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Asta vs Consensus

A side-by-side comparison of Asta and Consensus, drawn from Ignaite's continuously-verified listings.

Compared from listings verified as of

Asta

Science

Open agentic research assistant for scientists, from Ai2.

View Asta

Consensus

Research

AI search over peer-reviewed research papers, with inline citations.

View Consensus

At a glance

Feature comparison of Asta and Consensus
AttributeAstaConsensus
Category (differs)ScienceResearch
Pricing (differs)FREEFREEMIUM
License (differs)Open sourceProprietary
DeploymentCloudCloud
Platforms (differs)Web, APIWeb, iOS
Model supportMulti-modelMulti-model
Vendor (differs)Ai2 (Allen Institute for AI)Consensus
Capabilities (differs)
  • LLM evaluation
  • Cited answers
  • Literature search
  • Literature review
  • Data analysis / BI
  • Cited answers
  • Literature search
  • Literature review
  • Summarization
  • Structured extraction

The honest brief

Asta

Ranks science agents on AstaBench by both accuracy and cost, and grounds answers in cited, reproducible literature analyses.

  • Cited literature summaries with sources
  • Ships with the AstaBench benchmark suite
  • Built by a respected nonprofit AI lab (Ai2)
  • Rankings weigh cost, not just accuracy
  • Data analysis is in limited beta
  • Narrower than general-purpose research assistants
  • Focused on scholarly/scientific workflows

Consensus

Consensus Meter aggregates whether papers agree or disagree on a question, beyond surfacing individual citations.

  • 200M+ peer-reviewed corpus
  • Copilot drafts literature reviews
  • Inline citations on answers
  • Best answers behind paid tier
  • Coverage skews to indexed journals
  • Not for non-academic questions

When to pick which

Both cover Cited answers, Literature search, and Literature review.

Pick Asta if you need LLM evaluation and Data analysis / BI.

  • LLM evaluation (secondary capability)
  • Data analysis / BI (secondary capability)

Pick Consensus if you need Summarization and Structured extraction.

  • Summarization (secondary capability)
  • Structured extraction (secondary capability)

They share capabilities, but each leads with different ones as a headline job:

Asta is built around Literature review.

  • Literature review (primary capability)

Consensus is built around Cited answers.

  • Cited answers (primary capability)

They also differ on:

Pricing
FREE · FREEMIUM
License
Open source · Proprietary
Platforms
Web, API · Web, iOS
Asta detailsConsensus details