[Tex/LaTex] Comparison: ShareLaTeX vs Overleaf (formerly WriteLaTeX)

onlineoverleafsharelatex

So far, I didn't have the chance to use either of these services. Before starting, I would like to hear your opinions. What are the advantages and disadvantages? Why should I choose one over the other? I am mainly interested in the technical side, but I would also love to hear comments also regarding the plans and prices.

Best Answer

2020 Edit: Most of this is moot now, since they merged a while ago. In the end, ShareLaTeX won, and took on the catchier Overleaf name.

Overleaf has find and replace, a rich text editor, tags for projects, and a large library of templates (that I haven't used). The free version comes with 1GB of storage, unlimited projects and collaborators, and a basic save and restore history. Paid versions include save to Dropbox, spellcheck (it is disabled in free), autocomplete, version comparing, priority support, access control (otherwise anyone with the link can edit), and full version history.

ShareLaTeX is also good. The free version has a spell checker, autocomplete, and it saves the code to a private Github repo. The paid versions include access to version history, unlimited projects, and sync to Dropbox. The project organization is somewhat worse than Overleaf; ShareLaTeX only has folders. I suggested several improvements that the developers said they would get back too, so project management should be improved in the future. The autocomplete is fuzzy, which means that \beeq matches \begin{equation} which allows for faster completion. It also automatically adds the \end when you do that too. In addition, ShareLaTeX is completely open source; it has a Github repo with all of the code including the LaTeX compiler.

All in all, I believe that ShareLaTeX is better than Overleaf (formerly WriteLaTeX) because of the slightly better feature set.