Gregator vs Consensus

Pick Consensus when your question lives in the scientific literature and you need to find, read, and cite papers: a thesis, a clinical question, a research project. Pick Gregator when you want to learn a topic and need a structured course written for you, drawn from the open web with arXiv and Wikipedia among its search providers. They solve different problems, and Consensus is the stronger tool for academic search.

What Consensus does well

Consensus describes itself as "an AI academic search engine for peer-reviewed literature." Its homepage says it searches "400M+ scientific papers," and its Research Agent page says it is used by more than 10 million researchers.

Its features are built for people who work with papers every day:

• Pro Search and Deep Search modes that return synthesized AI answers from the literature.
• The Consensus Meter, which shows the level of scientific agreement on yes/no questions. For a question like "does X improve Y", that is a quick read of where the evidence points.
• Study Snapshots with the key findings and methodology of a paper.
• Ask Paper, to chat with a single paper.
• A Citation Graph that shows how papers relate to each other.
• Citation export in RIS, BibTeX, and CSV, so results go straight into a reference manager.
• Collections to organize a research library.

The newer Research Agent chains tools together: citation crawling, DOI lookup, author search, and similar-paper search. Consensus says it runs searches in parallel, reads the full text of each result, and builds comparison tables from the values it extracts. You can stack filters, exclude what you do not want, and carry context from one search to the next.

Consensus says it is free to use, and it offers paid Individual and Team and Enterprise plans. Current prices are on its pricing page, linked below.

How Gregator works differently

Gregator is a learning product, not a literature-review tool. It does not search a dedicated index of peer-reviewed papers or export citations to a reference manager. It takes a topic and builds a course:

1. Plans a curriculum: a refined title, a summary, and 1 to 12 Chapters sized to the topic, each with an objective and its own search queries.
2. Researches the open web across seven search providers: Brave, Serper, Tavily, Linkup, Jina, arXiv, and Wikipedia. It extracts up to 18 sources per Chapter from HTML, PDF, tables, and images, with at most 4 from one domain.
3. Distills each source into a relevance score, a summary, key facts, and its perspective and stance.
4. Writes each Chapter from its 7 most relevant sources, chosen with a cap on domain and perspective. Chapters run about 700 to 1,200 words and end with key takeaways.
5. Reviews the full course for redundancy, difficulty spikes, coherence gaps, and one-sided sources on contested topics, then revises flagged Chapters automatically.

Because Gregator reads the open web, a course can mix peer-reviewed papers with institutional pages, journalism, and community writing. It makes that mix visible. Every source is classified for type (peer-reviewed, institutional, journalism, community) and evidence quality, with signals such as primary source, author credentials, and methodology, and flags such as marketing language or missing citations. You see a trust overview for each course with the mix of source types and an evidence-quality label, and each Chapter shows its source count and peer-reviewed count. Individual source scores are not shown.

Citations are inline footnotes placed next to the claim they support, and each Chapter ends with a Sources list. Around the course you get quizzes graded on the server that link a wrong answer back to the right section, Greg the chat tutor, deep dives that add a Chapter, narration on paid plans, progress tracking, and recommendations for what to learn next.

Side by side

When to choose Consensus

• You are writing a thesis, a paper, or a grant, and you need peer-reviewed sources you can cite.
• You want to know where the scientific evidence stands on a yes/no question.
• You need to compare study designs, methods, or results across many papers.
• You use a reference manager and need RIS or BibTeX export.
• Your topic is narrow and academic, and web sources would add noise.

When to choose Gregator

• You want to understand a subject, not assemble a bibliography.
• Your topic spans more than journals: software, history, a business practice, a hobby, a current event.
• You want a course you read in order, with footnotes, key takeaways, and a Sources list per Chapter.
• You want a fast view of how much of a course rests on peer-reviewed work versus journalism or community writing.
• You want quizzes, a tutor that knows your Chapters, and progress you can return to.

Gregator's limits matter here. It is not a systematic or literature-review tool, and it does not replace a database search for academic work. It searches the open web only and does not take uploads. It is English-first, has no PDF export (Markdown export is available), and has no native mobile app.

A practical split: use Gregator to learn the shape of a field quickly, then move to Consensus when you need the papers themselves.

Sources

• Consensus: AI for Research (homepage)
• A more powerful Consensus, now with multi-step tool use (Consensus)
• Consensus pricing