Alternatives to Petal
A web platform for storing documents and asking an AI questions answered with sources from them. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Petal
A web platform for storing documents and asking an AI questions answered with sources from them.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Petal.
Humata
An AI tool for asking questions about your documents, with cited answers and summaries.
Humata answers questions across many uploaded documents with cited passages and summaries, and can be embedded in a webpage or accessed through an API.
Anara
An AI research workspace for searching, questioning and citing papers and documents in your library.
Anara searches and questions up to 10,000 files with answers linked to exact passages, writes with automatic citations, and has macOS and iOS apps.
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, requiring a Google account with documents processed by Google.
Logically
An AI workspace for citation-backed research, reference management, PDF annotation and paper writing.
Logically combines reference management, citation-backed AI chat, PDF annotation and paper writing in one web workspace, with pricing not published on its homepage.
ChatPDF
An AI tool that summarizes PDFs and answers questions about them, with citations to the source.
ChatPDF answers questions with cited passages, uses folders to chat across several files, and offers desktop and mobile apps, but lacks team collaboration features.
Open Notebook
Self-hosted, open source alternative to Google's NotebookLM.
Open Notebook is an MIT-licensed, self-hosted NotebookLM alternative, so documents stay on your own server instead of a vendor cloud, depending on the configured model provider.
SurfSense
An open-source, self-hostable research agent and NotebookLM alternative that answers questions over your documents.
SurfSense is an open-source, self-hostable research agent answering over your documents and connected sources, able to run air-gapped, but requiring you to maintain a server.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Paperlib
An open-source desktop app for organizing academic papers, scraping their metadata and exporting references.
SciSpace
An AI research assistant for searching papers, running literature reviews and writing with citations.
Kotaemon
An open-source, self-hosted RAG app for chatting with your documents using local or hosted models.
AnythingLLM
A desktop AI app that answers questions about your own documents, with no account and no API key needed.
Elicit
An AI research assistant that finds papers, summarizes findings and extracts data for literature reviews.
