# Lune vs Orchestra

Orchestra aims at the whole arc: literature, then code, then GPUs, then writing. Lune is one layer of that stack rather than the stack, and it is the layer that decides whether the citations hold up.

Competitor site: https://www.orchestra-research.com.

## Choose Orchestra if

- You want agents that plan and run experiments, not only find papers.
- Compute orchestration and reproducibility tracking are on your critical path.
- You want a platform with a skills library, not a connection you wire yourself.

## Choose Lune if

- You have an agent you trust and want to give it better evidence.
- You need claims checked against quoted text before co-authors see them.
- You want a published price and a free plan, not a sales call.

## From a question to a citation

Orchestra: Literature synthesis -> Experiments on GPUs -> Draft with results.
Lune: Search top-tier venues -> Read the full text -> Quote with a locator.

Orchestra runs the study. Lune checks what the study cites.

## Line by line

| Dimension | Lune | Orchestra |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Scope | Retrieval, full text, citations, extraction, verification. | Literature, code, experiments, compute, analysis, writing. |
| How you adopt it | Add an MCP server to the agent you use. One minute. | Move the work onto the platform. |
| Where the literature comes from | A full-text index of CORE and CCF top-tier venues. | Synthesis over the published record; sources unspecified. |
| How deep a citation goes | A verbatim quote and its locator, per claim. | Synthesis across large volumes of papers. |
| Running experiments | Not offered. | Agents handle GPUs, code and execution. |
| Published pricing | Free, $4.99 and $9.99 a month, or $47.90 and $95.90 a year. | None published. |

## Platform or layer

Orchestra bets that research is slow because the pieces do not talk to each other, so it puts literature, code, compute and writing in one system. When that works, it pays off more than any single tool.

Lune bets the other way. The agent you use will keep improving faster than any platform can absorb, so the thing worth owning is the grounding underneath: which papers exist, what they say, whether a claim holds.

## They compose better than they compete

An agent that runs experiments still writes the paper, and that paper needs a related-work section that survives review. Nothing stops Orchestra calling a retrieval layer for it.

If your agents already run code but cite from memory, the missing piece is the evidence layer, not another platform.

## 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
- Orchestra Not published: Contact, no public pricing page

Orchestra publishes an open-source research skills repository but no prices.

## Questions

### Is Lune an Orchestra alternative?

Only for the literature part. Orchestra also runs code, experiments and compute, which Lune does not do at all.

### Can they be used together?

Yes. Lune is an MCP server, so any agent platform that calls MCP tools can use it as its evidence layer.

### What does Orchestra cost?

They do not publish pricing. Lune's plans are free, $4.99 and $9.99 a month.

## What we read

- [orchestra-research.com](https://www.orchestra-research.com)