Consensus vs Humata: Features, Pricing and Verdict

Consensus searches published research for you; Humata answers questions about your own documents. Compare features, limits, and pricing to find your fit.

By Galactic News Editorial · Published 2026-11-09T10:21:04+00:00 · Updated 2026-11-09T10:21:04+00:00

Consensus and Humata are both research tools, but they answer different questions. Consensus searches the published literature for you. You ask a question, and it finds peer-reviewed papers, summarises what they say and shows its sources. Humata answers questions about documents you already have. You upload a PDF, and it reads the file and answers with citations to the page. One searches the world. The other reads your files. This comparison covers features, pricing and which one fits your work.

The confusion comes from the overlap. Both tools give cited answers. Both are used by students, researchers and professionals. But the workflow is different from the first click. Consensus starts with a question and no files. Humata starts with a file and no search. Pick the one that matches how your research actually begins.

Consensus vs Humata at a glance

What Consensus does

Consensus is a search engine built for peer-reviewed research, not the open web. You type a question in plain language, such as whether a treatment works or a policy had an effect. Consensus returns an answer drawn from published studies, with citations to the papers behind each claim.

The free plan is generous on search itself. Basic paper searches are unlimited. The limits sit on the AI layer: 10 Pro messages a month, up to 3 Deep reviews a month and 10 Study Snapshots a month. Pro messages are the deeper AI answers. Deep reviews are the full literature-review syntheses. Study Snapshots are one-page summaries of individual papers.

Pro costs $20 a month, or $144 a year, which works out to $12 a month billed annually. It lifts Pro messages to unlimited and raises Deep reviews to 15 a month. It also unlocks every research tool and includes 500 API and MCP uses a month, with further uses at $0.05 each. The Deep plan costs $65 a month, or $540 a year ($45 a month billed annually). It raises Deep reviews to 200 a month and API uses to 2,000. It is built for researchers and clinicians running frequent literature reviews.

Teams pricing sits behind a separate tab at $30 per user per month, with Pro features plus 50 Deep reviews per user per month and centralised billing. Enterprise is a custom quote. Students and faculty with a valid academic email get up to 40% off Pro, and clinicians with a valid NPI number get 25% off.

Watch the metering. Deep reviews are capped on every tier, even the $65-a-month Deep plan. If your work is mostly synthesis-heavy literature reviews, you will hit the cap faster than the price suggests. The free plan's unlimited basic search is the best part of the deal for occasional users.

What Humata does

Humata is document-grounded question answering. You upload PDFs and other files, then ask questions in natural language. Humata answers with citations that link back to the source page, so you can check every claim against the document. It can summarise long papers, compare files and pull out key points. It does not search the web.

Humata charges by pages processed per month, so calculate cost from your reading volume, not from the number of questions you expect to ask. The free plan costs $0 and covers 60 pages a month for one user, with basic features and GPT-5 support. The homepage also states the free tier includes up to 10 answers.

Expert costs $9.99 a month and covers 500 pages a month for up to 3 people, with chat support and extra pages at $0.02 each. A Student plan costs $1.99 a month for 200 pages. Team costs $49 per user per month and covers 5,000 pages a month for up to 10 people, with extra pages at $0.01 each. Team adds OCR for scanned documents, department and folder permissions, and response personalisation. Enterprise is custom, with unlimited users, a SOC 2 certificate, an uptime SLA and early feature access.

One concrete example shows how the billing works. On Expert, 750 pages in one month costs the $9.99 subscription plus 250 extra pages at $0.02 each, for $14.99 total before taxes. Page allowances reset monthly. Subscriptions can be cancelled, upgraded or downgraded at any time.

Humata's limits are its scope. It only knows what you upload. It cannot find papers you do not have, and it cannot tell you what the wider literature says. For a researcher with a stack of PDFs to work through, that is fine. For a researcher starting from a question, it is the wrong tool.

Consensus vs Humata pricing

The price structures reward different habits. Consensus Pro at $12 a month billed annually is cheap for unlimited basic research questions. Humata Expert at $9.99 a month is cheap for a moderate reading load. The expensive tier in each case is the heavy-use one: Consensus Deep at $45 a month billed annually for 200 literature reviews, and Humata Team at $49 per user a month for 5,000 pages.

Which one fits your research

Choose Consensus if you start from a question. Literature reviews, evidence checks, clinical questions and policy research all begin with finding what studies exist. Consensus does that job directly, with citations to the papers. Its free plan is genuinely useful, since basic search is unlimited.

Choose Humata if you start from a document. Reading a long contract, a thesis, a set of reports or a stack of papers is Humata's job. Upload the files, ask questions, and check the citations against the source pages. The Expert plan at $9.99 a month covers 500 pages, which fits a steady reading habit.

Many researchers need both. Consensus finds the papers. Humata reads the ones that matter most. A workflow that runs a Consensus search first, then uploads the key papers to Humata for deep reading, uses each tool for the job it was built to do.

Check the current prices before you pay. Consensus changed its prices during 2026, with Pro moving from $15 to $20 a month on monthly billing. Humata's pricing page lists no annual rate, so the monthly figures are the whole story. Both vendors can change limits without much notice.

Bottom line

Consensus vs Humata comes down to where your research starts. Consensus wins when you need to find and synthesise published evidence: Pro at $20 a month, or $12 a month billed annually, gives unlimited Pro messages and 15 Deep reviews a month. Humata wins when you need to read and question documents you already hold: Expert at $9.99 a month covers 500 pages with cited answers. If you only buy one, buy the tool that matches the first step of your work. If your research starts with a question, buy Consensus. If it starts with a file, buy Humata.