Consensus vs OpenAlex
Consensus
consensus.appOpenAlex
openalex.orgSide by side
| Figure | Consensus | OpenAlex |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $20/mo | $1/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | — |
| Android | Yes | — |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 9 |
| Spec score · Research Paper Discovery Tools | 9.3 (#1) | 8.9 (#2) |
| Founded | 2021 | OpenAlex's transparency page says Impactstory incorporated in North Carolina in 2012. |
| Integrations | Consensus supports Zotero library import and exports CSV or RIS files compatible with reference managers including EndNote, Mendeley, and Zotero. | Website exports support CSV, RIS for EndNote or Zotero, and TXT, while VOSviewer connects directly through the API. |
| Product | Consensus is an AI workspace and academic search engine for scientific research. | OpenAlex is a free and open catalog of the world's scholarly research system. |
| Support | The company offers support through in-product Support Chat and at [email protected]. | Member includes community support, Member+ includes ticket-based help for critical API bugs, and Partner includes full ticket-based support for API and data issues. |
| What it does | Consensus is an AI academic search engine that retrieves scientific papers and produces cited syntheses. | OpenAlex is an open index and knowledge graph covering scholarly works, authors, sources, institutions, topics and related entities. |
Plans
Consensus
- ProPriced on request
- DeepPriced on request
- Free TierFree
- Pro$20 a month
- Deep$65 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
- TeamsPriced on request
OpenAlex
- Pay as you go$1 a month
- Member$5,000 a year
- Member+$10,000 a year
- Partner$20,000 a year
- FreeFree
- Pay as you go$1, paid once
- Member$5,000 a year
- Member+$10,000 a year
- Partner$20,000 a year
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.
OpenAlex
OpenAlex is a free and open catalog of scholarly research, with a REST API for querying connected records such as works, authors, sources, institutions, and topics. API users can search, filter, sort, group, page through results, select fields, and retrieve individual entities. The complete database snapshot can be downloaded from Amazon S3 without an AWS account, and the data is released under the CC0 public-domain license. An official command-line tool supports bulk downloads with parallel transfers, checkpoints, rate limiting, retries, and resume. Full-text access provides PDFs and machine-readable TEI XML; each file download costs $0.01. Website exports include CSV, RIS, and TXT, while VOSviewer connects through the API. OpenAlex also offers Unpaywall's legacy-format open-access API, including a browser extension and integrations with SFX, EBSCO Discovery Service, and 360 Link. Its coverage includes journal articles, conference papers, books, chapters, datasets, dissertations, and preprints. OpenAlex is operated by a US 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and its code is open source.