Overleaf Alternatives in 2026: 9 LaTeX Editors Compared

Most people who go looking for an Overleaf alternative are not looking for a new hobby. They hit something specific: a compile that dies after ten seconds, a Git button that turns out to be paid, a procurement form asking where the data lives, or a price that went up again. This is a comparison of the nine options worth knowing in 2026, written by a company that makes one of them. We have tried to be straight about where the others win, because you will find out anyway.

The short answer

For most people moving off Overleaf, inscrive.io is the closest replacement: it runs the same LaTeX engine, keeps real-time collaboration free for unlimited co-authors, and hosts everything in the EU under a signed DPA. If you can leave LaTeX behind entirely, Typst is faster and cheaper at $7.99 a month. If you want to own the stack, self-hosted Overleaf Community Edition is free and open source. If you never want to depend on a server again, TeXstudio or VS Code with LaTeX Workshop compile locally for nothing.

That is the whole answer. The rest of this article is the evidence.

The four things people actually complain about

1. The free tier stops compiling after ten seconds

This is the one that pushes most people out. Overleaf’s own plan limits documentation puts the free-tier compile timeout at 10 seconds and the premium timeout at 240 seconds. That is a 24x gap, and it is not a soft limit you can nudge. A thesis with a few hundred pages, a bibliography, TikZ figures and a first-run index does not finish in ten seconds. It does not finish in twenty.

What makes this frustrating rather than merely limiting is the timing. The free tier works beautifully while you are writing a two-page assignment, and stops working in the month before submission, which is exactly when you have no appetite for migrating anything.

2. Git and GitHub sync are premium only

The same documentation lists integrations with Git and GitHub among the features that premium plans “provide”. Not the free plan. If you want your document under version control alongside your code, or you want a CI job to build the PDF, that is a paid feature on Overleaf.

There is a second, smaller catch even after you pay: the integration is built around GitHub. If your lab runs GitLab, or your university runs its own instance, the story gets more manual than the marketing suggests.

3. Uptime, and two very long days in July

Overleaf publishes its own numbers, which is more than most tools do. status.overleaf.com currently shows 98.64% uptime for overleaf.com across the recent reporting window. That figure sounds high until you convert it. 98.64% is roughly five hours of downtime a month, or about two and a half days a year.

The distribution matters more than the average. Overleaf’s status history records an outage of 10 hours 8 minutes on 1 July 2026, followed by 12 hours 21 minutes on 2 July 2026. Two working days, back to back, in the middle of a summer submission season. If your only copy of a paper lives in a browser tab, that is not an inconvenience, it is a deadline problem.

Every hosted service has bad days, ours included. The lesson is not that Overleaf is uniquely fragile. It is that a cloud-only workflow with no local copy and no Git remote leaves you with nothing to fall back on, which is an argument for choosing a tool that syncs to Git on the free plan.

Keeping a fallback ready, before you need one

The practical answer to an outage is set up in advance, not during it. It takes about fifteen minutes, once.

When an editor does stop responding, work the problem in order. Load the status page first, and try the editor on your phone over mobile data. If it works there but not on your laptop, your office network or VPN is the culprit rather than the vendor, and two minutes here saves you chasing the wrong fix. Then find your most recent copy. If the project is connected to a Git remote, your last push is sitting safely in your own provider and you can keep editing locally with any text editor and a local TeX install. Without a remote, you are relying on whatever ZIP you last downloaded, which is usually older than you would like.

So the setup is: create a free account on a second editor, connect Git to a provider both editors can reach, import a copy of your current project, and run one compile so you know the build works before you need it under pressure. Provider-agnostic Git matters more than it sounds here, because if your institution runs its own GitLab, that becomes the neutral ground both editors sync against rather than forcing everything through GitHub.

Outages are worse when you are not the only one affected. If three co-authors are mid-revision when the shared editor goes dark, everyone stalls at once and whoever holds the newest local copy becomes the bottleneck. Git as the shared source of truth fixes that: when the editor returns, or when the team moves to the backup, everyone reconverges on the same repository instead of emailing ZIPs around. A fallback with unlimited collaborators on the free tier means the whole team can move into it, rather than one person rebuilding the document alone.

4. The price

Overleaf’s current individual pricing, straight from its plans page:

Twenty-five dollars a month is a real line item for a postdoc, and $45 is a strange number to pay for a text editor when the compiler underneath it is free software. For a ten-person research group on Standard, you are looking at roughly $2,400 a year, since these are per-user prices.

The comparison table

Compile limits are the published figures from each vendor. Where a vendor publishes no number, the table says so instead of guessing.

Sources: Overleaf plan limits and pricing page, Typst pricing, Papeeria compiler docs, TeXPage pricing, Overleaf on GitHub.

