Best Research AI tools

14 research tools, ranked by our score. Our top pick is Perplexity, followed by NotebookLM and Elicit. If you want to start without paying, look at Perplexity, NotebookLM, Elicit. Every score is our own judgement of how well a tool does the job, and you can read how we score on the blog.

1. Perplexity: Answer engine that cites its sources. Research anything with real-time knowledge. Freemium. Solthar Score 93/100.
2. NotebookLM: Google's research companion that turns your sources into podcasts, briefs, and mind maps. Free. Solthar Score 92/100.
3. Elicit: AI research assistant that finds, screens, and summarizes academic papers at scale. Freemium. Solthar Score 87/100.
4. Consensus: Ask a research question, get answers grounded in peer-reviewed scientific papers. Freemium. Solthar Score 86/100.
5. Glean: Enterprise search across every internal tool your company uses. Paid. Solthar Score 85/100.
6. Semantic Scholar: AI-organised corpus of 200M+ papers with citation context. Free. Solthar Score 84/100.
7. Undermind: A deep search agent that hunts scientific literature the way a researcher would. Freemium. Solthar Score 83/100.
8. Hebbia: Document analysis at scale for finance and legal diligence. Paid. Solthar Score 82/100.
9. Exa: Search API built for AI agents rather than human browsing. Freemium. Solthar Score 80/100.
10. Scite: Shows whether later papers supported or contradicted a claim. Paid. Solthar Score 80/100.
11. SciSpace: Explains dense papers paragraph by paragraph as you read. Freemium. Solthar Score 79/100.
12. Research Rabbit: Maps citation networks so you can see a field's shape. Free. Solthar Score 78/100.
13. Scholarcy: Turns a dense paper into a structured summary card with the key claims pulled out. Freemium. Solthar Score 78/100.
14. You.com: Search that answers with sources and switchable models. Freemium. Solthar Score 78/100.

Head-to-head comparisons

• NotebookLM vs Perplexity
• Elicit vs Perplexity
• Elicit vs NotebookLM