PDF.ai vs SodaPDF | What Is the Best Chat-With-A-PDF Tool?
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AI summary
PDF.ai outperforms SodaPDF as a chat-with-PDF tool, offering advanced features like AI-driven summaries, tagging, and multi-language support, while SodaPDF is limited in functionality and primarily serves as a basic PDF editor.
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Almost every person deals with PDF documents in one way or another.
Professionals, entrepreneurs, teachers, students, the parents of those students… Everyone!
If that is your case, you don’t want to spend your precious time searching and capturing information from your PDF in the old way (which is 100% manual and very time-consuming).
You want to ensure efficiency, which will only happen if you use a high-quality PDF tool.
Recently, the ability to chat with PDFs is getting a lot of attention because it boosts productivity.
As you can imagine, the market is flooded with different tools competing for the billions of potential users available.
So, if we consider all of the options available, what is the best chat-with-a-PDF tool?
In this article, I compare PDF.ai and SodaPDF, two of the top competitors in this market.
I listed and explained their features, pricing, pros, and cons and made a final analysis.
After reading this comparison, you can decide which chat-with-your-PDF tool is the best alternative for you.
PDF.ai
PDF.ai is a powerful tool that lets you chat with any PDF document.
From legal agreements to financial reports, PDF.ai brings your documents to life.
You can ask questions, get summaries, find information, and more.
Over 1.5 million users back it up as the most powerful and reliable Chat-with-PDF tool.
PDF.ai Top Features
Chat with all of your PDF documents
Ask a question, and PDF.ai will use AI to pick up the answer from your documents.
I received your answer, along with the document from which it came. No matter how many PDFs you have, hundreds or even more, transform your files into your knowledge base.
Use tags to categorize different PDF documents
Your work deserves order.
PDF.ai allows you to tag your documents to organize them by topics, categories, or under other labels that match your personal work or study systems.
You can tag your PDFs during the upload process if needed.
Then, you can filter the documents on your dashboard by clicking on the name of your desired tag.
Select texts to summarize or explain quickly
Once you have uploaded and opened a document, you may select specific text from the document, right-click, and choose “Summary” or “Explain text.”
The explanation or summary of the text you have chosen will also provide you with the related pages (where the answers came from) of your selected text.
Chat with PDF in all GPT-4 models and Claude 3.5 Sonnet
PDF.ai supports the most capable models. That is great for chats that need advanced reasoning.
Special Keywords
PDF.ai incorporates the detection of special keywords in multiple-choice questions.
In other models without MCQ, the answers to the questions would be just a fragment of the text.
This bot will select the answer directly from the question without any additional explanation or description.
Without the MCQ keyword, sample Q&A will be like:
With the MCQ keyword, the same sample Q&A will be like:
Embed a PDF With an AI Chatbot
This is a great option if you want to use interactive documents. You can go to your PDF.ai account and create an embed code to use as an AI chatbot on your website.
That way, users can get responses and chat about your PDF documents on your landing page or website.
Keep Your Documents Private
If you prefer not to upload your document to our servers, you can choose to make it private during the upload process.
This is very convenient when dealing with privacy-sensitive PDFs. However, you must be aware that while you will be able to chat with your PDF, you won’t be able to preview it.
Let the PDF.ai Bot Speak Your Language
You can post a PDF in one language while posing queries in another.
All the answers from PDF.ai will be sent in your chosen language.
With this, say goodbye to spending your time and using another tool to translate the answers you get from us. Ask, explain, or summarize your PDF in English and get the answers you need in your preferred language, or vice versa.
Prompt Library
If you frequently have specific questions or requests during your work or study tasks, you can easily retrieve them in seconds using the Prompt Library.
To save a prompt from your current chat, hover your mouse over the prompt you want to save until the “+” icon shows up.
Click the “+” icon, and a success message will appear once added.
To see your saved prompts, click on the Prompt Library icon.
You will be able to easily access these instructions as needed.
To modify a previously saved prompt
Go into your prompt library.
Click the pencil icon for the prompt you want to edit.
Hit “Save” once done.
That’s all. You can also remove the prompt you are no longer using by clicking the trash icon.
Capture & ask
You will find the Capture & Ask icon next to the chat box in each document view.
If you click on this icon, you will automatically be able to take a screenshot of the document.
After taking the screenshot, navigate to the chat box area and ask any questions or make your requests related to the screenshot.
If the screenshot attachment remains active in the chat box input area, you can ask follow-up questions.
After finishing that image, you can move on to other questions. To remove the attached image from the chat box area, simply click on the "x" icon.
This feature will be especially useful if you are more of the visual type and want to work fast through a document without having to read a lot or if your PDF has more visually separated sections.
