Paperpile 2026: Benefits, Features & Pricing

Wondering if Paperpile is right for your organization?

Our Knowledge Management Software selection experts can help you in 15 minutes or less.

On this page

Overview
User Interface
Popular Alternatives
Pricing and Plans
Features
Integrations
User Reviews
Popular Comparisons

Overview

Paperpile

4.8

(122)

Pricing

Starting at $2.99 per month

About Paperpile

Paperpile is a knowledge management solution that helps businesses access, read and annotate texts across the research library. The platform enables administrators to add bibliographies and citations across Google Docs.

Managers can access documents in PDF format via mobile applications on Android and iOS devices. Additionally, Paperpile allows teams to import data from Google Scholar, PubMed and other publisher sites on a unified interface.

Paperpile lets businesses integrate the system with several third-party applications including Google Docs and Google Drive.

Wondering if Paperpile is right for your organization?

Our Knowledge Management Software selection experts can help you in 15 minutes or less.

Paperpile User Interface

Popular Paperpile Alternatives

Main Product

Paperpile

4.8

(122)

Ratings Breakdown

4.71Ease of use
4.72Value for money
4.73Customer support
4.47Functionality

Pricing

Starting at $2.99 per month

Get Price

Alternative Product

Confluence

4.5

(3659)

Ratings Breakdown

4.25Ease of use
4.28Value for money
4.28Customer support
4.36Functionality

Pricing

Starting at $5.42 per month

Get Price

Alternative Product

Microsoft SharePoint

4.4

(5400)

Ratings Breakdown

4.07Ease of use
4.23Value for money
4.12Customer support
4.27Functionality

Pricing

Starting at $5.00 per month

Get Price

Alternative Product

Notion

4.7

(2699)

Ratings Breakdown

4.35Ease of use
4.57Value for money
4.39Customer support
4.62Functionality

Pricing

Starting at $12.00 per month

Get Price

Alternative Product

Guru

4.8

(639)

Ratings Breakdown

4.82Ease of use
4.76Value for money
4.77Customer support
4.76Functionality

Pricing

Starting at $25.00 per month

Get Price

Alternative Product

Connecteam

4.6

(5012)

Ratings Breakdown

4.66Ease of use
4.46Value for money
4.61Customer support
4.53Functionality

Pricing

Starting at $29.00 per month

Get Price

Paperpile Pricing and Plans

Starting price: $2.99 per month

Free Trial

Free Version

Free

$0.00

flat rate

No plan information available

Academic

$2.99

flat rate, per month

No plan information available

Business

$9.99

flat rate, per month

No plan information available

Confused about pricing? We've got you covered.

Get a personalized pricing breakdown tailored to your specific needs—no guesswork, no generic estimates.

Paperpile Features

Popular features found in Knowledge Management
Access Controls/Permissions
Catalog Management
Collaboration Tools
Commenting/Notes
Content Management
Data Import/Export
Discussions/Forums
Document Management
Self Service Portal
Text Editing
More features of Paperpile
Activity Dashboard
Content Library
Full Text Search
Knowledge Base Management
Multi-Language
Third-Party Integrations

Paperpile Integrations

Google Docs

Google Drive

Paperpile User Reviews

Overall Rating

4.8

Ratings Breakdown

77%

21%

Secondary Ratings

Ease of Use

4.7

Value for money

4.7

Customer support

4.7

Functionality

4.5

Sam W.

Verified reviewer

Research

10000+ employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed February 2024

Great citation tool

Great. It's a very user friendly tool, can be integrated into both GoogleDocs and Word and prevents me from messing up my references. I also love that it can change citation styles with pretty much a click of a button.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Paperpile is great - convenient and easy to use. I love that it can automatically change the reference style with zero effort and it can find the paper I want to cite by title DOI, link, whatever I throw at it. I reecently stumbled on a bug after Google updated - the Paperpile support team were really responsive, provided a work around and then got back to me when they had patched the software. Overall, just a stellar experience and I'll be using Paperpile for years to come.

Cons:

Not much to dislike. At most, it would be that every now and then the ciation is imported incorrectly, but given the multitude of formats that papers come in these days I find that a forgivable fault.

John C.

Verified reviewer

Education Management

10000+ employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed August 2021

Solid reference manager and citation tool

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Functionality

Pros:

Its ability to add new papers (e.g., automatically pull papers from Google Scholar) is pretty good, better than competitor's products for the most part. Also, synchronization across devices is quite good.

Cons:

The iPad version is not as robust in adding new papers. I find myself having to go onto a desktop/laptop machine to do that, even if the need arises while on my iPad.

Reasons for switching to Paperpile

Problems with the other product such as flaky sync across devices.

Vendor Response

Thanks for the feedback, John! While the mobile apps are still somewhat limited compared to the web version, we intend to align features across platforms as we continue developing. Eventually, importing new papers should be as seamless on mobile as it is on web. If you find any particular disruption or have further insights to share about your import experience, please feel free to drop us a line via chat or email (support@paperpile.com)

Replied September 2021

Aly Z.

Verified reviewer

Research

Self-Employed

Used weekly for less than 12 months

Review source

Reviewed August 2021

Pros and cons

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Functionality

Pros:

It is easy to use and the interface looks clean and simple.

Cons:

(1) Sometimes when I tried to add a paper from a web page [SENSITIVE CONTENT], although you can see that the readers can simply download the PDF from the website, after I saved it to Paperpile it always says no PDF found so I would have to manually download it and then upload it to Paperpile. (2) Cannot rotate pages when viewing PDFs in Paperpile.

