Avidnote vs Elicit: Which AI Research Tool Should You Use?
Short version: Elicit is built for finding and screening papers at scale. Avidnote is built for the work after that: reading the papers you kept, taking notes, writing with citations and analysing your data. Many researchers use both. Here is how they differ and when each one fits.
What Elicit does
Elicit is an AI research assistant that searches a large index of academic papers (its site cites more than 138 million), screens them against your criteria and extracts data from each paper into a table. Its Research Agent and Research Reports produce structured summaries of a question, and the paid tiers add more usage, exports (RIS, CSV, BibTeX) and support for systematic reviews. It is strongest at the start of a project, when you need to map a field and shortlist papers.
What Avidnote does
Avidnote is an AI workspace for research. You upload papers, ask questions and get answers cited to the passage they came from, take notes beside the PDF, draft with writing templates, analyse data and transcribe interviews. Data is stored in the EU and is not used to train AI models. The free plan includes 20,000 AI words a month; paid plans start at $19 a month. Avidnote also finds new papers, but its centre of gravity is your own library: the PDFs you have decided to read, the notes you take on them, and the paper you are writing from them.
Side by side
| Avidnote | Elicit | |
|---|---|---|
| Main job | Read, note, write and analyse with citations to your own sources | Search, screen and extract data across millions of papers |
| Chat with your PDFs | Yes, answers cite the passage; click to open it | Yes, on uploaded papers in paid tiers, focused on extraction |
| Notes on papers | Notes beside the PDF, tags, projects, workbooks | Not a note-taking tool |
| Writing | AI writing templates: literature review, discussion, rewrite, proofread; export to Word or PDF | Research reports; not a manuscript editor |
| Data analysis | AI analysis and coding on your data; interview transcription | No |
| Reference management | Built in, with paper discovery | Export to RIS, CSV, BibTeX |
| Data and privacy | Stored in the EU, GDPR, not used to train AI | See Elicit's policy |
| Free plan | 20,000 AI words, 10 paper questions, 100 papers, 2 h transcription per month | Limited usage of agent and reports, unlimited search |
| Paid from | $19 per month | Plus $11 per month billed annually; Pro $49 per month billed annually (at the time of writing) |
When to pick Elicit
You are starting a systematic or scoping review and need to screen hundreds of papers against inclusion criteria, or you want a quick structured map of what a field says before you read anything in full.
When to pick Avidnote
You have the papers and now need to read them properly, keep your notes and highlights attached to them, write the manuscript with citations you can check, and analyse data or interviews in the same place. Avidnote's answers are tied to a passage you can open, which matters when a supervisor or reviewer asks where a claim came from.
Can you use both?
Yes, and it is a sensible split. Screen in Elicit, export the papers you keep, then upload them to an Avidnote project to read, note and write. If you are writing a review, our guide on how to use AI for a literature review walks through that workflow.
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