Skip to content
effecthub

ChatPDF vs Pdfy

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. Pdfy publishes a starting price ($10); ChatPDF does not. Both have a free tier. Only ChatPDF ships a public API.

ChatPDFAsk questions about PDFs, documents and videosPdfyAsk questions across PDFs, audio files, web pages and YouTube videos and get answers with sources

Side by side

FactChatPDFPdfy
CategoryPDF ToolsChat with Documents & PDF
Pricing modelFreemiumFreemium
Starts at—$10 month
Public APIYesNo
PlatformsWeb, macOS, APIWeb
CompanyChatPDF GmbH—
Launched20232023
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

Pdfy

Taking audio files and YouTube links as first-class sources alongside PDFs is the part worth paying attention to — most competitors in this bracket handle documents only, so lecture recordings and interviews need a separate transcription step first. Citations back to the source are present, which is the minimum bar for trusting an answer. It is a small, cheap tool with a 2023 copyright and no company details, so plan for it being a personal utility rather than something to standardise a team on.

Pros

  • Handles four source types — documents, audio, web pages and YouTube — in one workspace
  • Answers carry source attribution rather than free-floating text
  • Questions run across all sources in a workspace, not one file at a time
  • Cheapest paid tier sits under €10 a month

Cons

  • Free tier is five sources and fifty questions a month, which is a trial in all but name
  • A permanent-looking '50% off' banner makes the real list price hard to trust
  • No company name, country or team is disclosed; the copyright still reads 2023
  • No API, integrations or team features are offered

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 Pdfy if you need

  • Students working across lecture recordings, slides and papers at once
  • Anyone who needs answers from a YouTube video without watching it
  • Light personal research where €9 a month is the whole budget

More comparisons

Browse all PDF Tools →