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ChatPDF vs PDFConvo

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. PDFConvo publishes a starting price ($2.99); ChatPDF does not. Only ChatPDF has a free tier. Only ChatPDF ships a public API.

ChatPDFAsk questions about PDFs, documents and videosPDFConvoChat with uploaded PDFs for summaries and answers, sold as a single $2.99 monthly plan.

Side by side

FactChatPDFPDFConvo
CategoryPDF ToolsChat with Documents & PDF
Pricing modelFreemiumPaid
Starts at—$2.99 month
Public APIYesNo
PlatformsWeb, macOS, APIWeb
CompanyChatPDF GmbHPDFConvo
Launched2023—
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Sep 6, 2026

What our research says

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

PDFConvo

At $2.99 a month for unlimited documents, PDFConvo is the cheapest way into document chat we found in this shard, and a single plan means no tier maths. What you are paying for is bare: no API, no integrations, no citation controls, and a vendor that publishes no company name or country. Fine for personal reading, weak for anything with a compliance question attached.

Pros

  • Single $2.99 plan with unlimited PDFs and unlimited chats
  • Free trial with no card required
  • Natural-language search plus automatic summaries and key points
  • Companion product covers CSV and spreadsheet files

Cons

  • No company name or country published anywhere on the site
  • No API or third-party integrations
  • No standing free tier once the trial ends
  • Feature copy is thin — no detail on file limits or citation behaviour

Which one fits

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

Choose PDFConvo if you need

  • individuals reading long PDFs on a small budget
  • students summarising papers and reports
  • anyone wanting document chat without a tier comparison

More comparisons

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