The nine options, one at a time

Overleaf: still the default, and still good at some things

Worth saying clearly, because a comparison that pretends the incumbent is bad is not a comparison. Overleaf’s template gallery is the largest in the world and many journals link to their class files there directly. The learn-by-doing documentation is genuinely excellent and is used as a LaTeX reference by people who do not even use the editor. Institutional licences are widespread, so your university may already have paid. And Digital Science holds ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification, so the security posture is not the problem.

Stay if: a journal template only exists there, your institution has a licence, or your collaborators refuse to move. Those are legitimate reasons and they beat every argument below.

inscrive.io: the EU-hosted like-for-like replacement

This is us, so read the rest of this page for the counter-arguments. What we do is a real-time collaborative LaTeX editor with the same TeX engine underneath, which means your existing source compiles without edits.

• Free, €0. Ten active projects, unlimited collaborators on every project, 60 second compile budget, Git with any provider, templates, PDF export, Zotero and Mendeley sync, version history. No card.
• Pro, €7/month, or €5.83/month billed annually at €70/year. Unlimited projects, 480 second compile budget, AI suggestions for compile errors, priority support.
• Organizations, custom. SSO, central user management, template access control, a signed DPA, procurement-friendly invoicing.

The numbers worth comparing: our free 60 seconds is six times Overleaf’s free 10 seconds, and our Pro 480 seconds is double Overleaf’s premium 240. Git is on the free plan and works with GitHub, GitLab, self-hosted instances, anything with a token. The Zotero and Mendeley connection is a live .bib that stays in sync rather than a one-time import, which is a small thing until you have re-exported a bibliography for the fourth time.

Where we lose: our template gallery is a fraction of Overleaf’s, we are a smaller company, and if you want the absolute longest compile budget for the money, TeXPage’s $21 Ultimate tier gives you 600 seconds against our 480.

Typst: the one that is genuinely cheaper than us

Here is the honest version of our competitive position. Typst Pro is $7.99 a month. We are €7 a month. Those are the same price. Typst is not a tool we beat on cost, and any comparison table that implies otherwise is doing you a disservice. Their free tier is also strong: 200MB of storage, up to 100 files per project, collaboration, community packages and compiler error assistance, at zero.

Typst is also, by design, faster. It is not LaTeX. It is a new typesetting language with a modern compiler, and compiles that take a minute in LaTeX often take under a second in Typst. Typst GmbH is registered in Berlin, so it is a European company, and they offer an On-Premises tier for organisations that need data isolation.

So what is the actual difference?

Full LaTeX compatibility. If you have a thesis, a co-author’s chapter, a journal class file, a supervisor’s macros, or a decade of accumulated .tex, Typst does not run it. There are converters, and they get you most of the way, and “most of the way” on a 200-page document is a week of your life. Every LaTeX package on CTAN, every Beamer theme, every arcane \usepackage your field depends on, works with us and does not with Typst.

Published EU data residency. We host with Hetzner in Germany and Finland, in ISO 27001 certified facilities, with no third-country transfers, a signed DPA and an independent inspection report. Typst’s public legal pages do not publish an equivalent residency commitment for the hosted app, though their On-Premises tier lets you supply your own answer.

Those two things are the entire case. If you are starting a fresh document, have no legacy LaTeX, and no procurement requirement, Typst is an excellent choice and you should try it before you try us.

Papeeria: minimal and cheap

Clean, quick, unfussy. The free tier gives a 60 second compile, matching ours, but allows only one active private project. Paid plans start at $5 a month and lift the timeout to 120 seconds, extendable on request per their docs. Git is included. There is a plot builder, which is a nice touch nobody else has.

Best for solo writers with short documents. The 120 second paid ceiling is the constraint: it is above Overleaf’s free tier and well below what a large thesis needs.

TeXPage: the best raw compile time per dollar

TeXPage publishes unusually specific numbers on its pricing page: free gives 30 seconds and one collaborator, $5 Standard and $12 Professional give 300 seconds, and $21 Ultimate gives 600 seconds. That $21 tier has the longest published compile budget of any tool here, ours included.

If compile seconds are the only axis you care about, TeXPage Ultimate wins outright and we will not pretend otherwise. What it does not publish is EU data residency, a signed DPA, or live reference-manager sync.

Crixet: the new AI-first one

Crixet is a free, modern LaTeX editor that launched in 2025, built around an AI assistant that writes equations and debugs compile errors, with Zotero sync and drag-and-drop asset handling. It is fast, it is free, and it is pleasant to use.

It is also young. At the time of writing there is no published compile timeout, no published pricing beyond free, and no public DPA or data-residency statement. For a personal side project that is fine. For a thesis you cannot afford to lose, or a department rollout that has to pass a data protection review, “no published answer” is itself the answer. Worth watching.

