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AskYourPDF vs ChatPDF

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors. AskYourPDF publishes a starting price ($11.99); ChatPDF does not. Both have a free tier. Both ship a public API.

AskYourPDFChat with PDFs plus embeddable document-trained chatbotsChatPDFAsk questions about PDFs, documents and videos

Side by side

FactAskYourPDFChatPDF
CategoryPDF ToolsPDF Tools
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at$11.99 month—
Public APIYesYes
PlatformsWeb, iOS, Android, Chrome Ext, APIWeb, macOS, API
CompanyAskYourPDFChatPDF GmbH
Launched20232023
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Sep 6, 2026

What our research says

AskYourPDF

A sensible pick when the job is repeatable question-answering across a document library rather than one clever answer, and the embeddable agent plus API are what separate it from the many ChatPDF clones. If you already live in Google's stack, NotebookLM covers the research half at no cost.

Pros

  • Page-level source citations instead of unattributed summaries
  • Documented API and Chrome extension, so it fits into existing workflows
  • Very large per-document page ceilings (2,500 on Premium, 6,000 on Pro)
  • Premium at $11.99/month billed yearly undercuts most document-chat rivals

Cons

  • Free tier is one document, three conversations and 50 questions per day
  • Advertised prices are annual-billing rates; monthly billing costs about 25% more
  • Daily rather than monthly quotas mean a heavy research day hits a hard wall
  • The 40-plus free writing tools are search-traffic surface, not the product

ChatPDF

The quickest way to interrogate one long PDF without building retrieval yourself, and the page-level citations are what keep it honest. But ChatGPT and Claude now read PDFs natively, so ChatPDF only earns its subscription if you need those citations, the multi-file view, or the API.

Pros

  • answers cite specific pages, so you can check them instead of trusting them
  • handles Word, PowerPoint, Markdown and text files, not only PDF
  • REST API supports streaming and multi-turn conversations
  • free tier works with no account and no card

Cons

  • two documents a day on free runs out fast during real research
  • Plus pricing is not published anywhere on the site
  • no team plan, SSO or shared document library
  • hard per-file limit of 2,000 pages or 32 MB

Which one fits

Choose AskYourPDF if you need

  • Researchers querying large PDF sets and citing back to specific pages
  • Support teams embedding a chatbot trained on manuals and policy documents
  • Repeatedly filling the same non-fillable PDF forms from source records
  • Zotero users who want chat over their reference library

Choose ChatPDF if you need

  • students and researchers pulling verifiable quotes out of long papers
  • checking claims inside a contract or report you did not write
  • developers wanting a hosted PDF-Q&A endpoint instead of rolling their own RAG stack

More comparisons

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