Gregator vs Elicit

Pick Elicit when you are doing research work on the academic literature: screening papers for a systematic review, extracting data into tables, or writing an evidence brief. Pick Gregator when you want to learn a topic, and you want a structured course with cited sources written for you from the open web. Elicit is built for researchers and analysts; Gregator is built for learners.

What Elicit does well

Elicit searches "over 138 million academic papers from Semantic Scholar, PubMed, and OpenAlex," according to its help center, and the corpus is updated weekly. It covers academic papers and leaves out books, dissertations, and non-academic publications. Elicit says more than 5 million researchers use it.

Its strengths are in the parts of research that take the most time:

• Systematic literature reviews. Elicit automates screening and data extraction for systematic reviews, with partial support for search and report generation. On the Pro plan, the systematic review workflow screens up to 5,000 papers.
• Data extraction into tables. You add columns and Elicit pulls the values from each paper. Pro adds 20 columns at a time, Scale adds 30.
• Research reports. Elicit writes research briefs with a process inspired by systematic reviews, and you can change which papers and information a report covers.
• Sentence-level citations. Elicit says it supports AI-generated claims "with sentence-level citations from the underlying sources," and its Research Agent page says every claim links back to the exact supporting passage, table, or figure.
• A Research Agent that plans an approach, searches, reviews evidence, and builds an answer. Beyond papers, it can draw on clinical trials (over 545,000 from clinicaltrials.gov), patents, biology, chemistry, and regulatory databases, conference abstracts, web sources, and documents you bring. It can turn findings into tables, figures, reports, and slides.

Paid plans add routines, custom extractions, and API access.

As of October 2026, Elicit's pricing page lists:

• Basic: free, with unlimited search across 138 million papers, unlimited summaries and chat with papers, and limited Research Agent and report usage.
• Pro: $49 per user per month, or $588 per user per year billed annually.
• Scale: $169 per user per month, or $2,028 per user per year billed annually, with 5x the usage of Pro, figure extraction, and live collaboration.
• Enterprise: custom pricing.

How Gregator works differently

Gregator does not screen papers, extract data into tables, or support a systematic review protocol. It is a learning product. You type a topic, and Gregator:

1. Plans a curriculum: a refined title, a summary, and 1 to 12 Chapters sized to the topic, each with an objective and 3 to 6 search queries.
2. Researches the open web across seven search providers, including arXiv and Wikipedia, and extracts up to 18 sources per Chapter, 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, forward references, difficulty spikes, coherence gaps, and one-sided sources on contested topics, then revises flagged Chapters automatically.

Citations are inline footnotes placed next to the claim they support, and each Chapter ends with a Sources list. Because the research covers the open web, Gregator classifies every source for type (peer-reviewed, institutional, journalism, community) and evidence quality. Each course shows a trust overview 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.

Then it teaches. Each Chapter has up to 5 multiple-choice questions with an explanation for every option, and a final quiz covers the whole course. Answers are graded on the server, and a wrong answer links back to the Chapter section you need. Greg, the chat tutor, reads your Chapters, can search the course and the web, and can offer a deep dive that adds a new Chapter. Progress is tracked per Chapter and course, recommendations suggest what to learn next, and paid plans narrate every Chapter.

Side by side

When to choose Elicit

• You are running a systematic review or meta-analysis and need screening and data extraction at scale.
• You need a table of results, sample sizes, or outcomes across dozens or hundreds of papers.
• Your work depends on biomedical sources such as PubMed or clinical trials.
• You need claims tied to the exact passage, table, or figure that supports them.
• You want to bring your own documents into the same analysis.

When to choose Gregator

• You want to learn a subject, not run a review protocol.
• Your topic reaches beyond academic journals: a programming language, a historical period, an investing concept, a craft.
• You want a course you read in order, with footnotes, key takeaways, and a Sources list per Chapter.
• You want to see at a glance how much of a course rests on peer-reviewed sources versus journalism or community writing.
• You want quizzes, a tutor that knows your Chapters, and progress that carries over between sessions.
• You want a free starting point: the Free plan covers 3 courses in total, with quizzes, Greg, deep dives, Markdown export, and public share links included.

Gregator's limits: it is not a literature-review tool and will not replace a structured database search for academic work. It searches the open web only and does not take uploads. It is English-first, has no PDF export, and has no native mobile app. Narration needs a paid plan.

The two work in sequence: Gregator to get oriented in a new field, Elicit to search, screen, and extract from its papers.

Sources

• Elicit: AI for research and decision-making (homepage)
• Elicit pricing
• Elicit's source for papers (Elicit Help Center)
• Research Agent (Elicit)