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Freemium

Liner

Citation-first AI search and research agent with a scholar mode for literature reviews and a writing workspace.

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Liner

Evaluation

What to know

Best for

  • Graduate students and researchers building literature reviews
  • Consultants and content researchers fact-checking claims
  • Professionals who want cited answers rather than chat

Not ideal for

  • Users wanting an ad-free free tier
  • Heavy Scholar users on a tight budget
  • Teams needing a general-purpose chatbot for creative tasks

Key features

  • Line-by-line cited answers with one-click source checking
  • Deep Research reports and mind maps
  • Liner Scholar: literature review, citation recommender, hypothesis and peer-review tools
  • Liner Write for drafting and editing with verification
  • PDF upload and Q&A; API and MCP access

Pros

  • Citation granularity makes fact-checking fast
  • Academic tooling goes further than general AI search
  • One plan covers search, scholar and writing agents

Cons

  • Free answers include ads and very limited uploads
  • Credit costs per action vary widely and are easy to burn on Scholar tools
  • Benchmark advantages are self-reported

ToolifyNav verdict

Liner has chosen a lane and stays in it: answers you can check, and tools that look like a research workflow rather than a chat thread. Liner Scholar in particular — literature reviews, citation recommendations, hypothesis evaluation — is more structured than what general-purpose assistants offer researchers. The catch is the credit economy. Heavyweight actions cost 40 to 80 credits each, so a busy thesis month can exhaust Pro faster than expected, and the free tier carries ads. Students and analysts who value provenance over personality should trial it on a real literature search before choosing between Pro and Max.

About

About Liner

Liner is an AI search and research product built around verifiability. Answers come with line-by-line citations you can open in one click, follow-up questions to dig deeper, and mind maps for untangling complex topics. The company says its Advanced Search, which draws on carefully selected sources, scored higher than ChatGPT's advanced model and Perplexity Pro on OpenAI's SimpleQA accuracy benchmark — a vendor claim, but one that signals what Liner optimizes for.

The product is split into three agents under one subscription. Liner handles everyday search and Deep Research reports. Liner Scholar is aimed at academic work: finding and comparing papers, recommending citations, generating literature reviews, and running specialized tools such as a hypothesis generator and evaluator, research tracer, survey generator, survey simulator and peer-review assistant. Liner Write drafts emails, newsletters and reports from a topic and lets you edit and verify without leaving the window. File upload lets you summarize and query your own PDFs.

Pricing mixes daily and monthly allowances. Free users get daily credits, unlimited Advanced Search, a single small file upload per day and ads in answers. Pro and Max add monthly agent credits, larger and more frequent uploads, ad-free answers and access to major external models (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude). Different actions cost different credits — a Deep Research request or literature review costs far more than a basic search. Team and Enterprise plans add central billing, admin controls and exclusion of team data from AI training. An API and MCP server are also offered.

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