Consensus vs Kimi Deep Research

Consensus is an AI workspace and academic search engine for scientific research, available on web, Android, iOS, and as an extension. It searches more than 220 million peer-reviewed papers, with the database updated weekly, and offers filters for publication date, access, citations, journal rank, study design, population, sample size, and other paper details. Its Research Agent plans multi-step searches, uses tools such as citation crawling and DOI lookup, and returns citation-backed answers. Consensus says citations in its AI summaries correspond to exact paper quotes, with the relevant section identified and PDF text highlighted when available. Medical Mode searches a selected collection of about 8 million papers and 50,000 clinical guidelines from the top 1,000 medical journals. Users can import Zotero libraries and export CSV or RIS files for reference managers. Consensus also works in ChatGPT, Claude, and Microsoft 365 Copilot; API and MCP calls share a monthly allowance. The Free Tier costs nothing. Pro is $20 a month, or $144/year billed annually; Deep is $65 a month, or $540/year billed annually.

Kimi Deep Research turns a research question into a cited report by clarifying its scope, making a plan, searching sources, and synthesizing findings. It searches the open web and professional databases spanning news, government, academic, corporate, financial, and economic material. Reports can contain charts and traceable citations from web research and uploaded files. Users can follow up within the same session, with additional sources gathered in light of earlier context and findings. Deliverables include Markdown, PDF, PowerPoint, Word, Excel, and interactive HTML. Users may upload background files and review the agent’s queries and fetched URLs while it works. The feature lists use cases in finance and investment, academic and market research, consulting, business analysis, and due diligence. It is available on Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, web, and as an extension. The free plan has a limited monthly allowance, with usage measured by token consumption rather than a fixed query count; paid plans start at $19/mo. The privacy policy says prompts and uploaded files may be processed to provide and improve services, including training and optimizing AI models.