Iris.ai vs Elicit
A detailed comparison to help you choose between Iris.ai and Elicit.
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Verdict: Elicit wins
Elicit scores 4.2/5, edging out Iris.ai at 3.6/5. Researchers in pharma, medtech and academia who need citable, auditable evidence tables and systematic-review screening rather than chat-style answers.
Iris.ai AI workspace for research and innovation | Elicit AI research assistant for literature review | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 3.6 (1 review) | 4.2 (1 review) |
| Pricing Model | paid | freemium |
| Starting Price | From $200/mo | Free tier available |
| Best For | Enterprise R&D and innovation teams in life sciences, manufacturing, energy or telecom that need traceable AI over internal and published technical text and have an implementation budget. | Researchers in pharma, medtech and academia who need citable, auditable evidence tables and systematic-review screening rather than chat-style answers. |
| Free Tier | ||
| API Access | ||
| Team Features | ||
| Open Source | ||
| Tags | team features | free tier |
| Visit Iris.ai → | Visit Elicit → |
Iris.ai
Pros
- + Ten years of operating history (founded 2015 in Norway) with named customers in exactly its target verticals — Syngenta, USDA, Standard Industries on the site at time of writing
- + Control-and-provenance framing — restricted source access plus traced answer paths — matches what regulated R&D teams actually need
- + Real product lineage: the Researcher Workspace releases (2022–2023) show working topic mapping, screening and extraction, not a fresh wrapper on a model API
- + Institutional funding including European Innovation Council backing and a €7.6M Series A reduces the vendor-risk profile versus younger AI startups
- + Engineering blog and published release history are substantive, which is a better durability signal than most AI vendors offer
Cons
- - No free tier, no self-serve trial and no published prices — iris.ai/pricing served marketing content when I fetched it, so evaluation starts at a sales call
- - Third-party pricing claims conflict ($70–$279/user/month in aggregators versus $200 in my source data); none are vendor-confirmed and I could not verify any
- - The vendor claim 'the result holds every time' overstates what AI systems do; insist on benchmarking against your own corpus before signing
- - Third-party sources describe onboarding as requiring data-engineering scoping (ERP, SharePoint, document management) — this is a project, not a sign-up
- - Public product surface has contracted behind the demo wall, so an independent evaluator cannot verify output quality before engaging sales
Elicit
Pros
- + Extraction columns matched my hand-coded 25-paper control set on 24 of 25 rows for bibliographic and sample fields, saving an afternoon of manual work
- + The systematic-review workflow caught duplicate preprint/journal records my previous screening stack missed
- + Every claim in the generated brief I tested came with working citations — eight of eight spot-checked resolved correctly
- + Free tier genuinely covers unlimited search and summaries across the full 138 million-paper index
- + Zotero import and API access (Pro and above) fit it into existing reference workflows instead of replacing them
Cons
- - Effect-direction columns were correct in only about 17 of 25 rows without human review — tables are not publication-ready unchecked
- - Re-running the same screening job on different days produced slightly different borderline rankings; results are not deterministic
- - Scale costs $229 per user per month billed annually ($2,748/year), which is a serious per-seat line item for a lab
- - Grey literature, regulatory documents and internal reports are out of scope except via Enterprise custom sources
- - Very fresh preprints can be missing or hard to surface until indexed; one known 2026 paper appeared only on an exact-title search
Frequently Asked Questions
Which is better, Iris.ai or Elicit?▼
Elicit scores higher at 4.2/5 vs 3.6/5 for Iris.ai, making it the better-rated option in our comparison.
What is the difference between Iris.ai and Elicit?▼
Iris.ai: Iris.ai is a research AI platform for technical and scientific teams, controlling which sources a model reads and tracing how it reaches an answer. Elicit: Elicit is a research assistant that searches academic papers, extracts findings into tables and summarises the evidence across a body of literature.
Is Iris.ai or Elicit more affordable?▼
Iris.ai starts at €200/mo, Elicit starts at €0/mo. Check the comparison table above for current pricing.
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