Self-hosted Overleaf Community Edition: the open source Overleaf alternative

Overleaf’s server code is on GitHub under AGPL-3.0. You can run it yourself, on your own hardware, in your own country, for the cost of the hardware. For a university IT department that already runs infrastructure, this is a serious option and the most complete answer to “who controls my data”.

Two things to know before you commit.

Server Pro holds the features you may assume are included. Tracked changes, SSO with LDAP or SAML, and Sandboxed Compiles are commercial features, not Community Edition ones.

Community Edition has a real security caveat, stated by Overleaf. The project documentation warns that Community Edition “is not appropriate for scenarios where isolation of users is required” because Sandboxed Compiles are unavailable, and that without them, users “have full read and write access to the sharelatex container resources (filesystem, network, environment variables) when running LaTeX compiles”. In plain terms: any user who can compile a document can run arbitrary code inside your container. That is acceptable for a trusted lab group. It is not acceptable for an open campus deployment, and it means the free self-hosted route quietly requires either a Server Pro licence or serious isolation work of your own.

TeXstudio: the offline LaTeX editor most people end up with

If you want an offline LaTeX editor like Overleaf but without the server, TeXstudio is the usual answer. It is free, open source, cross-platform, and mature. Integrated PDF viewer, syntax highlighting, autocompletion, a built-in reference and citation assistant, and a structure view. Pair it with a local TeX Live or MiKTeX install and you have no timeout, no subscription, no outage, and no data-residency conversation at all, because the data never leaves your laptop.

What you give up is collaboration. There is no real-time co-editing. Sharing means Git, or a shared drive, or email, with all the merge conflicts that implies.

VS Code with LaTeX Workshop: the offline option for people who already live in VS Code

Same trade-off, different ergonomics. LaTeX Workshop gives you build-on-save, a side-by-side PDF preview with SyncTeX jumping between source and output, snippets, and linting, all inside the editor you already have open for everything else. Combined with Git and a local TeX distribution, it is a completely free, entirely local workflow.

Setup is more work than TeXstudio. You install a TeX distribution, install the extension, and usually spend an evening on your build recipe. After that it is excellent. And with the Live Share extension you can get a rough approximation of collaborative editing, though it is not the same as a purpose-built collaborative editor.

The data residency question, precisely

This section matters mostly to European institutions, and it is where a lot of competitor marketing, including some we have written in the past, has been sloppy. So, carefully:

Overleaf is not an American company. It is operated by Digital Science UK Limited, registered in London. Digital Science is part of the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, which is German. Anyone telling you to leave Overleaf because it is American is wrong on the facts, and you should discount the rest of their argument accordingly.

The accurate concern is narrower and, honestly, harder to dismiss:

• Overleaf’s storage runs on Google Cloud Platform, per its own security documentation.
• Its privacy notice states that data “may be transferred to the USA, as well as to other locations where our affiliates and service providers are based.” It relies on adequacy decisions and standard contractual clauses rather than on keeping data inside the EEA.
• There is no EU data residency guarantee in the published terms for the standard hosted product.
• Users with billing addresses in the United States, Canada or South Africa are served by its US affiliate, Digital Science & Research Solutions Inc., based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
• The US CLOUD Act reaches US-headquartered cloud providers regardless of which region the data sits in. This is the part people get backwards: it is not the nationality of the software vendor that pulls the CLOUD Act into scope, it is the nationality of the infrastructure provider holding the bytes. A German company on US-owned cloud is still exposed. So is a British one.

That is the real argument, and it does not require calling anyone American.

Our answer is structural rather than contractual. Everything runs on Hetzner, a German company, in data centres in Germany and Finland, certified to ISO 27001. There are no third-country transfers to analyse, because there are no third-country transfers. You get a signed DPA and an independent inspection report, and we never train AI models on your documents. If your DPO asks where the data is, the answer fits in one sentence and does not involve standard contractual clauses. We go into more detail in our GDPR and data protection article, and the primary sources are the GDPR text and the EDPB guidelines.

For self-hosted Community Edition, the residency answer is whatever you make it, which is the strongest position of all if you have the operations team to back it.

Moving off Overleaf takes about fifteen minutes

The migration is easier than the decision. Standard LaTeX is portable by design.

1. In Overleaf, open the project menu and download the source as a ZIP.
2. Import the ZIP into the new editor. Most of the tools here, including ours, Crixet and TeXPage, accept a ZIP or a folder directly.
3. Compile once, immediately, before you change anything. This surfaces any missing package or custom class while you still have the original open in another tab.
4. Re-invite your co-authors by email.
5. Reconnect Git and relink Zotero or Mendeley.

