One-time buyout license — no built-in credits, bring your own API key. Same tier features as above.
1 credit = 8,000 tokens. Monthly subscriptions receive their credit allowance each billing period and unused credits roll over while the subscription is active; yearly plans grant 12 months’ credits at once. When a subscription expires without renewal, the account downgrades to the free plan — remaining credits are kept and can still be used to chat a single PDF or up to 3 PDFs.
Top-up packs
Feature access depends on your tier (Unlicensed: 30 single-PDF trial chats & multi-PDF (≤ 3) chat; Basic: + whole-library chat, Literature Radar Explore; Premium/Business: AutoPilot + Literature Radar Track).
Running this for a lab, a department or a company library? We scope private deployments: your own index, your own models, annual license.
Tell us about your setup →💡 AI chat credits require at least PapersGPT v2.1.0 — download v2.1.0 to activate your included credits.
One engine, from a personal library to a 10,000-document corpus. Measured on a MacBook Pro (Intel Core i9), macOS 14.3.1 — not on a server.
PapersGPT is the leading AI research assistant built directly into Zotero. Unlike standalone web tools like ChatPDF or Scholarcy, PapersGPT lives inside your Zotero library — you can chat with any paper, select multiple PDFs for cross-analysis, and batch-process 100+ papers with AutoPilot. It supports 30+ LLMs (GPT-5.6, Claude Fable 5, Claude Sonnet 5, Gemini 4, DeepSeek V4, Kimi-K3, GLM-5.2, Grok 4) plus built-in local models for offline use. It's open source with 2.7k GitHub stars, with paid plans from $7/month and one-time lifetime licenses from $149. Individual paid plans include PapersGPT AI chat credits. Monthly subscriptions receive credits each billing period; lifetime licenses include a one-time, non-renewing allowance.
PapersGPT lets you select multiple PDFs or entire Zotero collections and ask questions across all of them simultaneously. The AutoPilot feature can batch-process 100+ papers overnight, extracting key findings and saving structured summaries directly to Zotero Notes. This makes literature reviews dramatically faster than reading each paper one by one.
Yes. PapersGPT offers a generous free tier with unlimited local LLM usage (Gemma 4, Qwen 3.5, Mistral 7b, and more) — these run on your own machine, work completely offline, and require no API keys. Free users can also use 30 cloud AI sessions with their own API key. No credit card required, no time limit.
PapersGPT is widely considered the best Zotero AI plugin for paper analysis in 2026. Key features: native Zotero integration (not a separate web app), 30+ supported LLMs, built-in local models for privacy and offline use, multi-PDF chat (up to 300 papers), AutoPilot batch processing (100+ papers overnight), MCP Server for Claude Desktop integration, automatic note-saving to Zotero, and paid plans from $7/month or one-time lifetime licenses from $149. Open source with 2.7k GitHub stars.
Yes — PapersGPT turns Zotero into an AI research agent. Beyond chatting with a single PDF, its agent capabilities include whole-library search (ask questions across every paper you've saved), Literature Radar (Explore + Track) for discovering and monitoring new research, and AutoPilot, an autonomous agent that batch-reads 100+ papers overnight and writes structured findings into Zotero notes. Everything runs inside your Zotero client, with cloud LLMs or fully local models.
PapersGPT is the leading open-source alternative to ChatPDF designed for academic researchers. While ChatPDF is a simple web tool for one-off PDF chats, PapersGPT runs inside Zotero, supports your entire PDF library, enables multi-paper analysis, batch processing via AutoPilot, 30+ LLM choices, local offline models for privacy, and lifetime licenses from $149. Source code is on GitHub with 2.7k stars.
PapersGPT streamlines literature reviews through AutoPilot. Select a collection of papers, set your research questions, and AutoPilot processes them overnight — reading each paper and extracting findings into structured Zotero Notes. You can also chat with multiple papers simultaneously, compare findings across studies, and export synthesized insights. This replaces hours of manual reading with AI-assisted analysis.
Yes. PapersGPT includes built-in local LLMs (Gemma 4 12b/26b, Qwen 3.5 2b/4b/9b, DeepSeek Distill, Mistral 7b, Llama 3.1, Phi-4) that run entirely on your computer. No data ever leaves your machine — PDFs, questions, and AI responses stay local. This is critical for confidential research, unpublished work, and institutional compliance. Local models also work offline.
PapersGPT includes a built-in MCP (Model Context Protocol) Server that connects your Zotero library to any MCP-compatible AI client, including Claude Desktop, Cursor IDE, and other MCP hosts. You can search your Zotero library, retrieve papers, and ask AI questions about your research directly from your preferred AI interface. Setup takes just a few clicks from the PapersGPT settings panel.
Yes. PapersGPT's Literature Radar (Track) subscribes to your research topics and watches arXiv, PubMed, Semantic Scholar, Europe PMC, Crossref, bioRxiv and medRxiv for new papers. It delivers daily or weekly digests inside Zotero, so relevant new research finds you instead of you chasing databases. Queries go directly from your machine to the source APIs — no monitoring server in between.
PapersGPT's whole-library search indexes every PDF in your Zotero library, so you can ask questions like “which of my papers discuss X?” and get answers grounded in all of them at once — not just the one you have open. It works on libraries of thousands of papers and pairs well with multi-document chat for cross-paper synthesis.
