Every "best AI for research papers" list treats these tools like they compete head to head. They mostly do not. They solve different stages of the same painful workflow: read the literature, write the draft, get the citations right, make the figures, then ship a poster and slides.
Pick the wrong tool for your stage and you end up paying for three subscriptions that half overlap.
This is a breakdown of where each one actually earns its place in 2026. I build one of these tools (Bibby AI), so treat the Bibby section as biased and judge it on the facts. The competitor sections are written straight.
The 30-second version
Tool Best at AI writing Live citation search Figures / diagrams LaTeX-native Starts at
Anara Reading + literature review Limited (analysis, not authoring) Yes, traced to your uploads No No Free / $20 Pro
Underleaf Turning anything into LaTeX Rewrite / shorten / elaborate Inline search No Works in/around editors Free / ~$4.99 annual
Overleaf Collaborative LaTeX editing AI Assistant on paid tiers Limited No generation Yes (the classic) Free / ~$16-21 mo
Bibby AI End-to-end authoring Agentic editor Yes Yes (generated in-paper) Yes Free tier + paid
Now the detail.
Anara: best for reading, not writing
Anara (formerly Unriddle, YC-backed) is a research reading and analysis companion. You upload your PDF library and ask questions, and it answers with clickable citations that trace back to the exact passage in your documents. That traceability is the whole point. It uses a RAG approach so it does not fabricate paper titles the way general chatbots do.
It handles more than text too, so PDFs, video, audio, and images can live in one workspace, and it connects to Zotero, PubMed, arXiv, and JSTOR.
Where it stops: it is not a writing or typesetting tool. It will not build your LaTeX document, format for a journal, or generate figures. It is the tool you use to understand the field before you write, and to sanity check claims while you write elsewhere.
Pricing: free tier (small daily word and upload limits), Pro at $20/mo, Team at $30/seat/mo, plus a high-end Max tier if you want the Deep Search agent. Use it if literature review is your bottleneck.
Underleaf: best for converting things into LaTeX
Underleaf is an AI LaTeX assistant focused on conversion. Point it at a scanned paper, a whiteboard photo, a PDF, or a spreadsheet, and it hands back compilable LaTeX with the math structure intact. Equation conversion accuracy is its headline claim, and it is genuinely good at it.
The clever part is delivery: it runs as a Chrome extension that works inside your existing editor (including Overleaf) or as a standalone web app, so there is no copy-paste dance. It also does inline citation search and one-click rewrite, shorten, and elaborate.
Where it stops: it is an assist layer, not a full research platform. No figure generation, no poster or slide output, no end-to-end project management for a multi-chapter thesis. Think of it as the fastest way to get non-LaTeX material into LaTeX.
Pricing: free tier that is actually usable, paid from around $4.99/mo billed annually. Use it if your main pain is "I have this thing and I need it in LaTeX."
Overleaf: best for collaboration and habit
Overleaf is the incumbent. It is the collaborative LaTeX editor most labs already live in, and it now ships a LaTeX-fluent AI Assistant on its paid tiers. If your co-authors already use it and you just want AI autocomplete on top of a familiar editor, it is the low-friction choice.
Where it stops: the AI is an add-on to an editor designed in the pre-AI era, not a workflow built around AI. No citation generation engine, no figure generation, no poster or slide pipeline. You pay mostly for collaboration and familiarity.
Pricing: free tier, paid roughly $16-21/mo depending on plan, with an academic discount for institutional groups. Use it if collaboration and inertia matter more than AI depth.
The honorable mentions
SciSpace and Paperpal: strong for literature discovery and language editing respectively. Paperpal in particular is good at grammar, readability, and submission readiness.
Writefull: LaTeX-aware language feedback that plugs into Overleaf. Narrow but good at what it does.
Elicit and Consensus: literature search and synthesis. Same stage as Anara, different flavor. Not writing tools.
None of these author the paper for you. They each own one slice.
Bibby AI: built for the writing stage end to end
Here is the biased section, so weigh it accordingly.
Bibby is a LaTeX-native AI platform built around authoring rather than reading. The idea is to keep writing, citing, figures, review, and presentation in one place instead of stitching four tools together. It currently serves 10,000+ researchers across 50+ universities in 50+ countries.
What it does:
Agentic LaTeX editor, with a Rich Text mode if you want to write like a Word doc and let Bibby produce the LaTeX underneath
Live citation search inside the editor that inserts the real \cite{} and the BibTeX entry, so no hallucinated references
Academic Diagrams, agentic figure generation with 6,000+ scientific icons (Bioicons + SciDraw) and one-click insert into your paper. Closer to a BioRender rival than a writing feature
Posters and presentations generated from the paper you already wrote, so the deck is a transform of your work, not a from-scratch project the night before the deadline
AI paper reviewer, a LaTeX to Word converter, and a live conference deadline tracker for when you need the boring stuff handled
Where it stops: it is not a literature reading tool the way Anara is. If your bottleneck is understanding 80 papers, pair Bibby with Anara or Elicit. Bibby owns the part where you turn understanding into a submitted paper.
Pricing: there is a free tier, so you can test the editor, citation search, and figure generation before deciding. Current pricing is on the site.
So which one should you actually use
Drowning in papers to read → Anara (or Elicit / Consensus)
Have material that needs to become LaTeX → Underleaf
Co-authors already on Overleaf, want light AI → Overleaf
Writing the paper, figures, poster, and slides start to finish → Bibby AI
Language and submission polish → Paperpal or Writefull
Most serious researchers end up using two: one for reading, one for writing. The mistake is paying for two that both only read, or two that both only write.
Try Bibby at trybibby.com if the writing side is your bottleneck.
Question for the researchers here: how many separate tools are in your paper-writing stack right now, and which one would you drop first? Curious where the overlap actually hurts.
Top comments (1)
Let me know if you've tried Bibby AI.