Authorea vs Overleaf

Authorea and Overleaf both land on Depends.

Authorea

Depends

Confidence: Medium

A fit if you are a researcher wanting free collaborative writing plus a citable open preprint.

Depends

Confidence: High

Buy it if you or your team writes in LaTeX and collaborates . it is the category default with 30M+ users and university backing.

Authorea versus Overleaf
Compare	Authorea	Overleaf
Verdict	Depends	Depends
Best for	Academic researchers co-writing manuscripts	Academic paper co-authoring
Who it's not for	Business or marketing teams . academic-only tooling	Writers who don't need LaTeX markup
Privacy	No known public vulnerabilities found in the sources reviewed.¹¹	FedRAMP-authorized for government use; two moderate CVEs disclosed Sept 2024; open-source with public advisories.
Support quality	No support evidence in sources.	No reliable support-rating evidence in sources
Public sentiment	Reddit and forum threads show researchers using it for preprints and collaborative writing, with mixed opinions and frequent comparisons to Overleaf.^⁶	Users broadly treat Overleaf as the standard for collaborative LaTeX but gripe about free-tier limits, recent product changes, and whether Pro is worth paying for.
Biggest gotcha	Publishing creates a public DOI preprint; check your target journal's preprint policy first.^⁵	Free plan limits (collaborators, compile time, storage) are the main upsell trigger . check before committing.