Paperpal vs PDFCite
Paperpal
paperpal.comPDFCite
pdfcite.comSide by side
| Figure | Paperpal | PDFCite |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $11.58/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | — |
| Windows | Yes | — |
| macOS | Yes | — |
| Plans published | 15 | 1 |
| Spec score · AI PDF Assistants | 8.9 (#4) | 7.0 (#25) |
| Integrations | Official pages list a web app, Microsoft Word add-in, Google Docs support, Chrome extension and Overleaf support. | The site names PubMed, arXiv, Semantic Scholar, and Google Scholar as libraries it works with. |
| Privacy | Paperpal says it never uses user documents, uploads, or personal information to train its AI models and allows users to delete documents. | The site says documents stay on the user's device and AI requests pass through its gateway without PDFCite accessing the content. |
Plans
Paperpal
- Prime$144 a year
- Prime$25 a month
- Pro$348 a year
- Pro$59 a month
- FreeFree
- FreeFree
- Prime$12 a month
- Paperpal Prime$25 a month
- Prime Monthly$25 a month
- Pro$29 a month
In their own words
Paperpal
Paperpal is an AI research and academic writing workspace for students and researchers, combining writing help, citation tools, and academic checks. Users can upload references and PDFs, ask questions, and receive cited findings from more than 300 million verified research articles. Writing tools cover academic suggestions, paraphrasing, tone changes, word reduction, grammar, proofreading, and citation formatting. Its checker suite looks for plagiarism and AI-writing patterns, checks references, and assesses journal submission readiness. Paperpal runs on the web and as a browser extension; it also offers a Microsoft Word add-in and browser-extension support for Google Docs and Overleaf. The free plan includes 200 language suggestions, five generative AI uses per day, 7,000 plagiarism-check words per month, and five daily AI-detection scans of up to 1,200 words each. Prime costs $144 a year billed annually, or $25 a month billed monthly. Pro costs $348 a year billed annually, or $59 a month billed monthly. Paperpal says it does not train its AI models on user documents, uploads, or personal information, and allows document deletion.