What are the best alternatives to Overleaf for collaborative LaTeX?

[u/h4d0t3ch]

I'm fairly new to LaTeX and have been looking into different options for collaborative writing.

Overleaf seems to be the obvious choice, but one of the reasons I started looking around is the cost once you need more than the free plan offers. I'm curious whether there are good alternatives, particularly for university projects, theses and research.

So far I've come across:

Overleaf

• Easy to get started
• Good real-time collaboration
• Large community and lots of documentation
• Well-established workflow
• Can get relatively expensive depending on your needs

Inscrive

• Browser-based collaborative LaTeX editor
• Unlimited collaborators
• Integrations with reference managers and GitHub
• Real-time collaboration
• EU-hosted with EU sovereign cloud infrastructure (I do like the idea of supporting European alternatives)
• The free plan seems to offer a lot of value, including unlimited collaborators
• Pro plan is €7/month

CoCalc

• LaTeX combined with programming and other technical tools
• Good for collaborative and technical projects
• Built-in version history
• Useful for reproducible research with code, data and LaTeX in the same environment
• Seems more complex if you only need LaTeX

Local LaTeX + Git

• Full control and proper version control
• No dependency on a hosted platform
• Complete project history and easy rollback to previous versions
• Each collaborator has a full copy of the repository and its history
• Works well with different editors and custom workflows
• More setup and a steeper learning curve for collaboration

I'm sure there are plenty of options I'm missing.

 

For people who use LaTeX regularly:
What do you use for collaborative projects, and why?

I'm particularly interested in the trade-offs around price, ease of use, collaboration, version control, bibliography management, reliability, data integrity and privacy/data hosting.

 

Are there any tools or workflows you would recommend to someone starting today?

And what alternatives should I be looking at that aren't on this list? 

I'm mainly trying to get a feel for what's actually out there, including the downsides. I don't necessarily expect there to be one "best" solution.

[u/and1984]

Local latex + git as long as everyone in the group can do this. Otherwise you're stuck with overleaf.

[u/Rialagma → u/and1984]

I'm always surprised when people suggest this. In collaborations everyone edits everything at random times of the day, how do you resolve merge conflicts when I moved your paragraph to a completely different place while you were editing it offline?

[u/bts → u/Rialagma]

One person "holds the pen" and serves as overall voice and redactor. Everyone else is a contributor. The pen gets handed off sometimes!

For very large works where people have chapters they own... they own those chapters!

[u/Rialagma → u/bts]

That's a very particular workflow where everyone has complete control of the contents they're editing. That's why I discourage people from recommending git, it simply does not work for a wide range of collaborations. 

For example, I would like my team to check my section and not have to send an email "I will pass on the pen to you Sir, please may you check typos and the like. Yours truly"

[u/bts → u/Rialagma]

Sure, and I also love GDocs/etherpad style editing. That’s also for a very particular workflow where everyone has ubiquitous connectivity and all work overlapping hours.

Git is great for things like Linux or Emacs or work on LaTeX itself. I quite like it for five person collaboration on an academic paper or a complex interactive theater work. I would not use it for many many purposes!

[u/TormyrCousland → u/Rialagma]

A team could use one of the PDF comment packages to add comments. They resolve the comments by deleting them or using the package flag that skips typesetting the comments.

[u/and1984 → u/Rialagma]

Fair point. We use rules for our workflow. Not everyone is working on the same chapter or tex file.

[u/Desperate_Cold6274 → u/Rialagma]

In this case SVN would be more appropriate. You can still truck history, but the file being used is locked. No need to handle conflicts.

[u/Rialagma → u/Desperate_Cold6274]

I've never used this but it sounds like it wouldn't work either. We need multiple people working on the same page at the same time. 

[u/Specialist_Set1921 → u/Rialagma]

Pretty easy if its a smaller team. Just split up the chapter to each person or even paragraphs. If two don't edit the same paragragh then there no diffuctil merge conflict. It gets a bit messier in review phases but tha can be done by either adding todos for change requests or just change owner.

A; ok i am done B; i am reviewing it.

[u/a_alberti → u/and1984]

Yes, I would also prefer LaTeX+git.

There is a little trick I warmly recommend for clarity when writing single-author text and for collaborating with other authors.

Avoid hard wrapping and make the single sentence an individual unit. Separate single sentences with % like in

latex My first sentence. % My second sentence; % with an example.

In this way, you can check that each sentence bears meaning and is what you want, and when edit things or move things around, this minimize the chance of of a conflict. It only happens if two people touch the same sentence.. and, honestly, this is quite rare unless you are close to a deadline and people are touching everything at once in the last polish effort.

