Lune

Comparisons

Lune vs PathFlow

PathFlow searches 250 million publications and 100 million researchers across more than fifty sources, and charges nothing for it. Lune charges, covers far less, and reads what it covers in full.

Install the connectorSee pricingpathflowx.ai

Start with the one you should not buy from us

If the first list is you, take PathFlow.

Choose PathFlow if

  • You want reach across OpenAlex, ORCID and CrossRef without paying.
  • Finding people and labs matters as much as finding papers.
  • Funding discovery is part of the same job for you.

Choose Lune if

  • You want the paragraph inside the paper, not the record for it.
  • You need the retrieval available to your agent through MCP.
  • You want claims checked against source text before submission.

From a question to a citation

PathFlow

  1. Search 250M+ records
  2. Match people and funding
  3. Shortlist to read

Lune

  1. Search top-tier venues
  2. Read the full text
  3. Quote with a locator
Free breadth across the record, or paid depth inside the venues.

Line by line

Marks the side we think wins. We mark the ones we lose.

  • What is indexed

    Lune

    Top-tier venues, most papers in full text.

    PathFlow

    PathFlow wins this row. 250M+ publications and 100M+ researchers, 50+ sources.

  • Price

    Lune

    Free for 10 requests a day, then $4.99 a month or $47.90 a year.

    PathFlow

    PathFlow wins this row. Free, with no paywalls stated.

  • How deep a citation goes

    Lune

    Lune wins this row. A verbatim quote and its locator, per claim.

    PathFlow

    Papers and researchers surfaced for you.

  • Agent access

    Lune

    Lune wins this row. MCP and a CLI, on every plan.

    PathFlow

    No MCP server or public API listed on their site.

  • People and funding

    Lune

    Not offered.

    PathFlow

    PathFlow wins this row. Scholarship matching, researcher and institution search.

  • Methodology guidance

    Lune

    Lune wins this row. A corpus on peer review, ablations and venue choice.

    PathFlow

    Not offered.

Where the difference comes from

Free is a real advantage

PathFlow gives away search across a quarter of a billion records, and adds researcher, institution and funding discovery on top. For a student without a budget that is worth more than anything on our pricing page.

We are not going to argue with free. What we will say is what free buys here: metadata from OpenAlex, ORCID and CrossRef, which is the layer at which those sources publish.

The layer below the record

A record tells you a paper exists, who wrote it and what it cites. It cannot tell you what the authors reported in section 5, which is what an agent needs to write a defensible sentence.

Lune parses accepted papers at ingest and keeps that structure, so verify_claims can answer with the line and get_paper_fulltext can return the section. That work costs money to run, which is why there is a price at all.

What your agent can call

  • search_papers
  • search_papers_many
  • search_related_papers
  • get_paper_fulltext
  • get_paper_citations
  • extract_from_papers
  • verify_claims
  • gather_evidence
  • list_conferences
  • get_conference_papers
  • search_research_guidance
  • get_research_guidance_doc

One connection, in Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, ChatGPT or anything else that speaks MCP. The same tools back the miniapps in the Lune dashboard.

Price

Lune

Free
$0 10 requests a day, every tool
Pro
$4.99 a month or $47.90 a year, 300 requests a day
Max
$9.99 a month or $95.90 a year, 600 requests a day
Credits
$0.99 300 extra requests, no expiry

PathFlow

Free
$0 stated as full access, no paywalls

PathFlow lists support from NVIDIA Inception and AWS Activate. Prices move; treat this as a snapshot, not a quote.

What we read

Questions

Is Lune a PathFlow alternative?
For full text and claim checking inside an agent, yes. For free breadth across publications, researchers and funding, PathFlow covers far more.
Why pay for Lune when PathFlow is free?
Only for what full text buys: quotes with locators, typed extraction across papers, and claim checking. If metadata is enough, free is enough.
Does PathFlow connect to agents?
No MCP server or public API is listed on their site.

Trustworthy AI for Scientific Research

Free to start. Every tool from the first request.

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