Move your team from ChatPDF to Afforai.
Each person gets a short interview, then a personalized step-by-step guide showing exactly where their saved work, prompts, and projects land in Afforai — and the few things that need a manual step, walked through. You send one invite; nobody becomes the help desk, and nothing in ChatPDF is changed or cancelled. Want to see where you’re paying for both first? Run the free audit.
Both tools let you upload documents and ask natural-language questions; migrating the core Q&A workflow is straightforward. Moving from Afforai to ChatPDF: download or export the files you uploaded to your Logically library (the web app at logically.app holds them), then re-upload each PDF or Word doc to ChatPDF — drag-and-drop or paste a URL is enough to start chatting immediately, no account required for a trial. Moving from ChatPDF to Afforai: ChatPDF doesn't store documents beyond the session in a persistent library, so your source files are wherever you put them originally; upload them to logically.app and create a library, then switch to Document Retrieval mode to replicate the same closed-domain Q&A behaviour. Key difference: Afforai also offers Semantic Scholar mode (200M peer-reviewed papers) and Google Search mode as augmentation layers, which ChatPDF doesn't have, so researchers who relied on those must plan to keep that enrichment step elsewhere or stay on Afforai.
- Warning: Afforai (Logically) maintains a persistent library with nested folders and tags; ChatPDF chat sessions are ephemeral per upload, so you lose any organisational structure when migrating to ChatPDF.
- Warning: ChatPDF free tier caps you at 2 documents per day, 120 pages per file, 10 MB per file, and 50 questions per day — a heavy Afforai user will hit these limits quickly and need the $19.99/month Plus plan.
- Warning: Afforai's Semantic Scholar and Google Search augmentation modes have no equivalent in ChatPDF; questions that relied on external literature enrichment will return answers limited to the uploaded file only.
Both products accept PDF, DOCX, and TXT uploads as a baseline, so most documents transfer without conversion. Moving from Afforai to ChatPDF: locate your source files (Logically stores uploaded documents in the web app under your library); for PDF, DOCX, PPTX, and TXT files simply re-upload them to ChatPDF — these formats are supported on both sides. EPUB, Markdown (.mdown), and academic identifier imports (DOI, ArXiv, PMID, ISBN) are Afforai-only; convert EPUB to PDF using Calibre or a similar tool, and download the PDFs for any references added by identifier before switching. Moving from ChatPDF to Afforai: ChatPDF sessions are not persistent — retrieve your original files from wherever you sourced them, then upload to logically.app. URLs added via ChatPDF can be re-added in Afforai as URL sources with the optional 'Convert to Markdown' setting.
- Warning: Afforai supports EPUB, Markdown, PPTX, and URL-to-Markdown conversion plus academic identifiers (DOI, ArXiv, PMID, ISBN); ChatPDF does not accept EPUB or academic identifiers, so those source types require format conversion before migrating.
- Warning: ChatPDF enforces per-file size limits of 10 MB (free) and 32 MB (Plus); very large PDFs that Afforai accepted may exceed ChatPDF's limit and need splitting.
- Warning: Afforai's OCR support for scanned PDFs is documented; ChatPDF's OCR handling for scanned documents is not explicitly described in available docs, so scanned files may not parse correctly.
Both products anchor every AI answer to the source document with clickable inline citations, so this workflow maps closely. Moving from Afforai to ChatPDF: no special export step is needed for the citation behaviour itself — upload your document to ChatPDF and citations will appear automatically in each response, pointing to the page number in the side-by-side viewer. Moving from ChatPDF to Afforai: upload the same PDF to a Logically library, chat in Document Retrieval mode, and inline citations appear with links that jump to the exact passage in the uploaded file. The verification UX is equivalent; the main practical difference is granularity — Afforai citations link to the exact passage inside the document, while ChatPDF citations reference the page number, so reviewers who need pinpoint passage links should prefer Afforai.
- Warning: ChatPDF citations identify the page number; Afforai citations link to the exact passage within the page — migrating to ChatPDF loses sub-page citation precision.
- Warning: Afforai produces citations across all three research modes (Document Retrieval, Semantic Scholar, Google Search); ChatPDF citations are scoped to the uploaded file only, so multi-source citation traces are not reproducible in ChatPDF.
- Warning: ChatPDF free plan limits questions to 50 per day; heavy citation-checking workflows will exhaust this quickly.
Both products support querying across multiple documents at once, but through different organisational models. Moving from Afforai to ChatPDF: export or re-download your library documents (Logically stores them in the web app), then create a folder in ChatPDF (Plus plan required) and upload each PDF into it; you can then chat against the whole folder in one conversation. Moving from ChatPDF to Afforai: any PDFs you uploaded to ChatPDF folders must be re-uploaded to a Logically library; create a library, use nested folders and colour-coded tags to replicate your ChatPDF folder structure, and then query via the AI research assistant in Document Retrieval mode. Note that Afforai's reference manager also stores bibliographic metadata (title, author, DOI, citation style) which ChatPDF does not track at all — if that metadata matters, keep records of it before decommissioning the Afforai library.
- Warning: Afforai's reference manager supports over 10,000 citation styles and auto-generates bibliographies; ChatPDF folders are purely for multi-file chat and have no citation-style or bibliography export capability.
- Warning: ChatPDF multi-file folders require the Plus plan ($19.99/month); free-tier users can only chat with single documents, two per day.
- Warning: Afforai libraries support up to four levels of nested folders and shared/collaborative libraries with configurable permissions; ChatPDF folders are flat and single-user.
- Warning: RIS, BibTeX, and CFF reference imports (from Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote) are unique to Afforai; there is no import path for bibliographic metadata into ChatPDF.
Both products provide a way to take AI-generated document insights into external tools, but via very different mechanisms. Afforai offers the Logically Cite Extension (Word add-in) for inserting formatted citations and bibliographies into Microsoft Word from the library. ChatPDF exposes a REST API for programmatic document upload and Q&A. Moving from Afforai's Word integration to ChatPDF: there is no ChatPDF Word add-in; instead, use the ChatPDF API (POST /v1/sources/add-file or /v1/sources/add-url to get a sourceId, then POST /v1/chats/message) to extract relevant passages programmatically and paste or insert them into Word manually or via a custom script. Moving from ChatPDF's API to Afforai: replace API calls with the Logically library UI or use the Logically Cite Extension in Word to insert citations directly; there is no Afforai public REST API documented in available sources, so API-driven workflows cannot be directly replicated.
- Warning: ChatPDF's API is stateless — the full conversation history must be resent with each request; scripts migrating from a stateful integration will need to manage history explicitly.
- Warning: Afforai's Word integration inserts formatted citations in over 10,000 citation styles directly into the document; ChatPDF has no Word add-in and no citation-style formatting — output is raw text from the chat endpoint.
- Warning: No public REST API is documented for Afforai/Logically, so teams that need programmatic batch document processing cannot replicate ChatPDF's API workflow on the Afforai side.
- Warning: ChatPDF API per-file limits match the Plus web plan: 2,000 pages and 32 MB per source.