Last updated: 2026-06-14
Humata AI lets researchers and teams upload PDFs, ask questions in plain English, and get instant cited answers. Free plan available, paid up to $49/month.
Humata AI is an AI ai chatbots by Humata that upload pdfs and documents, ask questions, get cited answers — built for research.
Humata lets you upload documents — PDFs, Word files, presentations — and ask questions about them in plain English. Answers come back with highlighted citations pointing to the exact passage in your file, so you can verify them rather than just trust the output. It runs on GPT-4 and handles unlimited file uploads depending on your plan. The tool is useful when you have dense reports, contracts, or research papers and need to pull specific information fast. It's used by researchers, legal teams, and analysts who would otherwise spend hours reading. Security includes SOC 2 Type II, AES-256 encryption, and role-based access controls. Humata does not use your documents to train its models. Pricing starts free with limited storage, with paid tiers for teams and enterprise. Enterprise plans include SSO, custom security controls, and dedicated infrastructure.
Free tier with 60 pages and 10 questions. Expert plan at $9.99/month includes 500 free pages and $0.02 per additional page. Team plan at $49/month per user includes 5,000 free pages and $0.01 per additional page. Enterprise pricing available upon request.
Humata AI is a document Q&A platform built by Tilda Technologies Inc, a company founded in 2022 and backed by investors including Google's Gradient Ventures and ARK Invest, with a $3.5M seed round. The product lets you upload PDFs and other documents, then ask questions in plain English and get answers with citations pointing back to the exact page and passage in the source file. It runs on a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline with a GPT-4 backend and can process 200+ page documents in seconds. Humata is popular with graduate students, researchers, lawyers, and teams who need to extract answers from long technical or legal PDFs without reading the whole document. It holds SOC 2 Type II compliance and is GDPR compliant, and the company has its source code organized under the Humata-ai GitHub organization.
Humata AI has four tiers. The Free plan costs $0 and includes a 60-page monthly limit with 10 questions, enough for light testing. The Expert plan costs $9.99/month and raises the limit to 500 free pages, with pay-as-you-go overage at $0.02 per page beyond that. The Team plan costs $49/month per user and includes 5,000 free pages, with overage priced at $0.01 per page beyond that, plus collaboration features for sharing documents across a team. Enterprise pricing is custom and requires contacting sales, and typically adds SSO, higher page limits, and dedicated support. Some third-party trackers list slightly different intermediate tiers, such as a Student plan around $1.99/month, so always check Humata's own pricing page for the current numbers before subscribing.
Humata AI's core differentiator is citation-based answers: every response includes a link back to the exact page and section of the source document where the answer came from, which lets you verify the AI's output instead of trusting it blindly. It supports multi-document analysis, so you can upload several PDFs and ask questions that span across all of them at once, useful for literature reviews or comparing contracts. Humata also offers webpage embedding, letting teams add a Humata-powered Q&A widget to their own site for customer-facing documentation. Enterprise-grade security, including SOC 2 Type II compliance and 256-bit encryption, makes it a fit for legal and healthcare teams handling sensitive files. Its main weakness compared to newer tools is the page-based pricing model, which some 2026 reviewers call outdated next to competitors offering unlimited uploads.
Google NotebookLM is completely free with a Google account, supports up to 50 sources per notebook, and adds extras like AI-generated podcast-style audio overviews of your documents, which Humata does not offer. In an April 2026 survey of 50 African researchers and students, 72% rated NotebookLM as the most useful tool for research workflows, reflecting its strong reputation for citation-grounded synthesis across multiple sources. Humata, by contrast, starts at $9.99/month for its Expert tier and focuses more narrowly on single-document and multi-document Q&A with page-level citations, plus team collaboration and webpage embedding that NotebookLM lacks. If budget is the priority and you mainly need cross-source synthesis, NotebookLM is the stronger free option. If you need team sharing, an embeddable Q&A widget, or SOC 2 Type II compliance for client-facing work, Humata is the better fit despite the cost.
Yes, Humata AI has a free plan that allows up to 60 pages of document uploads and 10 questions per month, which is enough to try the citation-based Q&A feature on a short PDF or two. The free tier does not require a credit card to start. However, several 2026 reviews note that 60 pages and 10 answers per month are restrictive for serious or repeated use, especially for students working through full textbooks or researchers handling multiple papers. To get a meaningful upgrade, the Expert plan at $9.99/month raises the limit to 500 free pages with $0.02 per page after that. There is no separate time-limited trial of paid features beyond the free tier itself, so most users decide to upgrade once they hit the 60-page or 10-question ceiling.
Humata AI is best for graduate students, academic researchers, lawyers, and small teams who regularly work with long PDFs, such as research papers, contracts, or technical manuals, and need cited, traceable answers rather than generic summaries. Its SOC 2 Type II compliance and 256-bit encryption also make it a reasonable fit for legal and healthcare professionals handling sensitive client documents. Humata is a weaker choice for people who need to process very large document sets cheaply, since its page-based pricing model has been criticized in 2026 reviews as expensive compared to unlimited-upload competitors. Users with very large or highly technical documents (beyond roughly 200 pages) may also notice accuracy drops, since some reviewers report the tool performs best on documents around 50 to 60 pages. Anyone needing grammar checking or plagiarism detection should look elsewhere, since Humata does not include those features.
Humata AI's defining feature is that every answer comes with a citation linking back to the specific page and passage in the uploaded document, which several 2026 reviewers describe as best-in-class for traceability compared to general-purpose AI chat tools. That said, user reviews are mixed: Humata holds a Trustpilot score in the low 3-out-of-5 range, with complaints centering on answers being inaccurate, incomplete, or irrelevant on complex or highly technical documents, and on the page-consumption billing model. The tool reportedly works most reliably on documents in the 50 to 60 page range and can struggle with extremely long or jargon-heavy files, occasionally misinterpreting niche legal or technical terms. For straightforward documents, the citation system lets you quickly check whether an answer is grounded in the actual text, which is the main reason academic and legal users continue to choose it despite the mixed accuracy reviews.
Humata AI is built around enterprise-grade security, advertising 256-bit encryption for uploaded files and holding SOC 2 Type II compliance, with ISO 27001 listed as planned and GDPR compliance already in place as of 2026. These certifications are generally associated with policies that keep customer data segregated from model training data, which is the standard expectation for SOC 2 Type II and GDPR-compliant document platforms aimed at legal, healthcare, and enterprise customers. If document confidentiality is a hard requirement for your organization, such as for client files under attorney-client privilege or patient records, request Humata's current data processing agreement and SOC 2 report directly from their sales team before uploading sensitive material, since specific contractual terms can change and should be confirmed in writing rather than assumed from marketing pages.