Lune

Comparisons

Lune vs Semantic Scholar

Semantic Scholar is free, non-profit, indexes 237 million papers and publishes an API that a large share of the tools on this site quietly run on. Lune indexes a fraction of that and reads most of it in full.

Install the connectorSee pricingsemanticscholar.org

Start with the one you should not buy from us

If the first list is you, take Semantic Scholar.

Choose Semantic Scholar if

  • You want the broadest free index there is, from a non-profit.
  • You are building something and want a documented public API for free.
  • Your field is outside computer science, where Lune's venues do not reach.

Choose Lune if

  • You need the sentence inside the paper, not the record for it.
  • You want claim checking and typed extraction, not just search.
  • You want tools your agent calls rather than an API to integrate.

From a question to a citation

Semantic Scholar

  1. Search 237M papers
  2. Read abstracts and TLDRs
  3. Open the paper

Lune

  1. Search top-tier venues
  2. Read the full text
  3. Quote with a locator
The widest free index, or a narrow one parsed to the sentence.

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.

    Semantic Scholar

    Semantic Scholar wins this row. 237 million papers from every field.

  • Price

    Lune

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

    Semantic Scholar

    Semantic Scholar wins this row. Free. It is run by a non-profit institute.

  • Programmatic access

    Lune

    An MCP server and a CLI, installed in a minute.

    Semantic Scholar

    A documented public API you integrate yourself.

  • How deep a citation goes

    Lune

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

    Semantic Scholar

    Abstracts, TLDR summaries and citation metadata.

  • Analysis across papers

    Lune

    Lune wins this row. Typed extraction tables and claim verification.

    Semantic Scholar

    Search, filters and a reading interface.

  • Methodology guidance

    Lune

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

    Semantic Scholar

    Not offered.

Where the difference comes from

Say plainly what it is

Semantic Scholar is a public good. The Allen Institute runs it free, at a scale no startup in this category matches, and publishes the API openly. Several products compared elsewhere on this site are, underneath, a wrapper over it with a nicer interface.

Lune is not one of them. It builds its own index from venue proceedings and parses the full text, which is the reason it can quote a paper rather than describe one.

The layer above metadata

The public API returns records: titles, abstracts, authors, citation edges, TLDR summaries. That is enough to find a paper and to build search on top of, which is why so many tools do.

It is not enough to answer whether a paper supports your sentence, because the answer is in the body. Lune indexes accepted papers in full, so verify_claims returns the line and get_paper_fulltext returns the section.

When free is simply the right answer

If you need breadth, or you are building on a budget, use Semantic Scholar. Nothing on our pricing page beats free from a non-profit, and pretending otherwise would insult you.

Pay for Lune only when the gap it fills is one you actually feel: quoting the source, checking a draft, comparing methods across papers you name.

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

Semantic Scholar

Everything
$0 free, including the public API

Semantic Scholar is run by the Allen Institute for AI. Prices move; treat this as a snapshot, not a quote.

What we read

Questions

Is Lune a Semantic Scholar alternative?
Only for depth. Semantic Scholar covers vastly more papers, for free. Lune reads a smaller set in full so an agent can quote it.
Is Lune built on Semantic Scholar?
No. Lune builds its index from venue proceedings and parses full text; several other tools in this category do wrap the Semantic Scholar API.
Which should a developer use?
For broad metadata, their free API. For quotes, claim checking and extraction inside an agent, Lune's MCP server.

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