Short answer: the best Sharly AI alternative depends on where your documents live. If they're files you upload, Gemini Notebook and Humata are strong. If you read in the browser, wikis, Google Docs and PDFs behind a login, Sidenote reads them in place and cites the exact sentence. For literature reviews, Elicit and SciSpace go deeper on academic papers. Below, each one is compared fairly with what Sharly does well.
What Sharly AI does well
Sharly is a research assistant built around uploaded documents: drop in PDF, Word, PowerPoint or Notion export files and get instant summaries, answers and citations. Its paid plans add reasoning models, a source-restricted docs-only mode, team annotations and citation history, and its Business plan adds SSO and audit logs for institutions.
From Sharly's pricing page in October 2026:
| Plan | Price | Documents | Messages | Context |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10 a month (headline: 5 a day) | 50 a month | 10k |
| Pro | $12.50/mo, billed yearly | Unlimited | 1,000 a month | 50k |
| Team | $24/seat/mo, billed yearly, up to 100 seats | Unlimited | Unlimited | 124k |
| Business | Custom | Unlimited | Unlimited | Custom |
The reasons people look for an alternative are usually the free plan's message cap, the upload-first workflow, and wanting citations they can check line by line.
Sharly AI alternatives at a glance
| Tool | Best for | Reads docs in place? | Citations | Free plan |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Sidenote | Cited reading of docs already in your browser | Yes, browser extension | Scroll to the exact sentence | Yes |
| Gemini Notebook | Synthesising a set of uploaded sources | No, upload to a notebook | Points to your sources | Yes |
| Humata | Q&A across larger sets of uploaded files | No, upload files | Highlighted source snippets | Yes |
| ChatPDF | Quick questions about a single PDF | No, upload PDFs | Page references | Yes |
| Elicit | Systematic literature review | Search and upload papers | Per-paper data with sources | Yes |
Features and prices change often, so check each vendor before you commit.
Sidenote - best for cited reading in the browser
Sidenote is a browser extension for Chrome, Edge and Firefox, plus a web app, that reads the document you already have open: PDFs, Confluence, Notion, SharePoint, Google Docs and web pages. There's no upload step, and files behind a login are read through your own session, read-only. Every answer carries a citation that scrolls to the exact sentence and highlights it, and claims that can't be matched to a passage are dropped server-side.
Pros: reads documents where they live; sentence-level, click-to-verify citations; Collections to ask across several documents on paid plans; scanned PDFs OCR'd on paid plans.
Cons: no team annotation layer like Sharly Team's; the free plan is a taster, 1 document and 3 cited chat turns a month, with Pro from £10 a month.
Gemini Notebook - best for synthesising uploaded sources
Gemini Notebook, formerly NotebookLM, turns a notebook of up to 50 sources on the free plan into answers with citations, plus Audio and Video Overviews, mind maps, flashcards and reports. Pros: generous free plan, strong cross-source synthesis, reads scanned PDFs and images. Cons: upload-first, usage limits that refresh every 5 hours, and no Notion or Confluence connector.
Humata - best for questioning a large pile of files
Humata is built for Q&A across bigger collections of uploaded files, surfacing highlighted snippets as evidence. Pros: handles larger document sets; shows supporting snippets. Cons: upload-first, and it doesn't read the page you already have open. See our Humata alternatives for more.
ChatPDF - best for a quick question about one PDF
ChatPDF keeps it simple: upload a PDF, ask questions, get answers with page references. Pros: fast and frictionless for single documents. Cons: PDF-centric and upload-first; lighter on citation depth. More in our ChatPDF alternatives.
Elicit - best for literature reviews
Sharly markets itself to researchers, and for systematic reviews Elicit goes further: finding relevant papers and extracting structured data across many of them, with sources attached. Pros: purpose-built for evidence synthesis. Cons: overkill for questioning a single document or an internal report.
Which Sharly alternative should you choose?
- Cited answers from documents you already have open: Sidenote.
- A free research notebook with audio summaries: Gemini Notebook.
- Questioning a large set of uploaded files: Humata.
- One quick PDF: ChatPDF.
- A systematic literature review: Elicit.
For a head-to-head on features, see Sidenote vs Sharly AI, or our roundup of AI tools that cite their sources.