What each tool does
Elicit is an AI research assistant for evidence and decision-making. It helps you gather and synthesise findings from studies, understand a field, plan experiments or programmes, draft proposals and weigh tradeoffs. It is used by researchers in academia and industry, with a free plan and paid upgrades.
NotebookLM, now presented as Gemini Notebook, is Google's AI research assistant. You add your own sources, and it reads them to answer questions, explain difficult concepts and pull out what matters. It can reshape your material into new formats for review. It is free and runs in the browser.
Key differences
- Source material: Elicit works with evidence from studies; NotebookLM works only with what you upload.
- Main job: Elicit synthesises research across a field; NotebookLM helps you understand specific documents.
- Planning: Elicit supports proposals and tradeoff analysis.
- Pricing: Elicit is freemium; NotebookLM is free.
- Audience: Elicit suits researchers and professionals; NotebookLM suits students, teachers and researchers.
Which should you choose?
Choose Elicit if you need to review a body of research, draft a proposal or make an evidence-based recommendation.
Choose NotebookLM if you have lecture notes, papers or long documents and want help understanding and revising them. It is a strong option for students and teachers in Pakistan because it is free and browser-based.
Can you use both?
Yes. Use Elicit to identify and synthesise the relevant studies, then load key papers into NotebookLM to study them in detail. Since NotebookLM is free and Elicit has a free plan, you can try this workflow at no cost.
