A Humata alternative for long research reading. Grounded answers, and somewhere to put them.
Humata and CarrelAI overlap on the core promise — ask your own documents and get answers traced back to them — and diverge on scope. Humata is a focused document Q&A product with notably cheap student pricing. CarrelAI puts the same grounded questioning inside a workspace: the paper open beside a drawing canvas, annotations on the page, notes filed against it, and tasks that carry its name.
No card · Upload one file · The workspace builds itself
300
Documents on Pro, of up to 20,000 pages
8
Searches behind a single answer at the top plan
3
Model providers, with mid-request failover
Same grounding, different surface area
Both products refuse to answer from the model's general knowledge and search your uploaded material instead — which is the property that makes either of them usable for research reading, and it is worth saying plainly that this is not a difference between them.
What differs is what surrounds the answer. Here the paper is rendered and open, reopening at the page and scroll position you left it on, with a full drawing canvas beside it, highlights anchored to the words on the page, rich-text notes grouped by the day you wrote them, and tasks with due dates badged with the document that produced them.
Asking a literature rather than a paper
The chat can be pointed at every document you have uploaded rather than one file, and the answer comes back naming which paper each part came from. On the Pro plan those references are links that open the paper at the passage — so "who else says this" is a query rather than an afternoon.
Each upload is also analysed on the way in for its real title rather than its filename, its subject, and its sections with the page ranges they cover. A folder of files named after their DOI becomes a folder of papers with titles.
Older and scanned material
A meaningful proportion of any real literature is scanned rather than born-digital. On Study and Pro, pages that are images are transcribed automatically during the initial read at one credit per five pages, so they are searchable alongside everything else. The free plan does not transcribe scans.
On price, and on being fair about it
Humata has historically offered a very cheap tier for students with a verified .edu address — at the time of writing, around $1.99 a month, which is lower than anything here. If price is the deciding factor and you qualify, that is a real advantage and no comparison page should pretend otherwise. Verify it on their site; pricing in this category moves.
CarrelAI's Study plan is $9.99 a month with 250 credits, 50 documents of up to 3,000 pages, and scanned pages transcribed; Pro is $24.99 with 700 credits, linked citations, the model picker and frontier models by default. Yearly is ten months for twelve. The free plan needs no card.
Side by side, against focused document q&a.
| Capability | CarrelAI | Focused document Q&A |
|---|---|---|
| Answers grounded in your own documents | Yes | Yes |
| Ask across many documents at once | Yes | Yes |
| Citations linked to the passage | Pro | Varies |
| Drawing canvas beside the paper | Yes | No |
| In-page highlights and annotations | Yes | No |
| Notes and a task planner | Yes | No |
| Choice of GPT-5, Claude or Gemini | Pro | Varies |
| Cheapest student entry price | No | Yes |
The last row is real: a verified student can get focused document Q&A elsewhere for less than this costs. What that money does not buy is the workspace, which is the only reason to pay the difference.
Questions people ask before they sign up.
Is there a student price?
The Study plan at $9.99 a month is sized for a term's reading, and yearly billing works out at ten months for twelve. There is no separate .edu-verified tier below that, so if entry price is the deciding factor there are cheaper focused Q&A tools.
Do answers link to the exact page?
On the Pro plan, yes — each citation is a link that opens the document at that passage in the same tab. On the free and Study plans answers still come only from your own pages and say where they read something, but the reference is prose rather than a link.
How many papers can I keep in it?
Three on the free plan, 50 on Study and 300 on Pro, at up to 150, 3,000 and 20,000 pages per document respectively.
Related
For researchers
Read papers with an AI that answers only from your own PDFs and shows the passage. Ask across a whole literature at once, and keep what you find.
Chat with PDF
Upload a PDF and ask it anything. Every answer is searched out of your own pages before it is written, so it can show you where it read it.
NotebookLM alternative
An honest NotebookLM alternative. NotebookLM's free tier is excellent; this is for when you need to annotate, draw and plan around your sources.
Upload one file and see whether it read it properly.
That is the only question worth answering before paying for anything, and the free plan exists to answer it. No card.