Humata

Humata is a question-and-answer tool for your own documents. Upload PDFs, ask what they say, and get answers with highlighted citations that link back to the exact spot in the source file. The company frames it as "AI meets your knowledge base": a way for a team to get answers out of more material than anyone has time to read. Humata says it raised $3.5M in a round led by Google's Gradient Ventures.

Typical uses from Humata's own site are skimming long technical papers, summarising findings, comparing documents and searching across files. If the first summary is too long, you just ask for a shorter one, as many times as you like. There's also an embed option that puts Humata's document chat on your own web page, so customers can query your docs directly.

Built with teams in mind

Much of the product is about access control. Files live in shared team spaces, and role-based permissions decide who can ask questions of which documents. Humata says files are encrypted at rest as soon as they're uploaded. The higher plans add folder-level and department-level permissions, OCR for scanned files, response personalisation, a SOC 2 certificate and an uptime SLA.

Pricing (checked October 2026)

Humata bills monthly, and every plan includes a monthly allowance of "free pages," meaning pages of uploaded PDFs. Beyond that you pay per page:

• Free: up to 60 pages, basic features.
• Student and Expert plans with bigger allowances (the middle tier lists 500 pages a month for teams of up to three), and extra pages at $0.02 each.
• Team: for up to 10 users, with 5,000 pages a month included and extra pages at $0.01 each.
• Enterprise: custom pricing and limits.

The pricing page's plan cards didn't show every dollar figure clearly in our check, so confirm current rates on humata.ai/pricing. No credit card is needed for the free plan, and you can switch or cancel plans at any time.

Strengths and limits

Strengths: clear citations that make answers easy to verify; permission controls that suit legal, research or consulting teams; an embeddable widget for customer-facing docs.

Limits: 60 free pages is only a few papers; per-page billing means very large archives get expensive; and the most useful security features (OCR, SLA, granular permissions) sit on the top tiers.

Alternatives

ChatPDF is simpler and works without an account. For research papers, Consensus searches published studies, and Claude handles long uploads well in a general-purpose chat.