# Lune vs Consensus

Consensus takes a yes-or-no research question, pulls the studies that bear on it, and shows how many point which way. Lune does not aggregate. It returns the line one paper actually wrote.

Competitor site: https://consensus.app.

## Choose Consensus if

- Your question is empirical and settled by weight of evidence.
- You want a fast read on where a literature currently sits.
- Breadth across every field matters more than depth in one.

## Choose Lune if

- You are citing one paper and need the sentence that backs you.
- You want the retrieval inside your agent, through MCP.
- You work where the venues, not the volume, decide quality.

## From a question to a citation

Consensus: Ask a yes or no question -> Weigh the studies -> Agreement meter.
Lune: Send the claim -> Read the full text -> Quote with a locator.

An aggregate answers the field. A quote answers the sentence.

## Line by line

| Dimension | Lune | Consensus |
| --- | --- | --- |
| What is indexed | Top-tier venues, most papers in full text. | More than 200 million peer-reviewed papers. |
| What you get back | A verbatim quote and its locator, or nothing found. | An aggregate of what the studies point to. |
| Unit of evidence | The sentence inside one paper. | The finding across many papers. |
| Agent access | MCP and a CLI, on every plan. | Not documented on the pages we could read. |
| Methodology guidance | A corpus on peer review, ablations and venue choice. | Not offered. |
| Published pricing | Free, $4.99 and $9.99 a month, or $47.90 and $95.90 a year. | Free and paid tiers, published on their site. |

## An aggregate is an answer about a field

The Consensus Meter is a good idea honestly executed: for a question the literature has actually studied, showing how the studies distribute beats reading the first abstract that agrees with you.

It answers at the level of the field. Most of what a researcher writes is narrower than that. A related-work sentence attributes a specific claim to a specific paper, and no aggregate can confirm or deny it.

## Different questions, both worth asking

Ask Consensus whether an effect holds and you get a defensible summary of where the evidence sits. Ask Lune whether a paper says what you wrote and you get the sentence, or a plain report that there is none.

Neither replaces the other. If your field is empirical and broad, Consensus reaches more of it than Lune ever will.

## Pricing

- Lune Free: $0, 10 requests a day, every tool
- Lune Pro: $4.99, a month or $47.90 a year, 300 requests a day
- Lune Max: $9.99, a month or $95.90 a year, 600 requests a day
- Lune Credits: $0.99, 300 extra requests, no expiry
- Consensus Free: $0, search with the agreement meter
- Consensus Paid: Published, figures on their pricing page

Consensus blocks automated readers, so we link their pricing page rather than quote figures we could not verify ourselves.

## Questions

### Is Lune a Consensus alternative?

For citing one paper accurately, yes. For a read on where a whole literature sits, Consensus indexes far more and aggregates it properly.

### Does Lune have a consensus meter?

No. gather_evidence reports whether the evidence it found is sufficient and what is missing, which is a different claim from counting studies.

### Can I use both?

Yes. Consensus to see where a field sits, Lune to make sure the sentence you wrote about one paper is right.

## What we read

- [consensus.app](https://consensus.app)