Consensus vs Semantic Scholar
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
Semantic Scholar
Free AI-powered search engine for scientific literature
Free
Where they differ
- Only Consensus lists an Android app.
- Only Semantic Scholar lists a browser extension.
- Consensus also covers AI agents.
In commonFree planWebPublic APIAI searchResearchCitations
At a glance
| Consensus | Semantic Scholar | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free plan | Free |
| Starts at | Not published | Free |
| Free plan | 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. | Entirely free, with no paid plans. Papers can be read without an account; a free account adds a library, email alerts, Research Feeds and author page claiming. |
| Free trial | None listed | None listed |
| Web | ||
| Android | ||
| Browser extension | ||
| Made by | Consensus NLP, Inc. | Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) |
| Price read from | Not confirmed | semanticscholar.org |
| Checked | Oct 5, 2026 | Oct 5, 2026 |
Who each one suits
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
Semantic Scholar
- Free literature search across all fields of science
- Keeping up with new papers through alerts and recommendation feeds
- Developers who need open scholarly data through an API
Worth knowing
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.
Semantic Scholar
- There is no smartphone app; the FAQ says the site is designed to be used in mobile browsers.
- TLDR summaries are limited to papers in computer science and the biomedical fields.
- Semantic Reader is in beta and covers mostly arXiv papers, and Ask This Paper works on a limited set of papers.
- Unauthenticated API calls share one pool of 1,000 requests per second; an API key starts at 1 request per second.
Key features
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.
Semantic Scholar
- Paper search with TLDR summaries
- Searches papers with filters for venue, author, publication type and date. TLDRs are very short AI summaries, available for nearly 60 million papers in computer science, biology and medicine.
- Highly Influential Citations
- A machine-learning model flags the citations where the cited paper had a significant effect on the citing one, so a long citation list has a starting point.
- Library and Research Feeds
- Save papers into folders, share public folders and bulk export citations. Turning on a Research Feed for a folder brings paper recommendations based on its contents.
- Paper and author alerts
- Email alerts report new citations of a chosen paper, or new papers and citations for an author you follow.
- Semantic Reader
- A beta reading view for most arXiv papers, with in-line citation cards, a table of contents, AI skimming highlights and on-demand definitions of terms.
- Academic Graph API and datasets
- A REST API for papers, authors, citations, venues and recommendations, plus downloadable datasets. Most endpoints work without a key.
Plans
Consensus
Pricing could not be confirmed. See consensus.app.
Semantic Scholar
Free$0
Search, TLDR summaries, Semantic Reader, a paper library, alerts and Research Feeds, plus rate-limited API access.
Ways to pay less
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.
Semantic Scholar
No public discounts listed.
