The 12 Best Overleaf Alternatives in 2026 (Online, AI and Desktop)

Why people look for an Overleaf alternative

Overleaf is the best-known online LaTeX editor and it does a lot well. Three things on its free plan send people looking: one collaborator per project, a compile that stops after 10 seconds (240 on paid plans), and history that reaches back only 24 hours. Upgrading is $25 a month or $199 a year for Standard, and $13 a month or $98 a year for students. Git and GitHub sync are paid too. Each alternative below fixes a different one of those, so pick by the one that is stopping you.

Comparison at a glance

LetX: unlimited collaborators, an assistant that compiles

LetX is a real-time collaborative LaTeX editor that runs in the browser. Every plan, Free included, has unlimited collaborators, so a group project or a supervisor never needs a paid seat to join. It compiles a typical document in a few seconds, queue included, and ships 1000+ templates: theses for specific universities, CVs, IEEE and ACM papers, Beamer decks. Its assistant, Lexi, reads your whole project, edits the source in place and then runs the build, so when a document fails it fixes the line latexmk actually reported. More of Lexi, GitHub sync and longer builds come with Pro at $18 a month, or $9 for verified students and faculty (pricing). Your documents are never used to train a model.

AI-first editors: Prism, Murfy and Bibby

Prism (OpenAI), closes January 1, 2027

OpenAI shuts Prism down on January 1, 2027 and deletes its projects after that date, so it is a place to move away from rather than to: how to export every Prism project and bring them into LetX at once. Until then it is OpenAI’s LaTeX workspace, built on Crixet, which OpenAI acquired. It is free for anyone with a personal ChatGPT account (Free, Go, Plus or Pro) who has never been in a Business or Enterprise workspace, with unlimited projects and collaborators and OpenAI’s models built in. Two things to read before you put unpublished work in it: its help centre says whether your data helps improve OpenAI’s models is a setting you control, and that Prism does not currently use the Zero Data Retention option and keeps logs for a period after each request. Git integration is not available yet. See LetX vs Prism.

Murfy

An Overleaf-style editor from Murple Inc. in Korea, with AI paper review, compile-error fixes, chat, code completion and an MCP connection for Claude Code, Cursor and ChatGPT. The free Starter plan has unlimited collaborators, comments and track changes, 1,000 AI credits a month and a 30-second compile; Pro is ₩29,000 a month. Murfy does not publish a training policy; its FAQ says projects are private by default and encrypted in transit. See LetX vs Murfy.

Bibby AI

An AI-heavy editor for writing alone: chat, citation search, figures, paper review and posters. The free plan is small (two projects, no collaboration), and Pro is $16 a month or $14 a month billed yearly. Bibby says it never uses your documents to train its models and sends text to Google Gemini under zero-retention, no-training terms.

Online editors without the AI focus

inscrive

The pick when documents must stay in the EU: inscrive says projects are stored and compiled on its servers in the EU. The free plan has unlimited collaborators, up to 10 active projects and a 60-second compile, with Git for any provider on every plan. Pro is €7 a month or €70 a year, with 480-second compiles and opt-in AI error fixes. It says your documents are never used to train AI models.

TeXPage

A real-time editor with AI credits for proofreading, paraphrasing and debugging. The free plan allows one collaborator and a 30-second compile. Standard is $5 a month with two collaborators and five-minute compiles, sold as one-time purchases that do not renew on their own. Git and GitHub come with the paid plans.

CoCalc

LaTeX next to Jupyter notebooks, SageMath and PythonTeX, with live collaboration and a built-in Codex agent. The free tier runs one project at a time on shared resources; Basic is $6 a month billed yearly, or $8 month to month. Best for computational work where the paper and the code live in one place.

Papeeria

A simple online editor with unlimited collaborators per project and one private project on the free plan, Git sync, and paid plans from $5 a month. The site is live, but we found nothing on it dated after 2021, so check it is still maintained before you commit a long project to it.

Run Overleaf yourself: Community Edition

Overleaf’s own code is open source (AGPL-3.0) as Overleaf Community Edition. With the Overleaf Toolkit, which needs bash and Docker, a lab can run it on its own server: real-time collaboration, files on your own hardware, no price per seat. You maintain it yourself, and features from the cloud version are missing, including Git and GitHub integration and track changes, which Overleaf sells in Server Pro. Best for a group with someone to run the server and a reason to keep documents in-house.

Work offline: desktop editors

VS Code with LaTeX Workshop

Free (MIT) and the natural choice if you already write code in VS Code: build on save, a PDF viewer beside the source, and Git built in. You install a TeX distribution yourself (TeX Live, or MiKTeX, which also needs Perl for latexmk). Collaboration means Live Share, which Microsoft has put in maintenance mode with no new features planned.

TeXstudio

The most complete free desktop LaTeX editor, open source, for Windows, macOS and Linux (version 4.9.8 came out in September 2026). Install TeX Live or MiKTeX first; TeXstudio is the editor on top. There is no official online version, so if you searched for TeXstudio online, an online editor is the nearest thing. More desktop options are in the best free LaTeX editors.

A different format: Typst

Typst is not LaTeX. It is a newer typesetting language with its own syntax and a fast open-source compiler (Apache-2.0). The typst.app web editor has real-time collaboration, a free plan with 200 MB and 100 files per project, and Pro at $7.99 a month, with data stored in Germany. It suits documents you control end to end. Most journals, conferences and universities still ask for LaTeX, so check before you move a paper. See LetX vs Typst.

Moving a project from Overleaf to LetX

1. In Overleaf, open the project and choose File, then Download, then Download as source (.zip). From the project list you can tick several projects and download them in one go.
2. In LetX, open your projects and choose Upload Zip. The .tex files, folders, images and .bib files come across as they were.
3. Open the main .tex file and compile, then invite your co-authors. They join free, however many there are.

How we compared

• What we looked at. The free plan (collaborators, compile time, projects), the cheapest paid plan, real-time collaboration, what the AI does with your text, and whether it works offline.
• Where the facts come from. Each vendor’s own pricing page, help centre or repository, read on 23 October 2026, and nothing from other comparison sites. Where a vendor does not publish something, such as a training policy or a student price, we say so rather than guess.
• What we did not do. We did not time every editor under the same conditions, so there is no speed ranking. LetX’s own figure, a few seconds end to end with the queue included, is explained in how to compile LaTeX online.

Where LetX is the wrong choice

• You need to work offline. LetX runs in the browser and compiles on our servers. On a plane, use TeXstudio or VS Code over TeX Live.
• You want the AI to draft for you. Murfy puts drafting first (Prism did too, until OpenAI closes it on January 1, 2027). Lexi is built to fix, convert and build: a few runs on Free to try it, a monthly allowance on Pro.
• Your files must stay on your own servers, or in the EU. Run Overleaf Community Edition, or choose a service that states EU hosting, such as inscrive.
• Your publisher’s workflow assumes Overleaf. Overleaf has more journal submission buttons and years of community answers. If your workflow depends on them, that is a real reason to stay.

The short answer