Overleaf Reviews 25

Helped me a lot with writing a degree. Best customer service, other companies could learn from them.

Each error has a code and you need ai to understand the error. The communication of errors is so bad you need ai to INTERPRET the error codes.

This could be a great product but everything around it is bad. The only good thing about overleaf is Latex..! sadly.

Example: Missing } Inserted. Output.bbl.70
If you click on it, it explains why } is necessary.

Ok, where should you add a } for it to be complete? Somewhere in the document? WTF is output.bbl.70, why add that information if it's useless? GIVE US THE LINE WHERE THE PROBLEM IS!

Use ai to correct it and cross fingers it's right. This is so stupid.

Instead, give me the line in the code where you find this error. Give me the corresponding { for which one } is missing.

But no, Overleaf: You might have a problem with a missing } somewhere in the document. Use ai to guess if you need one or not, cross fingers. You might not have a problem, we don't know, but here's 17 warnings with the same message. P.S.: Please pay for this service..!

Instead of assistance for bugs, Overleaf is asking users to pay for misinformation and hindering the work. Great business model.

So, here is the review I tried to leave in response to an email from the company. However, because I rated them one star, the review didn't submit. So, I guess instead I'll leave my extremely negative review here, in this public forum. Summary - predatory business practices that try to manipulate you - for example rejecting 1 star reviews, insisting on keeping your card details even if your company policy doesn't permit this. Sugary - sweet to the point of sickly sales/pr outfit. FACT - this service is a convenience platform for FREE SOFTWARE. I need them this year, so I'm eating all of this up. Next year, eat my dust overleaf. And, in the meantime, this review should tell you everything you need to know :-)

Not well. Your company has a deliberate policy of refusing to issue quotes and honour POs for orders of less than 5 licenses. This cost me a week of bureaucracy, and it still isn't over because after I persuaded my organisation to allow me to make a card purchase against its usual policy, your firm is by default giving me a 'membership' which is code for keeping my card details so it can automatically charge me next year. So, I still need to interact further with your company to get my card details removed. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. By next year I will have (a) found an alternative service; and (b) spent the whole year telling my friends and contacts in the science world about your practices, and why they shouldn't use your service either.

Excellent latex code editor loved it

Have to pay for an AI to help fix problems that are way too complicated to use ones time on. I regret all the time i've spend on learning this program. A complete waste of my time

Overleaf, since a few days, totally lost its value.

Does refuses to compile, and most importantly: it does not give fix suggestions anymore! That makes the program worthless. It was the most useful feature, and now it is abolished. Very disappointing

It has been a great service for long time, but sadly now it is quite useless.
All my projects now take too long to compile and most of them are not compiled at all. I can not work like this.
I had to download everything and use texmaker locally, to work decently.
Great GUI but if it is not anymore functional, it became useless.

Overleaf used to be decent. Free accounts could at least handle small projects. Now, even a few pages and a single longtable over two pages won’t compile. The “collaboration” features are weak, and compiling locally is infinitely faster and more reliable. Their business model is textbook bait-and-switch: make it cheap and useful, then strip features and push subscriptions. Overleaf offers nothing you can’t do better with local LaTeX, PDF annotations and/or GitHub. Don’t use it, don’t endorse it.

Be careful, they like to make automatic payments. They charged me twice this month, the worst part you will not get your money back.

Useful

Waste of time

Ive been wasting 1000 hours+

Unreachable account out of nowhere, with nonexistent customer support. If you like people who can't even send you a "reset your password" email and lose all of your work, their service was made for you!

Always used Overleaf a lot. I can recommend.

Overleaf forced me to change password before I could login.
My password has 10 alphanumerical characters.
Sure, it is not the strongest password but I feel like I should be in control of that.
I understand, that forcing more secure passwords will reduce costs when it comes to account recovery. However, I pay for this product, shouldn't I decide?

It was very good a couple of years ago before it become popular. But DO NOT USE IT ANYMORE. It crashes too many times even when your document has no errors. And now it ask to go premium.

It's a very nice LaTeX editor, and it works a lot more transparently than most others. Beware, though, that since it's online, you are fully dependent on Overleaf to be up and running. It usually is, of course, but I've had a LOT of 'sorry, could not compile due to server error, try again later'---which is basically like saying 'woopsie, the 500 page dissertation you spent 4 years on does not exist for now'. Other than that, I'm a very satisfied customer, and the paid account is well worth it.

Excellent! :-) Lifesaver for a CS thesis writer!