Ai2 Asta vs Consensus
Price, platforms and features side by side. The table says where each price was read and when.
Consensus
AI search engine that answers questions from peer-reviewed papers
Free plan
Where they differ
- Only Consensus lists an Android app.
- Ai2 Asta is open source and self-hostable, according to its own site.
In commonFree planWebAI searchAI agentsResearchCitations
At a glance
| Ai2 Asta | Consensus | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free | Free plan |
| Starts at | Free | Not published |
| Free plan | No paid plans are offered. The three agents can be used without an account; signing in saves queries and results so they can be reopened later. | Basic paper search across 220M+ papers, plus 10 Pro messages and 3 Deep Searches per month. Paid tiers are Pro, Deep, Team and Enterprise; their prices could not be read. |
| Free trial | None listed | None listed |
| Web | ||
| Android | ||
| Made by | Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) | Consensus NLP, Inc. |
| Price read from | asta.allen.ai | Not confirmed |
| Checked | Oct 5, 2026 | Oct 5, 2026 |
Who each one suits
Ai2 Asta
- Researchers who want a stated reason for each paper a search returns
- Getting a cited overview of a question that spans many papers
- Exploring a tabular dataset with analysis code that stays visible
- Developers building or evaluating scientific AI agents
Consensus
- Checking what peer-reviewed studies say about a specific question
- Students and researchers starting a literature review
- Teams that want cited paper search inside ChatGPT, Claude or their own tools
Worth knowing
Ai2 Asta
- Ai2 publishes no pricing page; the app runs without an account, and its credit panel lists no credit cost for the three main agents.
- The getting started guide says Generate a report searches computer science, medicine, environmental science and biology papers.
- Data explorations stay active for 24 hours and then become read-only, and uploaded datasets are deleted after 7 days.
- Ai2 says not to upload sensitive or regulated data to the hosted version; that requires a self-hosted deployment.
Consensus
- Paid prices could not be confirmed: the pricing page did not show them when read, and Consensus's own pricing summary leaves out dollar amounts.
- The free tier allows 10 Pro messages and 3 Deep Searches per month. Pro includes 15 Deep Searches, Deep 200 and Team 50 per seat.
- API calls beyond a plan's included credits cost $0.05 each; 500 are included on Pro, Team and Enterprise and 2,000 on Deep.
- An Android app is listed on Google Play. No iOS app was found on the US App Store when checked.
Key features
Ai2 Asta
- Find papers
- Breaks a query into parts, searches, follows citations and judges relevance, then lists papers with a note on why each fits. A slower deep search mode handles complex questions.
- Generate a report
- Answers questions that need many papers with a structured report: expandable sections, comparison tables and inline citations with excerpts. Uncited text is labeled as model-generated.
- Analyze data
- Upload CSV, TSV, Excel, JSON, HDF5 or Parquet data and ask questions in plain language. Asta writes and runs Python and returns findings with charts, the code and a methods section.
- Follow-ups and sharing
- Reports can be refined over several turns, with specific papers referenced by an @ mention. A Share button copies a link to the results of any query.
- AstaLabs prototypes
- Hosted previews include AutoDiscovery, which generates and tests hypotheses on a dataset, and Paper + Figure QA, which answers questions about figures and tables in papers.
- Open-source agents and AstaBench
- Ai2 publishes open-source versions of the agents behind the three tools, along with AstaBench, a benchmark suite and leaderboard for scientific AI agents.
Consensus
- Cited answers from 220M+ papers
- Ask a research question in plain language and get a summary tied to its source papers, with filters for study type, journal rank, citation count, sample size and year.
- Deep Search
- Builds and runs a search strategy, screens up to 1,000 papers and writes a report on the 50 most relevant. The monthly allowance depends on the plan.
- Research agent
- Chains citation crawling, DOI lookup, author search and similar-paper search, and can build a comparison table from the full text of the results.
- Citation Graph
- Starts from one or more seed papers and maps what they cite and what has cited them since. It is included with every account.
- Library with Zotero import
- Imports papers from Zotero, BibTeX, RIS or PDF, then searches the collection, looks for gaps in it and generates bibliographies.
- API and MCP connector
- The API returns ranked papers with metadata for use in other tools, and the MCP connector links Consensus search to ChatGPT, Claude and Copilot.
Plans
Ai2 Asta
Free$0
Find papers, Generate a report and Analyze data, usable anonymously or with a free sign-in that keeps a history of queries.
Consensus
Pricing could not be confirmed. See consensus.app.
Ways to pay less
Ai2 Asta
No public discounts listed.
Consensus
- Education
Up to 40% off for students, faculty and US clinicians
Students and faculty with a valid school email, and US clinicians with a valid NPI number, can claim up to 40% off. Consensus's pricing summary gives students 1 year free, then 40% off until graduation.