Shawn C.

Verified reviewer

Biotechnology

Self-Employed

Used daily for less than 12 months

Review source

Reviewed August 2021

Easy to use and ideal for managing libraries

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Functionality

Pros:

It is very easy to use both in Word and in Google Docs. Very easy to import papers and manage libraries for different projects. Much less glitchy than other programs and imports paper metadata with much fewer errors compared to other commonly used software.

Cons:

It still is much easier to use with google docs than Word. It is still hard to justify the cost of this program compared to free alternatives. Managing libraries for different projects could be a little easier.

Reasons for switching to Paperpile

Other software was much glitchier in importing metadata.

Babak S.

Verified reviewer

Medical Practice

10000+ employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed August 2021

Essential and indispensable ingredient of team science

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Collaborative research requires an ecosystem of knowledge sharing and team-based writing. Could writing platforms are gaining popularity and it requires integration with citation managers. Paperpile is the best so far.

Cons:

Search capacity is very limited. You can not perform advanced search to find the reference you need. However, if you know what you need or the size of library is small (<200 articles) this is not a huge limitation.

Reasons for switching to Paperpile

Online capabilities and Google doc integrarion

Tal S.

Verified reviewer

Research

1001-5000 employees

Used weekly for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed August 2021

A fast, easy-to-use paper manager

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Functionality

Pros:

In-app highlighting and commenting is vital and works well enough. Integration with google drive is nice. The program is light-weight and not too slow. It's easy for the program to find papers and PDFs from a given webpage.

Cons:

I wish the highlighting and commenting had a bit more flexibility. I wish there was a "compact" view so more papers would fit on the screen in the listed papers view. I wish the "website" link for each paper linked to the publicly accessible link or DOI, not the paperpile link.

Reasons for switching to Paperpile

It's slow and less effective at finding PDFs. I switch from Paperpile to Mendeley because I needed a program which allowed me to highlight and comment on PDFs. When Paperpile introduced that feature, I switched back to paperpile.

Dean W.

Verified reviewer

Computer Software

201-500 employees

Used weekly for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed August 2021

Easy way to manage papers using Google tools

I use it to save research papers I come across for searching and reading later.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Functionality

Pros:

With the browser plugin, its easy to add a paper and it's smart about detecting whether the URL is a PDF or a page with a PDF (like arxiv.org), etc. It's easy to search papers and read them later.

Cons:

I Safari for almost everything else now, so I would like a Safari browser plugin. Using iCloud for storage would mean one less cloud storage provider to deal with, too.

Reasons for switching to Paperpile

The app was going away. I was considering a cloud option and decided to evaluate alternatives. Paperpile meet my needs the best.

Vendor Response

Thanks for the feedback, Dean. We do have short-term plans to support other browsers like Safari and Firefox. In the meantime, Paperpile runs in any Chromium-based browser (like MS Edge, Brave, Vivaldi) in case you'd like an alternative to Chrome. Can't say the same for iCloud or other storage providers yet, though, but I'm adding your +1 to the topic on our internal tracker.

Replied September 2021

Michael W.

Verified reviewer

Pharmaceuticals

1001-5000 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed August 2021

Paperpile

Excellent. Very easy to use and easily accessible on all of my devices.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Functionality

Pros:

Easy to search, easy to add new articles

Cons:

The sharing of references with others is kind of difficult to figure out.

Reasons for choosing Paperpile

Paperpile does a better job of formatting articles and offering easy access to pdfs and citations. I still need to use Endnote since it is soo popular in academia. It is important for Paperpile to offer easy import into Endnote.

Rebecca T.

Verified reviewer

Higher Education

11-50 employees

Used weekly for less than 12 months

Review source

Reviewed August 2021

Great reference management tool

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Functionality

Pros:

Really like how easy it is to add papers to your library on Paperpile straight from the browser, as well as the Google Docs plug in which makes adding references to collaborative projects really easy. Lots of tools for organization within the system, where you can organize by project. Papers save as PDFs to the associated Google account which is nice as it saves space on your main drive.

Cons:

It can be hard to convince colleagues to switch to this reference manager as it does have a monthly fee, whereas universities often have subscriptions to other reference managers that are available for free to students and faculty. Install of the plug-in can be a little confusing as well.

Reasons for switching to Paperpile

Paperpile is way easier to use and interface with Google Docso

Vendor Response

Thanks for the nice feedback, Rebecca! Many (or at least quite a few) universities and institutions also have group/site licenses with us, although as a younger product than our usual competitors I suppose we're still catching up. Hopefully we'll keep increasing that number as word of Paperpile spreads thanks to advocates like you :-)

Replied September 2021

Nina S.

Verified reviewer

Research

501-1000 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed August 2021

W/o this = digested by a sarlacc in the Great Pit of Carkoon

Like the heavens parted on my sad scholarly life.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Functionality

Pros:

Affordable for a poor PhD student; super easy & intuitive to use - seamless integration with Google docs allowing for collaborative writing projects. On the cloud so that I can switch from computer to computer + not worry about losing all my references if my ancient computers stop working. Honestly, shudder when thinking about life without it.

Cons:

Sometimes it acts funny when I click on a reference from Google Docs but is a minor annoyance.

Reasons for switching to Paperpile

Integration with Google Docs

Showing 1 - 10 of 122 Reviews

See All Reviews