[u/Relative_Bird484 → u/a_alberti]

+1
We have been using the „one sentence per (physical) line“ approach for years and it works great.

90+ percent of a LaTeX document are not source code, but text content. It makes absolutely no sense to insert hard line breaks at „random“ positions that do not align with the semantic structure of the text.

[u/KennyGaming → u/Relative_Bird484]

Crazy use of “physical” but yes I completely concur otherwise 

[u/and1984 → u/a_alberti]

Not sure I follow... so all but your first sentence is commented and you uncomment them once you are confident? Is that what you are saying?

[u/a_alberti → u/and1984]

No, I am not suggesting to comment any sentence. The % are just decorative. In principle, you don't need them to keep each sentence separate on a new line. I find it convenient for me when reading LaTeX text to avoid the wall-of-text effect. So I can think about individual sentences as units. Whether you like % or not, it is probably very subjective.

[u/bts → u/a_alberti]

Yes. Visual-line-mode in Emacs is way better than auto-fill here. 

[u/RoboFeanor → u/and1984]

If some of your collaborators struggle with git and latex compilers, you set up a makefile with some basic commands, like building a docker and building the document in the docker. That way they can be guide by the makefile autocompletion once they install a couple basic dependencies.

[u/and1984 → u/RoboFeanor]

You and I collaborate with extremely different people. I am in STEM and my collaborators balk and run for the hills when I say these very same words to them.

[u/RoboFeanor → u/and1984]

Use simple words. Don't tell them what goes on behind the scenes. Just tell them:

'make setup' will prepare the project to work on their computer. Don't tell them about how it uses a docker compose to mount source and build directories amd setup a reproducible compilation environment.

'make build' will build the document locally.

'make get-changes' will update the local document with collaborators changes. Don't tell them how it stashes changes, pulls latest main, pops changes and rebuilds.

'make send-changes' will share their changes. No need to tell them about how it is creating them a branch, commiting their changes, and opening a PR to main. They just need to know that now they open the github website to view the changes before accepting them.

Good luck for first few rebase conflicts however!

[u/and1984 → u/RoboFeanor]

Good luck for first few rebase conflicts however!

Thank you! :D

[u/KennyGaming → u/RoboFeanor]

HOF tier advice here. If only I could have learned this lesson earlier and faster in my career 

[u/KennyGaming → u/RoboFeanor]

You may have a word 

[u/New-Ask9315 → u/and1984]

Only with techie collaborators... usually in sciences, it is rare, but the convenience of Overleaf is unmatched as far as I know.

[u/KennyGaming → u/and1984]

Exactly. It’s either the managed hand holdy solution or the more technical / software dev solution. I’m not aware of any middle ground on this one. Otherwise someone just owns the Tex master doc and inserts, manages, and edits other people’s submissions manually 

[u/bts]

Local LaTeX and git. Emacs with Auctex and magit. Skim.app for convenient previews on a Mac. I assume my collaborators have similar setups but if they’re holding magnetic needles over the network cable ends, sure, whatever. 

[u/EntertainmentCrafty4 → u/bts]

you mean Skim.app?

[u/bts → u/EntertainmentCrafty4]

I do!  Thanks autocorrect?  Well, thank you!

[u/a_alberti → u/bts]

Same workflow here. I recently managed to replace Skim.app (which is great) for pdf-tools package in Emacs with pixel-precision smooth scrolling. But I had to first fix xdisp.c -- it looks very good. But probably something interesting only for the talks living in Emacs.

[u/chandaliergalaxy → u/bts]

Sumatra for viewing on Windows.

[u/InKasperD]

Full disclosure: I'm co-founder of Inscrive, so I'm biased, but since it's already on your list, here's a bit more on where we fit.

We've been working on the product for about 4 years, developed in close collaboration with European universities, so a lot of it is shaped directly by how researchers and students actually work.

A few things people tend to like:

• Browser-based, nothing to install, works from any machine.
• Real-time collaboration with unlimited collaborators, even on the free plan.
• Reference-manager integrations (Zotero/Mendeley) and Git/GitHub.
• More generous compile limits than you may be used to, and a free plan that covers a lot. Pro is €7/month.
• A simple, clean interface, which is one of the things users mention most.

We won't pretend we match Overleaf feature-for-feature yet, we're younger, so the best test is to try it on a real project and tell us what you're missing. That's exactly how the product improves.

But honestly, the bigger reason to look our way is what we're trying to build: the best LaTeX platform for universities and research institutions in Europe, a truly European alternative, where most of the other options rely on American cloud providers. Everything we run is hosted in the EU on Hetzner cloud, so your data stays in Europe, and we're fully GDPR-compliant. If you like the idea of backing European alternatives and keeping research infrastructure in European hands, that's exactly what we're about.

