# 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.

Competitor site: https://pathflowx.ai.

## 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: Search 250M+ records -> Match people and funding -> Shortlist to read.
Lune: Search top-tier venues -> Read the full text -> Quote with a locator.

Free breadth across the record, or paid depth inside the venues.

## Line by line

| Dimension | Lune | PathFlow |
| --- | --- | --- |
| What is indexed | Top-tier venues, most papers in full text. | 250M+ publications and 100M+ researchers, 50+ sources. |
| Price | Free for 10 requests a day, then $4.99 a month or $47.90 a year. | Free, with no paywalls stated. |
| How deep a citation goes | A verbatim quote and its locator, per claim. | Papers and researchers surfaced for you. |
| Agent access | MCP and a CLI, on every plan. | No MCP server or public API listed on their site. |
| People and funding | Not offered. | Scholarship matching, researcher and institution search. |
| Methodology guidance | A corpus on peer review, ablations and venue choice. | Not offered. |

## 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.

## 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
- PathFlow Free: $0, stated as full access, no paywalls

PathFlow lists support from NVIDIA Inception and AWS Activate.

## 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.

## What we read

- [pathflowx.ai](https://pathflowx.ai)