# 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.

Competitor site: https://www.semanticscholar.org.

## 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: Search 237M papers -> Read abstracts and TLDRs -> Open the paper.
Lune: Search top-tier venues -> Read the full text -> Quote with a locator.

The widest free index, or a narrow one parsed to the sentence.

## Line by line

| Dimension | Lune | Semantic Scholar |
| --- | --- | --- |
| What is indexed | Top-tier venues, most papers in full text. | 237 million papers from every field. |
| Price | Free for 10 requests a day, then $4.99 a month or $47.90 a year. | Free. It is run by a non-profit institute. |
| Programmatic access | An MCP server and a CLI, installed in a minute. | A documented public API you integrate yourself. |
| How deep a citation goes | A verbatim quote and its locator, per claim. | Abstracts, TLDR summaries and citation metadata. |
| Analysis across papers | Typed extraction tables and claim verification. | Search, filters and a reading interface. |
| Methodology guidance | A corpus on peer review, ablations and venue choice. | Not offered. |

## 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.

## 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
- Semantic Scholar Everything: $0, free, including the public API

Semantic Scholar is run by the Allen Institute for AI.

## 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.

## What we read

- [semanticscholar.org](https://www.semanticscholar.org)
- [Public API](https://www.semanticscholar.org/product/api)