- Best for
- Students, clinicians and anyone checking what the research says about a specific question
- Price
- Freemium · from $10/month
Free: Unlimited searches with 10 Pro Analyses and 10 Study Snapshots a month - Platforms
- Web, Android
- Made by
- Consensus
- App store ratings
- Android 3.7★ (60)
What it is
Consensus searches more than 200 million peer-reviewed papers and answers in plain language, citing the papers behind each sentence. Its Consensus Meter shows how much the studies agree on yes-or-no questions, and Deep Search writes longer literature reviews.
What the AI does
- Cited plain-language answers from peer-reviewed papers
- Consensus Meter showing agreement across studies
- Deep Search literature reviews
- Ask questions of a paper or your own PDF
- Study Snapshots summarising methods and results
Pros and cons
- Fast way to see where the evidence points
- Every claim cites a real peer-reviewed paper
- Cheap Pro plan and a usable free tier
- Exports citations and imports from Zotero
- Built for narrow, answerable questions rather than open-ended reviews
- Reviewers report lag and high CPU use in long sessions
- No deep links to the exact passage inside a paper
How it scores
Research quality8
Ease of use9
Features8
Value for money8.5
Platforms7.5
The quickest way to get an evidence-backed answer from the literature, at a low price; less suited to broad reviews.
Feature checklist · 7 of 9
- ✓Searches a large database of academic papers (yes)
- ✓Answers from your own uploaded PDFs and documents (yes)
- ✓Inline citations linked to the exact source (yes)
- ✓Multi-step deep research reports (yes)
- –Extracts details from papers into tables (no)
- ✓Shows whether studies support or contradict a claim (yes)
- –Discovers related papers through citations or recommendations (no)
- ✓Exports citations or connects to Zotero (yes)
- ✓Useful free plan (yes)
How we score apps →
Alternatives
See all Consensus alternatives, ranked →
- Gemini Notebook 8.8/10Students and researchers who already have their sources and want to understand, question and summarise them
- Perplexity 8.4/10Fast cited overviews of a topic across the web and academic sources
- ChatGPT deep research 8.0/10Professionals who want a thorough written briefing on a complex topic
- Elicit 7.8/10Researchers running systematic reviews or extracting data across many studies
Gemini Notebook vs ConsensusPerplexity vs ConsensusConsensus vs ChatGPT deep research
Sources