Chrome Extension
You can add the PDF.ai extension to your Chrome browser to start chatting effortlessly with any PDF. It saves you hours and boosts your productivity!
Download Chat History
Maintain and access a record of your conversations by downloading your chat history.
With this, ease your mind knowing you have a local copy of your chat that may include important information you may need in the future.
Free E-Sign Tool Included
PDF.ai also has a set of free tools that you can use unlimitedly and without registering.
One of my favorite ones is the e-sign PDF tool.
You can sign PDFs online for free or request signatures from others. 100% free!
PDF.ai Pricing Plans
PDF.ai offers four different pricing plans right now.
Hobby
Price: Free forever.
It includes:
Pro
Price: $17 per user per month
$10 per user per month (yearly payment)
It includes:
Ultimate
Price: $27 per user per month
$20 per user per month (yearly payment)
It includes:
Enterprise
Price: $37 per user per month
$30 per user per month (yearly payment)
It includes:
For the full list of features please visit this page.
The Pros of Using PDF.ai
PDF.ai is a tool designed to make you super-human when working with PDF documents.
It allows you to:
- Learn more
- Understand things better
- Get new perspectives and ideas
- Summarize information quickly
- Create new content from existing documents
- Work with different languages at the same time
- Get more repetitive tasks done faster
- Integrate every PDF.ai with your workflow
- Use extra tools like a Resume or Invoice scanner
- More
All of this at a very affordable price!
And you know what’s the best? PDF.ai is being developed as we speak.
New features are added consistently to make your experience better and more valuable.
The Cons of Using PDF.ai
While PDF.ai is an extremely reliable tool when it comes to working with PDF documents, it still has some areas of opportunity.
Some of the cons of using PDF.ai would be the following:
- You can't redeem ChatGPT's subscription to use PDF.ai for free
- It only supports PDF file format
SodaPDF
SodaPDF is a bundle of easy-to-use PDF tools.
It allows you to edit, merge, convert, compress, sign & secure your documents in just a few clicks.
SodaPDF AI Features
If you access the “Online Tools” menu on SodaPDF’s website, you can see it has many tools to organize, manage, convert, and edit your PDFs.
The AI Tools section, however only has two features:
- Chat with PDF
- Translate PDF
The only AI tool relevant to this comparison is the Chat with PDF one since the Translate a PDF tool is just a simple translation and doesn’t involve chatting.
Chat with PDF
The chat with PDF tools is quite basic.
You can upload a PDF document (with text) and then their AI assistant will read, summarize, and explain it.
You can then get a PDF with your results and edit it as needed with their other PDF tools.
Soda PDF Pricing Plans
SodaPDF allows you to upload your PDF and ask two free questions before you are required to upgrade.
SodaPDF offers two different pricing options:
14-Day Plan
This plan costs $1.97 for 14 days of access.
After 14 days, your plan will auto-renew at $59.99 billed every 1 year.
It includes:
✅ 30-day money-back guarantee
✅ Free Customer Support
✅ Cancel any time
Yearly Plan
This plan costs $39 per year.
After 1 year, your plan will auto-renew at $59.99 billed every 1 year.
It includes:
✅ 30-day money-back guarantee
✅ Free Customer Support
✅ Cancel any time
✅ Extended Device Access (access to your plan on up to 5 devices)
Pros of using SodaPDF
SodaPDF is a great alternative if your workflow includes editing, merging, splitting, and manipulating PDFs in any other way. It is affordable and if that is your main goal, it should be worth the try.
Cons of using SodaPDF
However if you require a tool that allows you do heavy analytical work with PDFs (summarizing entire papers, getting information from PDFs in other languages, etc) or if chatting with PDFs on a daily basis is a core task of your workflow, then SodaPDF wouldn’t help a lot.
It lacks almost all of the important features that a Chat-with-a-PDF tool must have.
Additionally, while the price is not high, the number of questions that you have available make it almost unusable for the purposes described above.
You need a powerful tool to work with if you expect the chat-with-a-PDF features to enhance and expand your efforts.
Conclusion
We have come to the end of this comparison.
It’s time to pick up a winner…
For us, PDF.ai is the alternative that won by far.
It is the best option if you are looking for a chat-with-PDFs tool.
Why? Because a product built and developed with a specific use case is more powerful.
The team behind PDF.ai is laser-focused on building a solution to help you chat with your PDFs to get more things done.
The AI assistant inside SodaPDF is just a feature of their product.
A feature is always improved way slower than a living product.
PDF.ai can be used anywhere via our Chrome extension or by uploading any PDF.
It also has all the features needed to help you succeed in study, work, or entrepreneurial endeavors.
We invite you to try out and join the +1,500,000 PDF.ai happy users.