Alternatives to ChatPDF
An AI tool that summarizes PDFs and answers questions about them, with citations to the source. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
ChatPDF
An AI tool that summarizes PDFs and answers questions about them, with citations to the source.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as ChatPDF.
Humata
An AI tool for asking questions about your documents, with cited answers and summaries.
Humata also gives cited answers across many files and can be embedded in a webpage or used through an API, but lacks ChatPDF's video and website support.
Gemini Notebook
Google's AI research notebook, formerly NotebookLM, that summarizes and answers questions about your uploaded sources.
Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM, summarizes and answers questions across your uploaded sources, but requires a Google account and runs only on the web.
SciSpace
An AI research assistant for searching papers, running literature reviews and writing with citations.
SciSpace includes chat with PDF for difficult papers alongside search across more than 280 million papers, literature review tools and a citation generator.
Explainpaper
A web tool that explains highlighted passages of uploaded research papers in plain language.
Explainpaper explains highlighted passages of uploaded research papers in plain language and answers questions, focusing on academic papers rather than general documents.
Kotaemon
An open-source, self-hosted RAG app for chatting with your documents using local or hosted models.
Kotaemon is a free open-source self-hosted app for chatting with your documents using local or hosted models, but needs a server or local setup.
UPDF
A cross-platform PDF editor with annotation, OCR, conversion, redaction and built-in AI tools.
UPDF is a PDF editor for desktop and mobile with built-in AI summaries, translation and document chat, plus editing, OCR and redaction on a paid plan.
RAGFlow
An open-source, self-hostable RAG engine with document ingestion, hybrid search and a visual agent builder.
RAGFlow is a free open-source self-hosted RAG engine for question answering over internal documents, with hybrid search, but needs more involved server setup.
Khoj
Open-source AI second brain that researches across your documents and the web with any model.
Khoj is an AGPL-3.0 open-source assistant that searches and chats over your own documents and the web with local or remote models, and can be self-hosted.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Scholarcy
An AI summarizer that turns papers, articles and videos into interactive flashcard summaries.
Elicit
An AI research assistant that finds papers, summarizes findings and extracts data for literature reviews.
Claude
Anthropic's AI assistant for writing, analysis and coding, with a large context window.
ChatGPT
OpenAI's AI assistant for conversation, writing, coding, analysis and image creation.
Monica
An AI assistant for chat, writing, summarizing and translation, available as an extension and app.
Sider
AI sidebar for the browser that summarizes pages and chats with several AI models.
