Elicit vs You.com
Elicit
elicit.comYou.com
you.comSide by side
| Figure | Elicit | You.com |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $11/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| iOS | — | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 13 | 6 |
| Spec score · AI Search Engines | 8.3 (#6) | 7.9 (#14) |
| Spec score · Ai Search Tools | 8.3 (#5) | 7.9 (#14) |
| Spec score · AI Research Assistants | 8.4 (#9) | 7.9 (#17) |
| Spec score · Ai Agents Assistants | 8.2 (#16) | 7.9 (#21) |
| Headquarters | Covina, California, USA | Palo Alto, California, USA |
| Integrations | Elicit can connect through its MCP server to Claude Desktop, Claude Code, and other MCP-compatible clients using OAuth 2.0. | 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. |
| Security | Elicit states that it achieved SOC 2 Type II compliance. | You.com says its infrastructure is SOC 2 certified and independently audited for security, privacy, and availability. |
Plans
Elicit
- BasicPriced on request
- Plus$11 a month
- Plus$132 a year
- Pro$39 a month
- Pro$468 a year
- Scale$89 a month
- Scale$1,068 a year
- EnterprisePriced on request
- BasicFree
- Plus$11 a month
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
Elicit
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.
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.