Consensus vs You.com
Consensus
consensus.appYou.com
you.comSide by side
| Figure | Consensus | You.com |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $20/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | Yes |
| Android | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 6 |
| Spec score · AI Research Assistants | 9.4 (#1) | 7.9 (#17) |
| Spec score · AI Search Engines | 9.4 (#1) | 7.9 (#14) |
| Spec score · Ai Search Tools | 9.5 (#1) | 7.9 (#14) |
| Founded | 2021 | 2020 |
| Headquarters | San Francisco, California, United States | Palo Alto, California, USA |
| Integrations | Consensus supports Zotero library import and exports CSV or RIS files compatible with reference managers including EndNote, Mendeley, and Zotero. | The hosted MCP server connects You.com search, extraction, research, and finance research tools to LLMs and agents; documentation lists setup guides for tools including Cursor, Claude Code, Codex CLI, VS Code, and JetBrains IDEs. |
Plans
Consensus
- ProPriced on request
- DeepPriced on request
- Free TierFree
- Pro$20 a month
- Deep$65 a month
- EnterprisePriced on request
- TeamsPriced on request
You.com
- FreeFree
- Contents API$1, paid once
- Answer API$5, paid once
- Web Search API$5, paid once
- Research API$12, paid once
- Finance Research API$110, paid once
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.
You.com
You.com describes its current offering as web search APIs for developers building RAG systems, AI agents, knowledge bases and data-driven applications. The Web Search API returns structured web and news results with metadata, snippets and optional full-page content. The Contents API extracts clean HTML or Markdown from supplied URLs. Answer synthesizes retrieved results into natural-language answers with inline citations, while Research uses multi-step research and synthesis with selectable effort levels. Finance Research returns citation-backed answers to financial questions involving filings, macro data, markets and derived calculations. A hosted MCP server connects search, extraction and research tools to LLMs and agents, with setup guides for several development tools. The free Web Search tier includes 100 queries per day, and the pricing page advertises $100 in free credits. Listed usage rates include $1.00 /1k pages for Contents, $5.00 /1k calls for Web Search and Answer, $12.00 /1k calls for Research, and $110.00 /1k calls for Finance Research. API use is pay-as-you-go with no minimums; paid plans are listed from $15/user/mo (annual). The company says generated output can be inaccurate or incomplete and should be independently reviewed.