How Plum compares
Plum is a native, keyboard-first reader whose assistant answers on the page, jumping to the passage and highlighting the exact lines it found so you can verify. It processes your PDFs on your Mac and runs on the AI you choose.
| Plum | Chat-with-PDF tools ChatPDF, Humata, SciSpace, AskYourPDF | AI notebooks & assistants NotebookLM, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity | Reference managers Zotero, Mendeley, Papers, EndNote | PDF readers PDF Expert, Skim, Preview, zathura, sioyek | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Built-in AI assistant that highlights only real text you can verify | Full support | Partial | Partial | Partial | – |
| Answers on the page (jumps to the passage, highlights the lines) | Full support | – | – | – | – |
| Native, keyboard-first reading environment | Full support | – | – | Partial | ✓ |
| Semantic search within a paper | Full support | ✓ | ✓ | – | – |
| Bring your own AI (connect your own API key) | Full support | – | – | – | – |
| Processes your PDFs locally on your computer | Full support | – | – | ✓ | ✓ |
Works with your reference manager
Zotero and Mendeley can complement Plum. Keep your library and citations there, and open those same PDFs in Plum to read them without migrating anything.