--- title: "SumizAI vs Sharly" url: "https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-sharly.html" date: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" modified: "2026-08-14T00:00:00+02:00" description: "Looking for a Sharly alternative? SumizAI and Sharly side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does." tags: ["ai notes", "sumizai", "sharly", "alternative to Sharly"] --- # SumizAI vs Sharly Looking for a Sharly alternative? SumizAI and Sharly side by side: price, licence, platforms and what each one actually does. ## What Sharly is Sharly is an AI tool that lets users chat with any source of information — a single document, a whole collection of files, or a set of research materials — instead of reading them line by line. Rather than manually searching a long report for one piece of information, the user simply asks, and Sharly pulls the answer directly from the source, translating complex content into accessible, easy-to-understand language. Key features: Chatting with any type of document covers PDFs, spreadsheets, presentations, and other common formats, so the user doesn't have to manually copy text fragments to ask a question about their content. Working across entire collections of files allows questions spanning multiple documents at once, particularly useful when analyzing extensive project documentation or reports split across many files. Turning complex information into accessible "friendly stories" is Sharly's central marketing pitch — the tool aims not just to summarize but to translate complicated jargon into language a layperson can follow. A conversational interface makes the process feel like talking to an expert who knows the document by heart, instead of laboriously searching through its content. Who it's for: Sharly appeals to people who regularly work with extensive documentation — lawyers reviewing contracts, business analysts reading financial reports, students working through academic papers, or managers handed hundreds of pages of documentation before a major decision. People who don't have time to read every document cover to cover but need to quickly pull out specific information find Sharly a practical solution. Use cases: In practice, Sharly works well when a lawyer needs to quickly check a specific term in a multi-page contract instead of manually searching through it clause by clause. An analyst receiving a competitor's quarterly financial report can ask directly about key metrics instead of reading the whole document. A student writing a thesis uploads a dozen academic papers and asks about shared conclusions and discrepancies between the studies. A project team analyzing a vendor's technical documentation can quickly find an answer scattered across multiple specification files. Pricing and business model: Sharly offers a free personal plan letting users try the core features at no cost, with expanded capabilities available in paid plans for heavier users and teams. That freemium model lets new users judge the tool's real value on their own documents before committing to a paid subscription with higher upload limits or query counts. Limitations and what to watch for: Sharly's answer quality depends on the quality and clarity of the uploaded document — scanned, low-quality PDFs or documents with unusual formatting can lead to worse, less precise answers. Like any tool built on a language model, Sharly can sometimes misinterpret an ambiguous piece of text, so critical findings — legal or financial ones especially — are always worth verifying directly against the source. The free personal plan likely has limits on the number or size of uploaded documents, worth checking before relying on the tool for large projects. AI notes from document conversations: Sharly is great at pulling information out of documents during a conversation, but it offers no built-in way to gather those answers into a separate, organized collection of notes outside the chat session tied to a given file. A user wanting to keep a valuable answer as a ai notes entry for use in another context has to manually copy it from the conversation window and paste it into a separate notebook, losing the direct link to the source document unless they recreate it themselves. From jargon to plain language: Many professional documents — legal contracts, financial reports, technical specifications — are written in industry jargon that's unclear to people outside that field. Sharly tries to bridge that gap, translating complicated wording into simpler language without losing the substance, which is especially valuable for people making decisions based on documents outside their main area of expertise, such as a manager without legal training reading an office lease. Scaling with collection size: As the number of uploaded documents grows, Sharly's usefulness grows with it — the tool starts spotting connections between files that a single document wouldn't reveal. That makes Sharly especially useful for large, scattered sets of documentation, where manually searching each file separately would be impractical, and ai notes pulled from such an analysis become a valuable shortcut to the key conclusions without needing to review the whole collection again. Conversation as a search interface: Classic text search in a document (Ctrl+F) requires knowing the exact word or phrase being searched for. Sharly lets users ask in their own words, describing what they're looking for rather than guessing the exact phrasing used in the document — a fundamental shift in how content gets searched, especially valuable for documents written by someone else, where the reader doesn't know in advance what terminology the author used. What's worth checking before choosing: Before relying on Sharly for confidential document work, check the privacy policy around storage of uploaded files and whether the data is used for further model training, especially if the documents contain customer data or trade secrets. Bottom line: Sharly is a practical tool for conversing with documents, useful anywhere a specific piece of information needs to be pulled quickly out of extensive material. Anyone who wants valuable answers from such conversations to automatically become ai notes saved as lasting files should consider a tool built specifically around that workflow, instead of manual copying. Comparison with SumizAI: Sharly and SumizAI address different needs around working with AI. Sharly focuses on extracting information from existing documents — a tool for analyzing what you already have. SumizAI focuses on preserving what emerges during a conversation with an AI model — it turns valuable answers into ai notes saved as Markdown files in a vault the user owns. Anyone who needs to quickly analyze a stack of documents will pick Sharly; anyone who wants ai notes from AI conversations (including ones generated while analyzing documents in other tools) to land in one organized archive will appreciate SumizAI as a complement. **Key facts** - Price: Free - License: Proprietary ## What SumizAI is A note-taking application built around a conversation with an AI model. You ask a question, the answer streams back, and the answers worth keeping become Markdown notes — filed into a vault that is a folder on your own disk. A vault is a directory holding `base.md`, a generated table of contents up to six levels deep, and a `notes/` folder with one `.md` file per note. Before a note is written it is checked against the ones already there, so the fourth note about the same idea gets merged instead of added. Links between notes are ordinary Markdown links to files that exist. The model is never ours: you bring your own API key to one of seven providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, Groq, OpenRouter, a local Ollama or your own server — and pay that provider directly. A question sends the table of contents plus at most five relevant notes within a 24,000-character budget, and the app shows you which five it used. ## Where they differ - Sharly is a place to have the conversation. SumizAI is not a chatbot — the conversation is the input, not the product. What comes out of it is a `.md` file with a title, a place in `base.md` and a duplicate check against the notes already in the vault. If you only want to talk to a model, you do not need SumizAI. - Sharly is free and SumizAI costs a dollar a month after a seven-day trial that takes no card. A dollar is what it costs to run accounts and licences without reselling the model; if free is the requirement, Sharly wins that row outright. - AlternativeTo's description of Sharly does not mention Markdown, so check what format your notes end up in before you fill it up. SumizAI writes standard `.md` files to a folder you picked, and an unpaid account can still export all of them. - Sharly runs in the browser. SumizAI is a desktop and mobile application, and on the desktop the vault is a folder on your own disk rather than a document in someone's cloud. Full side-by-side comparison table and pricing: [https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-sharly.html](https://sumizai.com/alternative-to/sumizai-alternative-to-sharly.html)