PDF.ai

PDF.ai has a free Hobby plan that lets you try chatting with a small number of PDFs at no cost. The paid Ultimate plan is $20 per user per month when billed yearly ($240/year), which unlocks unlimited documents, larger file sizes, faster models, source-linked responses, and access to the developer API. There is no enterprise-only tier published publicly, though custom deals are available for teams embedding PDF.ai's chatbot on their websites.

Yes. PDF.ai includes built-in OCR so you can chat with scanned PDFs where the text exists only as images — old contracts, historical archives, photographed documents, and image-based exports all work. The OCR runs automatically on upload, so you don't need to pre-process files through a separate tool. Accuracy is solid on clean scans and weaker on handwritten or heavily distorted pages.

Capture & Ask lets you screenshot a specific area of a PDF (or any on-screen content) and ask PDF.ai a question about just that snippet. It's useful for asking about charts, tables, and diagrams that don't extract well as text — instead of pasting a mangled data dump, you give PDF.ai the visual directly. This feature depends on vision-capable models in the backend and is one of PDF.ai's most-used features for technical documents.

Yes. On paid plans, PDF.ai lets you train a chatbot on one or more PDFs and embed it directly on your own website as a chat widget. It's a common pattern for user manuals, FAQs, legal documents, and product knowledge bases where customers want to ask questions of a document instead of reading it. Combined with the API, this makes PDF.ai a realistic way to add document-grounded AI to a SaaS product without building your own RAG stack.

Yes. The PDF.ai developer API is available on the Ultimate plan and lets you upload documents, query them, and retrieve source-linked answers programmatically. It's popular with developers building internal document search, customer support bots, and AI features inside SaaS products. The API is simple REST-style with straightforward auth, and it returns source citations so you can surface which page of a PDF an answer came from.

They're comparable products with slightly different positioning. ChatPDF is the older and more established player with strong chat quality and a larger free tier. PDF.ai is more developer-friendly with its API, embeddable chatbots, Capture & Ask, and browser extension. If you just want to chat with a few PDFs as a student, ChatPDF is a great default. If you want to build something on top of PDF chat, PDF.ai is the better choice.

The free Hobby plan has small file size limits suitable for short documents. The Ultimate plan increases these significantly — large reports, textbooks, and multi-hundred-page PDFs are handled comfortably. For extremely large files, PDF.ai chunks documents and uses RAG so the full content doesn't need to fit in a single context window, which makes it more robust than simply pasting a PDF into ChatGPT.

PDF.ai is built by an independent team and has grown through word-of-mouth in developer and research communities. It's not VC-backed at the scale of the biggest AI tools, which means pricing is relatively simple and the product prioritizes direct user requests over enterprise sales theater. The fact that a small team can ship a tool that competes with well-funded alternatives is a good sign of how commoditized PDF RAG has become in 2026.