ChatPDF

ChatPDF does one job that general chatbots still make awkward. It keeps your document open beside the conversation, and every answer carries a citation you can click to jump to the passage it came from. For a long contract or a dense paper, that's the difference between trusting an answer and checking it in seconds.

It was one of the first tools of its kind and remains one of the simplest. Drop a file on the page and start asking; you don't even need an account.

More than PDFs now

Despite the name, ChatPDF reads Word documents, PowerPoint files, Markdown and plain text, and it can chat with a YouTube video or a website. Folders let you put several files into one conversation and ask questions that span them. It works in any language and can answer in a different one from the document's.

Around the chat sits a growing set of study tools. You can summarize a file, turn it into flashcards or slides, run text through an AI detector or draft with an AI writer. There are apps for Mac and mobile, and the company says it answers more than a million questions a day.

Under the hood, ChatPDF says it routes each question between GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini. Those were OpenAI's mainstream models in 2024, which helps keep costs down but trails the newest models on hard reasoning.

Free and Plus

The Plus window as it opened on October 10, 2026, with prices in euros. ChatPDF has no public pricing page.

Prices aren't published on a pricing page. They appear only in the upgrade window, and they weren't identical on every visit. Four of five visits on October 10 showed €16.99 monthly and €8.25 a month on the yearly plan; one showed €15.99 and €9.92. Look at the window yourself before paying.

Two documents a day is generous for a student reading the occasional paper. Anyone reviewing a stack of contracts or a literature folder will reach the limit by mid-morning.

Privacy and sharing

Documents are private by default. ChatPDF encrypts them in transfer and at rest, stores them with a SOC 2 Type II certified provider and lets you delete them at any time. If you want a colleague to see a file and its chat, you can share a link that works without an account and revoke it later.

When another tool does more

NotebookLM, now called Gemini Notebook, handles up to 50 sources per notebook on its free plan and adds audio and video overviews. Claude and ChatGPT read long files and reason about them with newer models, though their citations are less precise than ChatPDF's page links. For academic work across many papers, Elicit and Consensus search the literature instead of only the files you upload.

ChatPDF's strength is speed on a single document. Keep the free plan for occasional files, and upgrade only in a month when you know you'll read more than two documents a day.