The only step that ever causes trouble is step three, and the usual culprit is an unusual journal class file or a package pinned to a specific version. Catch it on day one, not on submission day. We wrote a longer walkthrough in migrating from Overleaf.

So which one should you pick

• You want the same LaTeX, in the EU, with collaboration that does not cost per seat: inscrive.io.
• You are starting fresh, have no legacy .tex, and want speed: Typst. It is the same price as us and genuinely faster.
• Your university IT department wants total control and has the staff: self-hosted Overleaf Community Edition, with a clear-eyed plan for the sandboxing problem.
• You want an offline LaTeX editor and never think about servers again: TeXstudio, or VS Code with LaTeX Workshop if you already live there.
• You want the longest compile budget per dollar and nothing else matters: TeXPage Ultimate.
• You write short documents alone and want to spend $5: Papeeria.
• You want AI-first and do not mind an early-stage tool: Crixet.
• A journal template only exists on Overleaf, or your institution already pays: stay on Overleaf. Genuinely.

The field is better than it was three years ago. The reasons people used to tolerate a ten second timeout, a GitHub-only Git button, and an unanswerable question from their DPO now all have answers, and several of those answers are free.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best Overleaf alternative?

For most people migrating existing LaTeX work, inscrive.io is the closest replacement, because it runs the same LaTeX engine, includes real-time collaboration with unlimited co-authors on the free plan, and hosts all data in the EU under a signed DPA. Typst is the best choice for new documents where LaTeX compatibility is not required, and TeXstudio is the best free offline option.

Is there a free Overleaf alternative?

Yes, several. TeXstudio and VS Code with LaTeX Workshop are free and open source and run entirely on your own machine. Overleaf Community Edition is free under AGPL-3.0 if you self-host it. Among hosted editors, inscrive.io, Typst, Papeeria, TeXPage and Crixet all have free tiers, and inscrive.io’s free tier includes a 60 second compile budget and unlimited collaborators.

What is the best offline LaTeX editor like Overleaf?

TeXstudio is the most common answer: free, open source, cross-platform, with an integrated PDF viewer, autocompletion and a citation assistant. VS Code with the LaTeX Workshop extension is the better fit if you already work in VS Code, offering build-on-save and SyncTeX preview. Both need a local TeX distribution such as TeX Live or MiKTeX, and neither offers real-time collaboration.

Is there an open source Overleaf alternative?

Yes. Overleaf itself publishes its server code as Community Edition under AGPL-3.0, so you can self-host it for free. Be aware that tracked changes, SSO and Sandboxed Compiles are commercial Server Pro features, and that Overleaf warns Community Edition is not appropriate where user isolation is required. TeXstudio, Texmaker and LyX are open source desktop editors.

Why does my Overleaf project time out?

Overleaf’s free plan enforces a 10 second compile timeout, against 240 seconds on premium plans, according to Overleaf’s own plan limits documentation. Long documents, large bibliographies, TikZ figures and first compilation runs routinely exceed 10 seconds. Alternatives with longer free budgets include inscrive.io and Papeeria at 60 seconds, or any local editor, which has no timeout at all.

Can I use Git with Overleaf on the free plan?

No. Overleaf’s documentation lists Git and GitHub integration among the features provided by premium plans, so version control requires a paid subscription starting at $13 a month. inscrive.io, Papeeria and TeXPage include Git on their free tiers, and inscrive.io works with any Git provider rather than GitHub only.

Which Overleaf alternative keeps data in the EU?

inscrive.io hosts exclusively in the EU, with Hetzner in Germany and Finland, in ISO 27001 certified data centres, with a signed DPA, an independent inspection report and no third-country transfers. Self-hosting Overleaf Community Edition on EU infrastructure also works. Overleaf itself stores data on Google Cloud Platform and its privacy notice permits transfers to the USA, with no EU residency guarantee.

Can I move my Overleaf projects to another editor?

Yes, and it usually takes minutes. Download the project as a ZIP from Overleaf’s project menu, then import it into the new editor. Standard LaTeX source is portable, so most documents compile without changes. Compile once immediately after importing to catch any missing package or custom journal class while you still have the original available.

Sources

• Overleaf plan limits, for the 10 second and 240 second compile timeouts and the premium-only Git integration
• Overleaf status page, for the published uptime figure and outage history
• Overleaf legal and privacy pages, for hosting, corporate entities and international transfers
• Overleaf on GitHub, for the AGPL-3.0 licence and the Community Edition sandboxing warning
• Typst pricing and Typst legal
• Papeeria compiler documentation and TeXPage pricing
• GDPR text and European Data Protection Board

Prices and limits were checked against each vendor’s own published pages in August 2026. Vendors change these without notice, so verify anything you are about to base a purchase on. If you spot something out of date here, tell us and we will fix it.