Consensus vs Local Deep Research
Consensus
consensus.appLocal Deep Research
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Consensus | Local Deep Research |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $20/mo | — |
| Free plan | Yes | — |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | — | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 0 |
| Spec score · AI Research Assistants | 9.4 (#1) | 7.3 (#25) |
| License | The public consensus-mcp repository is marked MIT licensed, while the hosted Consensus product is a commercial service. | The repository states that Local Deep Research is distributed under the MIT License. |
| Privacy | Consensus says user content sent for AI processing is not used to train its models or third-party models, and it does not attach account identifiers to that content. | The project says it has no telemetry, analytics, tracking, or crash reporting, and that network calls are initiated by the user’s configured search, model, or notification services. |
| Support | The company offers support through in-product Support Chat and at [email protected]. | The project directs users to Discord and Reddit for community help and GitHub Issues for bug reports. |
Plans
Consensus
- ProPriced on request
- DeepPriced on request
- Free TierFree
- Pro$20 a month
- Deep$65 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
- TeamsPriced on request
In their own words
Consensus
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.
Local Deep Research
Local Deep Research has no write-up on Specifiction yet; its figures are above.