Paperpal vs Petal

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.

Petal is a web-based research assistant and reference manager for academic work, also available as a browser extension. Its plans include a free tier and paid options listed from $4.99/user/mo (annual). It helps users narrow literature reviews and compare studies, while providing a library for uploading and organizing PDFs with collections, metadata, and tags. AI tools offer translation, summaries, explanations, key-point extraction, suggestions for questions and search terms, and conversational assistance. Shared workspaces support group projects, co-authored papers, and reviews. The citation generator supports more than 10,000 styles and can copy citations or export them to BibTeX or Word. References can be brought in through identifiers such as DOI, PMID, ArXivID, ISBN, ISSN, and EAN, or by capturing metadata from URLs. Browser add-ins are listed for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, alongside a Word add-in for citations and bibliographies. The free plan includes 1 GB storage, one seat, three guests, 400 AI credits, two collections, and three annotations per document; citation export is not included.