Try Wonders for freeWho each tool is for
Elicit calls itself AI for scientific research. Its home page describes quick answers, research reports and systematic reviews, and lists pharma, medtech, consumer goods and academia as its industries. The product centres on a research agent, reports, paper search, a library, alerts and tables that extract data from many papers at once.
Wonders is a guided workspace for a literature review. It covers the steps around the search as well as the search: choosing a topic, building a search strategy, reading and highlighting, organizing sources on a board, and writing with inline citations and an automatic bibliography. It is built for students and researchers who want to see and control each step.
Features and pricing
| Wonders | Elicit | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | No. 14-day free trial that starts at checkout. Searching and the AI features need the trial or a paid plan | Yes. Unlimited search, summaries and chat with papers. Limited Research Agent and Reports |
| Entry paid plan | Plus: $20/mo, or $12/mo billed yearly | Plus: $11 per user/mo, billed as $132 annually |
| Student pricing | $10/mo, or $6/mo billed yearly, after verification | Not listed on the pricing page |
| Higher plans | Organizations: custom | Pro $39, Scale $89 per user/mo billed annually. Enterprise: custom |
| Usage limits on the entry paid plan | No credits and no cap on searches. Rate limits exist to stop abuse | "Standard usage" for Research Agent, Reports and systematic reviews. 5 table columns at a time |
| Index | No index of its own. Searches Semantic Scholar and OpenAlex, plus Google Patents | 138M+ papers and 545,000 clinical trials |
| Boolean search builder | Yes | Not listed |
| Visual boards for organizing sources | Yes | Not listed. Has a Library |
| Systematic review workflow | No | Yes, on Pro. Screens up to 5,000 papers. PRISMA 2020 support |
| Data extraction tables | No | Yes. 5 columns on Plus, 20 on Pro, 30 on Scale |
| Research alerts | No | Yes. 10 on Pro |
| Export | Word, PDF, LaTeX, BibTeX, RIS, CSV | RIS, CSV, BIB, PDF, DOCX on paid plans |
| Zotero | Save papers and projects to Zotero. Nothing is pulled in from Zotero: import is by .ris, .bib or .nbib file. No Mendeley or EndNote connector | Import from Zotero |
| API or MCP | No | Yes. API access from Pro |
| Generates essays or papers | No | No essay writer listed. Generates research reports |
"Not listed" means we did not find it on the Elicit pages cited below. Elicit’s pricing page has a selector for Academic and Industry pricing. Industry pricing is higher ($49 and $169 per user per month, billed annually, for Pro and Scale) and has no Plus plan. The table uses the Academic prices.
The integrity question
Neither tool lists an essay writer. Elicit generates research reports and says every AI-generated claim carries sentence-level citations to the underlying sources. Wonders summarizes papers and the sources you saved, and links each claim in a summary to the paper it came from. Before it shows a direct quote, it looks for the words in the paper’s text. If it cannot find them, it does not show them as a quote. That check lowers the risk of an invented quote. It does not remove the need to read the source.
The difference is in how much the tool does for you. An Elicit report is a finished, cited brief. Wonders works in smaller steps that you direct: you see the keywords, the query and the papers behind each summary. A supervisor view of a project is in beta for some accounts and is not generally available. If you plan to use output from either tool in assessed work, check your institution’s policy first. Our guides on AI-assisted research ethics and citing sources you found through AI tools cover the details.
Choose Elicit if
These two lists are Wonders’ opinion, not a neutral ranking.
- You are doing a systematic review or need structured data pulled from many papers.
- You want a free plan with unlimited paper search.
- You need clinical trial search, research alerts or an API.
- You already know the method and want the repetitive parts automated.
Choose Wonders if
- This is your first or second literature review and you want help with the search strategy itself. See how to find research gaps.
- You need patents in the same workspace as journal articles. Wonders searches Google Patents as a separate corpus.
- You want full-text links to go through your library’s subscription.
- You want to read, highlight and arrange sources on a board in one place.
- You want flat pricing with no usage tiers. See pricing.
What you can check in Wonders
These are things the product does today. You can test each one during the trial.
- When Wonders quotes a paper in a summary, it checks the quote against the paper’s text first. If it cannot find the words in the paper, it does not show them as a quote.
- Where the full text is available, citations in summaries carry the page number. Clicking one opens the PDF at that page with the passage highlighted.
- Search ranking takes journal quality into account, using SCImago quartiles for more than 28,000 journals, and you can filter by it.
- Wonders connects to your library’s access through OpenURL resolvers, EZproxy and OpenAthens proxies, KBART holdings and LibKey, so the full-text link goes through your subscription. Some of this is set up by your institution.
- Search, reading, a visual board and a writing editor sit in one workspace. You can take a plain question down to a full Boolean query, cite in six styles (APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver) and export to Word, LaTeX, PDF, BibTeX and RIS.
We have not tested how Elicit handles these points, so this list says nothing about Elicit.
What Wonders does not do
Wonders has no free plan, no systematic review screening or PRISMA workflow, no data extraction tables, no alerts, no public API and no index of its own. Its Zotero connection only saves out. It is built for desktop screens. In our view, Elicit is the stronger choice for those jobs. For other options, see Best Elicit Alternatives in 2026.