Elicit vs Kimi Deep Research

Elicit is an AI research assistant for researchers gathering and assessing evidence. Its Research Agent draws on scientific databases, academic journals, public data sources, uploaded documents, a corpus of 138 million academic papers, and the wider web. A session can use up to 20 uploaded resources, including PDF, DOCX, XLSX, PPTX, and JPG files. Elicit offers Research Agent sessions, Research Reports, and Systematic Reviews, and supports AI-generated claims with sentence-level citations to underlying sources. It can find up to 1,000 relevant papers and analyze up to 20,000 data points at once. Research Reports export as PDF or Word, tables as CSV or Excel, and references as RIS or BIB. Elicit runs on the web and provides an API, but API access requires Pro or above. Its MCP server connects to Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and other compatible clients using OAuth 2.0. Basic is free with limited usage for Research Agent and Research Reports; Plus costs $11 a month. Pro is $39 a month and Scale is $89 a month. Elicit states that it has achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance.

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.