Scite vs Semantic Scholar
Price, platforms and features side by side. The table says where each price was read and when.
Scite
Research assistant that shows how papers have been cited
Semantic Scholar
Free AI-powered search engine for scientific literature
Where they differ
- Scite starts at $20 per month, billed monthly. Semantic Scholar is free.
- Semantic Scholar has a free plan. Scite does not, though it has a free trial.
- Scite also covers chat assistant.
At a glance
| Scite | Semantic Scholar | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free trial | Free |
| Starts at | $20 per month, billed monthly | Free |
| Free plan | None | 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 | 7-day free trial for new users; it rolls into the plan chosen at sign-up unless canceled first. | None listed |
| Web | ||
| Browser extension | ||
| Made by | Scite LLC (Research Solutions) | Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) |
| Price read from | scite.ai | semanticscholar.org |
| Checked | Oct 5, 2026 | Oct 5, 2026 |
Who each one suits
Scite
- Checking whether a paper's findings were supported or disputed by later work
- Searching inside the full text of licensed journal articles
- Researchers who want cited answers inside Claude or ChatGPT
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
Scite
- No free plan is listed; after the 7-day trial a paid subscription is needed.
- The pricing page also offers annual billing and a Team plan for labs; those prices could not be confirmed in page text and are left out here.
- Patent, clinical trial and grant search and Collections above 1,000 papers need the Pro plan.
- MCP use is capped by monthly credits: 250 on Basic and 2,500 on Pro.
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
Scite
- Smart Citations
- Shows how later research has cited a paper: whether the citing statements support, contrast or simply mention its findings, with the surrounding context.
- Scite Assistant
- Answers questions from the scientific literature and links every claim back to the specific sentence in the paper it came from.
- Full-text search
- Searches inside more than 280 million full-text articles under agreements with Wiley, SAGE and 30+ other publishers, alongside preprints, books, patents and datasets.
- Collections and citation alerts
- Group papers into Collections of up to 1,000 papers on Basic or 10,000 on Pro, and get alerts about new citations.
- Browser extension
- Adds Smart Citation counts to paper listings on Google Scholar, PubMed and publisher sites. Clicking a badge opens the full Scite report.
- MCP, Zotero and API access
- Runs inside Claude, ChatGPT and other MCP-compatible assistants, plugs into Zotero and offers an API for teams building their own tools.
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
Scite
Basic$20
per month, billed monthly
Unlimited Assistant queries, full-text search, Smart Citation reports, citation alerts, 250 MCP credits a month and Collections of up to 1,000 papers.
Pro$50
per month, billed monthly
Everything in Basic, plus 2,500 MCP credits a month, Collections of up to 10,000 papers, and search across patents, clinical trials and grants.
EnterpriseCustom
For organizations and universities: unlimited users with pooled usage, SAML/SSO, access by domain, IP or email, and regulatory and safety datasets.
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
Scite
- Education
Student and academic discount on request
The pricing FAQ says students and academics who recommend Scite to their institution by email, copying Scite's sales and support addresses, are sent a discount code. The amount is not stated.
Semantic Scholar
No public discounts listed.
