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ChatDOC 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. ChatDOC publishes a starting price ($8.99); ChatPDF does not. Both have a free tier. Both ship a public API.

ChatDOCDocument question answering with click-through citations to source passagesChatPDFAsk questions about PDFs, documents and videos

Side by side

FactChatDOCChatPDF
CategoryPDF ToolsPDF Tools
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at$8.99 month—
Public APIYesYes
PlatformsWeb, Chrome Ext, APIWeb, macOS, API
Company—ChatPDF GmbH
Launched—2023
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Sep 6, 2026

What our research says

ChatDOC

Choose it over generic PDF chatbots for one reason: it shows you where the answer came from, one click to the highlighted passage. If you are assembling your own RAG stack, the standalone parser API is arguably the more interesting half of the product.

Pros

  • Every answer is anchored to its source passage, which is the entire point of the product
  • Handles cross-page tables, formulas and scanned documents, not just clean text
  • The parser ships as its own API, so ingestion quality can be tested independently
  • Cheap next to per-seat document AI products

Cons

  • Ownership and jurisdiction are not disclosed anywhere on the site, which matters for confidential documents
  • Free tier is tight enough to work as a demo rather than a usable plan
  • Billing runs in 30-day and 360-day blocks instead of a conventional monthly subscription
  • No team or workspace tier is published

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 ChatDOC if you need

  • Researchers and analysts who must verify every figure they quote
  • Legal and compliance reading where a fabricated citation is unacceptable
  • Developers needing a table- and formula-aware PDF parser behind an API
  • Students working through long scanned texts that need OCR

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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