Boba vs Elicit

Boba helps strategy and innovation teams run qualitative research, future scenarios, and storyboards from one workspace. You ask research questions, Boba searches the web for articles and news, summarizes earnings calls, and lets you dig deeper on signals before you move into ideation.

Most research chatbots stop at a bullet summary. Boba is wired for generative ideation workflows: scenario building from strategic prompts, Playing to Win strategy choices, and illustrated storyboards you can generate directly from those scenarios. That chain from research signal to narrative artifact is what sets it apart from general-purpose search assistants.

It fits consultants, product strategists, and innovation teams doing foresight work. The site describes Boba as an experiment by Thoughtworks with login for existing users and a waitlist for new access.

Elicit is a research assistant built for scientists, analysts, and policy teams who need cited answers from academic literature rather than generic chatbot summaries. It searches more than 138 million academic papers and 545,000 clinical trials, then returns evidence with sentence-level citations tied to the underlying sources. The platform covers paper search, research reports, systematic literature reviews, a research agent for multi-step workflows, a personal library, and alerts for new publications.

Where general AI chat tools guess at scientific claims, Elicit anchors every statement to a specific passage, table, or figure from the source material. Its semantic search finds relevant papers even when keyword overlap is thin, and it can screen and analyze up to 1,000 papers in a single workflow. That focus on traceable evidence over fluent prose is what separates it from tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity for high-stakes research decisions.

Elicit serves academic researchers, pharmaceutical teams, medical device companies, and government policy groups. Formation Bio, Oxford PharmaGenesis, and VDI/VDE have published case studies using Elicit for systematic reviews, data extraction, and literature screening at scale. The free Basic plan covers unlimited search and summaries, while paid tiers unlock systematic review workflows, API access, and team collaboration.