Elicit alternatives for life-science research in 2026
Elicit is an AI research assistant, used especially for systematic reviews. In our test of 50 life-science research questions, Arca scored 84.50, ahead of Elicit at 80.68, with Consensus and SciSpace in between.
About Elicit
Elicit started inside Ought, a nonprofit research lab, and became an independent public benefit corporation in September 2023 with a $9 million seed round. Its cofounders are Andreas Stuhlmüller and Jungwon Byun. In February 2025 it raised a $22 million Series A at a $100 million valuation, led by Spark Capital and Footwork.
Elicit searches more than 138 million papers from Semantic Scholar, PubMed and OpenAlex. Its newer Research Agent also reads ClinicalTrials.gov, patents and FDA, EMA and NICE records. Its strongest feature is the systematic review workflow, which screens thousands of papers and extracts data into tables.
| Plan | Price, billed annually | Highlights |
|---|---|---|
| Basic | Free | Paper search, summaries, limited reports |
| Pro | $49 per user per month | Systematic review of up to 5,000 papers |
| Scale | $229 per user per month | Five times the usage, collaboration |
| Enterprise | Custom | SSO, larger reviews |
In our test, Elicit charged $1.29 per research report once the monthly allowance ran out.
For the full ranking, including frontier models, see the ResearchQA leaderboard.
The alternatives
| Tool | Best for | Score on our 50 questions |
|---|---|---|
| Arca | Life-science teams that need research, regulatory sources and their own documents in one place | 84.50 |
| Consensus | Quick, evidence-graded answers from papers | 82.54 |
| SciSpace | Students and academics who read, write and cite papers | 80.93 |
| Elicit | Systematic reviews and data extraction | 80.68 |
| Undermind | Deep searches for every relevant paper on a narrow topic | Not tested on these questions |
Arca
Arca is built for regulatory, clinical and quality teams in pharma and medtech. It answers research questions from papers and queries more than 250 public sources directly, including FDA databases, device-vigilance reports and clinical trial registries. It also reads a company's own documents in Veeva Vault and SharePoint, so a literature finding can sit next to your SOPs and submissions. Every claim links to the passage it came from.
On our research questions, Arca's answers cited 7 sources on average and scored higher than Elicit's on 22 of the 50 questions and lower on 6. The rest tied. On regulatory deliverables, Arca leads the LifeSci Diamond benchmark.
Consensus
Consensus alternatives covers it in more depth. It finds papers fast and summarizes where the evidence points with its Consensus Meter. It searches academic literature only.
SciSpace
SciSpace alternatives covers it in more depth. It bundles paper chat, literature reviews and writing tools, and suits students and academics.
Undermind
Undermind was founded by two MIT physics PhDs and backed by Y Combinator. It runs long, exhaustive searches over Semantic Scholar's 200 million papers. Pro costs $75 a month for industry users and $20 for academics.
Choosing between them
Choose Elicit for formal systematic reviews. Choose Arca when research feeds regulatory or quality work and you need the answer, its sources and your own documents in one place.
