# Lune vs Liner

Liner is a general AI search assistant with an academic mode, and a good one. Lune does not search the web at all. It reads peer-reviewed venues in full and hands them to your agent.

Competitor site: https://liner.com.

## Choose Liner if

- You want one assistant for everything, a market question and then a paper.
- Your sources are often blog posts, docs and news.
- You want a polished consumer app with mobile and extensions.

## Choose Lune if

- You need answers that cite only peer-reviewed work.
- You want the exact sentence, not a page that mentions the topic.
- You work in an agent and want the literature as tools.

## From a question to a citation

Liner: Search the open web -> Rank the pages -> Cited answer.
Lune: Search peer review only -> Read the full text -> Quote with a locator.

Liner ranks the open web at answer time. Lune filters at the index.

## Line by line

| Dimension | Lune | Liner |
| --- | --- | --- |
| What it searches | Peer-reviewed papers from top-tier venues. Nothing else. | The open web, with an academic mode over papers. |
| Who filters quality | The venue's review process, before anything is indexed. | The ranking model, at answer time. |
| How deep a citation goes | A verbatim quote and its locator, per claim. | Cited answers linking to the sources used. |
| Agent access | MCP and a CLI, on every plan. | No MCP server or public API listed on their site. |
| Non-academic questions | None. Use ordinary web search. | Broad, and that is the point of the product. |
| Entry price | $4.99 a month, or $47.90 a year. No ads, ever. | $14.99 a month annually. Free tier carries ads. |

## The open web is the wrong corpus for a citation

A general assistant has to answer anything, so its index holds the SEO article summarizing the paper, the vendor post repeating the summary, and the forum thread misremembering the number. Ranking sorts that out most of the time. Most of the time is fine for a market question and not for a related-work section.

Lune removes the problem at the index instead. Only top-tier venues go in, so there is nothing to mistake for a source. Ask about a product launch and you get nothing, because it is not there.

## What an academic mode does not do

Search over papers gets you the paper. Most academic modes stop there, because their index holds metadata and abstracts.

That is not enough for the work that takes time: quoting the definition an author used, pulling the ablation table, checking whether the claim belongs to the paper you cited or a different one.

## 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
- Liner Free: $0, answers with ads, 1 upload a day
- Liner Pro: $14.99, a month annually, ad-free
- Liner Max: $29.99, a month annually
- Liner Team: $26.99, per seat a month

Liner also lists monthly billing at $17.99 for Pro.

## Questions

### Is Lune a Liner alternative?

For research questions, yes. For general web questions, no. Lune has no open-web index and is not trying to build one.

### Does Liner cover academic papers?

Yes, it has an academic mode and a Scholar tier. The difference is depth: Lune reads accepted papers in full so an agent can quote them.

### Can I use Lune with a web search tool?

That is the normal setup. Most agents already have web search; Lune adds the peer-reviewed half.

## What we read

- [liner.com](https://liner.com)
- [Pricing](https://liner.com/pricing)