Overleaf premium features

Your Overleaf account can be upgraded to activate premium features; this is usually through joining or starting a subscription, either individually or as part or a group or institutional license. You can find details of our individual and group subscriptions on our Plans & Pricing page, and a list of subscribing institutions can be found here.

The rest of this article describes Overleaf’s premium features.

Invite more collaborators

You can invite collaborators to your project via the Share menu in your project (with view or edit access). Simply add their email address and an email invitation will be sent to them. You can remove collaborators at any time via the same Share menu. The number of collaborators you can invite depends on your plan.

Free Personal† Student Standard Professional
Number of collaborators 1 1 6 10 unlimited

† The Personal plan is no longer available to new subscribers.

More compile time available

You have more time for compilation (to generate a PDF of your document) before receiving a timeout error message.

Real-time track changes

The track changes mode lets you see exactly what has been changed by your collaborators, and allows you to accept or reject each individual change. The availability of the track changes on your project depends on your plan.

Free Personal† Student Standard Professional
Is track changes available? No No Yes Yes Yes

† The Personal plan is no longer available to new subscribers.

Full document history and versioning

View the entire history of your project with the ability to revert to previous versions of your document from your project history (versus only 24 hours of history availability on a free Overleaf account). No more fear of losing work or making changes you can’t undo.

Advanced reference search

You can search by citation key, and our premium feature allows the added ability to search by author, title, year, or journal.

Reference manager integration

You can link your Mendeley and Zotero accounts to your Overleaf account, allowing you to import your reference library and keep your Overleaf document in sync with the references stored in Mendeley / Zotero.

Dropbox synchronization

You can link your Dropbox account to your Overleaf account, allowing 2-way integration with Dropbox

Git and GitHub integration

You can configure your Overleaf project to synchronize directly with a repository on GitHub, or you can use raw git access. This allows you to work offline and synchronize your files whenever you come back online. You can also use our Overleaf Git Bridge integration, which lets you git clone, push and pull changes between the online Overleaf editor, and your local offline git repository.

Symbol Palette

The Symbol Palette is a convenient tool to quickly insert math symbols into your document. It’s an account level feature, which is explained in more detail below.

Priority Support

Our helpful Support team will prioritise and escalate your support requests where necessary. Please note that we do not provide additional debugging support for users on a premium plan.

Further information

Account and project level features

Please note that certain premium features apply at the project level, like track-changes, compile time, and access to full history, and are based on the project owner’s subscription. So, when invited to collaborate on a project owned by someone with a subscription, users on the free plan can use those features within that project.

In other words, if you have an upgraded account, your fellow collaborators do not need to pay for a subscription in order to use track-changes or access the full history of projects that you share with them.

Other premium features apply at the account level, and are controlled by you, the subscription holder. These are the features that include linking to external services, like Dropbox, GitHub, Git, Mendeley, and Zotero. The majority of these do also confer benefits to those you work with, as described below:

  • Dropbox: A user with a premium subscription can link their account to Dropbox, to enable an automatic two-way sync between Overleaf and their Dropbox. This can be thought of as a 'personal' feature, as it does not allow collaborators to sync locally. For premium users who wish to enable collaborators to sync locally, we recommend the Git or GitHub sync options:
  • GitHub: A user with a premium subscription can link any project they own to a GitHub repo. Once the project is linked, all users in the project can click the button to sync it. So this can be thought of as a 'per project' feature.
  • Git: If the project is owned by a user with a premium subscription, all members of the project can git clone/push/pull to it. If a user has a premium subscription, they can git clone/push/pull to all projects they have access to. This is like a superset of GitHub and Dropbox permission model - it's personal, and per project.
  • Mendeley & Zotero: A user with a premium subscription can link their Mendeley and/or Zotero accounts to their Overleaf account, and import their reference library as a .bib file. Collaborators can cite these references within the project, but only the project owner can resync the imported file.
  • Symbol Palette: A user with a premium subscription always has access to this feature regardless of which project they are working on.

To find out more about how to use these premium features, please see the read more links in the sections above.

What happens to my projects if I downgrade to the Overleaf free plan?

  • You will not lose access to any projects you own.
  • You will be allowed only one collaborator on new and existing projects. If you have more than one collaborator on any of your existing projects, we recommend choosing the collaborator who will keep edit access on each project and move everyone else to view-only before downgrading. If you downgrade first, all collaborators will be moved to view-only permissions, but you’ll still be able to then assign edit access to one of the existing collaborators or invite a new collaborator with edit access.
  • Any existing track changes will remain a part of the project; however, the track changes feature will be unavailable for any additional changes.
  • Any other premium features (faster compiles, premium integrations, full project history, etc.) will no longer be available.

More help

For further reading on how to get the most out of Overleaf, we also provide an extensive online knowledge base. This includes a wide range of platform guidance, LaTeX tutorials, technical articles, and webinars:

Overleaf guides

LaTeX Basics

Mathematics

Figures and tables

References and Citations

Languages

Document structure

Formatting

Fonts

Presentations

Commands

Field specific

Class files

Advanced TeX/LaTeX