Elicit vs LitFlow

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.

LitFlow is an AI-augmented workspace for systematic literature reviews, covering search, screening, extraction, synthesis, and reporting. Search includes database queries, snowballing, and AI-generated synonyms. For each record, AI proposes per-criterion verdicts with confidence scores, explanations, and links to source passages, while researchers make the decisions. Custom extraction schemas can receive LLM pre-fill with source links, and a qualitative coding board supports thematic structure. Reports include PRISMA information, Cohen’s κ, and an audit trail in a publication-ready methods report. AI suggestions and human decisions are logged with timestamps, actors, and rationales. Users can bring keys for Gemini, Claude, OpenAI, or Mistral, or use open-source models hosted by the University of Münster. The closed alpha runs on University of Münster infrastructure in the EU under GDPR, with pseudonymised personal data in research outputs. Operated by the university’s LitFlow research project in Münster, it is free for academic use, requires maintainer approval, and has no commercial tier listed.