# Lune vs Elicit

Elicit narrows a very large index down to a table. Lune reads a much smaller one all the way down to the sentence. Both cite their sources. They disagree about what a citation owes you.

Competitor site: https://elicit.com.

## Choose Elicit if

- Screening thousands of papers into a table is the deliverable.
- You work in clinical or biomedical research, where the answer sits in a journal.
- You need PRISMA-shaped review output and seat management.

## Choose Lune if

- You already work in Claude Code, Cursor, Codex or ChatGPT.
- You publish at NeurIPS, ICLR, ACL, CVPR, USENIX Security and the rest.
- You want each sentence checked against a quote you can read.
- $49 a month is a lot for an agent to reach the literature.

## From a question to a citation

Elicit: Search 125M+ papers -> Screen into a table -> Cited report.
Lune: Search top-tier venues -> Read the full text -> Quote with a locator.

Elicit stops at the paper. Lune keeps going, into the paper's own sentences.

## Line by line

| Dimension | Lune | Elicit |
| --- | --- | --- |
| What you use | Tools your agent calls, plus a CLI and three miniapps. | A web workspace, with an API and MCP on top. |
| What is indexed | Top-tier venues, most papers in full text. | More than 125 million papers, every field. |
| What is left out | Everything outside a CORE or CCF top-tier venue. | Little. Preprints and journals of every rank sit together. |
| How deep a citation goes | A verbatim quote and its locator, per claim. | A link to the paper, and full-text chat on it. |
| Agent access | Included on the free plan. | Their docs: API access requires Pro or above. |
| Entry price | $4.99 a month, or $47.90 a year. | $49 a month. |
| Methodology guidance | A corpus on peer review, ablations and venue choice. | None published. |

## A smaller index is the point

Elicit indexes roughly a thousand times more papers than Lune. If your question is clinical, that breadth is the product and you should use it.

The trouble starts when an agent picks the citation. A person scanning results notices that the third hit is a paper-mill preprint. An agent optimizing for a plausible reference does not. Lune filters at the venue, so there is nothing left to notice.

## Two things get called a citation

Elicit links the paper, which is more than most tools manage. Checking it still means opening the PDF and reading until you find the line.

Lune's unit is the line. verify_claims answers each claim with a quote and where it sits, or reports that it found no support. That second case is the one worth paying for.

## What agent access costs

Elicit's free tier is generous for a human at the web app. Agent access is a separate line: their own docs say the API needs Pro, at $49 a month.

On Lune the free plan is the agent plan. 10 requests a day, every tool. Pro is $4.99 for 300 a day.

## 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
- Elicit Basic: $0, limited agent and report usage
- Elicit Pro: $49, a month, includes API access
- Elicit Scale: $169, a month, 5x usage
- Elicit Enterprise: Custom, SSO, PRISMA screening

Elicit discounts these on annual billing.

## Questions

### Is Lune an Elicit alternative?

For conference-driven fields, yes. For a biomedical systematic review, Elicit indexes far more of what you need and screens it better.

### Does Elicit have an MCP server?

Yes, at elicit.com/api/mcp. MCP is table stakes now, so the question is what the tools do once they are connected.

### Which one has more papers?

Elicit, by a wide margin. Lune reads top-tier venues in full instead of trying to hold all of published science.

### Can I use both?

Plenty of people do. Elicit for the wide screening pass, Lune inside the editor for drafting and checking claims.

## What we read

- [elicit.com](https://elicit.com)
- [Pricing](https://elicit.com/pricing)
- [API docs](https://docs.elicit.com/)