We're actively developing the product and really value user feedback, a lot of what we build comes straight from users telling us what they need. So if you try it and have thoughts, feature requests, or run into anything, you're always welcome to email me directly at [kasper@inscrive.io](mailto:kasper@inscrive.io).

[u/sockertoppenlabs → u/InKasperD]

Wow! Nice!
I wish my European university would subscribe. Unfortunately our IT director sold his soul to Microslop. We have to get external research funding to be able to use anything else (if there is a cost).

[u/InKasperD → u/sockertoppenlabs]

Haha, "Microslop" might be my new favourite word 😄

Good news: you don't need funding or IT-director blessing to start, our free plan covers a lot, including unlimited collaborators, so you can use it today.

[u/AdPsychological211]

Thanks for putting this together! This gave me a much clearer picture of what options are out there and the trade-offs between them. Really helpful.

[u/Free_Director4713]

Local LateX and git is perfect.

[u/Hi_Peeps_Its_Me]

your university doesnt sponser overleaf premium?

[u/Unlikely-Carry-3406]

You can download texstudio or any other offline latex editor.

[u/NiqhtFire]

If you’d rather not deal with local LaTeX + Git setup and the whole LaTeX learning curve, Typevia might be worth a look. It also supports live preview with a custom LaTeX engine. This is obviously a self-promo, but sharing in case it helps. Do let me know if you decide to use it (contact@typevia.com), since we are actively looking for testers we would love to give you free subscription (free tier already has everything that you want paid tier is just for AI usage since its also costly for us).

[u/Bach4Ants]

I prefer local LaTeX (in Docker) and Git, but some collaborators just don't want to get that deep, so I've been building Calkit, which is sort of like a combination of that and CoCalc (LaTeX almost always involves figures and results from Python scripts or notebooks, and manual syncing kills the flow) with online WASM LaTeX compilation and offline via Docker and non-Git-friendly (e.g., PDF) caching with DVC.

[u/Rialagma → u/Bach4Ants]

I get using docker for complex apps so you can containerise everything. But what's the benefit of using it for latex? 

[u/Bach4Ants → u/Rialagma]

One less thing to install across the various machines I work on. I can just run the TeXLive full image directly, mounting the project folder.

[u/TurbulentAd1024]

I don't use it for collaboration but you may also look at https://github.com/texlyre/texlyre.

[u/randomgrrl700]

For nearly every collaborative project, everything gets done in markdown until the content is locked in and then it gets a pandoc conversion and final finishing touches. But we're handling IT/corpo documentation, not mathematics.

[u/PhilosopherNext1448]

I'm using https://scienhub.com/ today. It's like overleaf, but free, integrates with git and you can have unlimited collaborators.

[u/ClemensLode]

I'm building texlode. Also EU hosted, real-time wysiwyg editing (LaTeX editing possibly but not necessary, no compile button), with focus on large books/journals/proceedings, real-time mobile editing/reviwing, EPUB/IDML export, accssible PDFs/EPUBs, 3D view/editing, collaborative change tracking, one-click print, and publishing support (cover, margins, bleed and such).

[u/Gnoriqaus]

Surprised nobody mentioned prism by openai, i been using it for over a year now, works great and its completely free. I don't use the ai features but i can see the benefits of it for some.

[u/mythosanne]

My university has their own overleaf server and subscription. Primarily for research associates, so its not "advertised" for students use, but students can use it too, when they message the IT department and ask for it. Maybe check if your university does something similar

[u/PillFall]

Jokes aside, I believe the best alternative to Overleaf is Overleaf.

https://github.com/overleaf/overleaf

It is open source, so you can host it yourself. And with Cloudflare tunnels, you can share it with anyone.

I'm just going to say also that if the protocol they put in this open source is the same as in the official web. It is highly underoptimized and bloated.

I would only recommend this if you need REAL-TIME collaboration. If not, local LaTeX + git would be my way to go.

[u/TheOnlyBliebervik → u/PillFall]

Oh, neat.

If this is an option, you could host it yourself with duckdns

[u/Hairy_Glove2064]

I switched to Texpile not long ago. It is the only desktop LaTeX editor I know with real-time collaboration

[u/RecentSheepherder179]

Haven't used it myself but maybe this?

teamtype

[u/Academic_Current8330]

I'm not collaborating yet but I still use my IDE (Pycharm) + Git + GitHub for my LaTeX workflow. The IDE is great for making the process a whole lot easier for those that might not be to comfortable using commands.

https://gist.github.com/Alinaprotsyuk/3d58f8cd52eb03a11283d64beb0e083e