Dear Suzanne,
I hope you and the team had a great start to the New Year!
I am writing to check if the 2026 roadmap has been updated, particularly regarding the implementation of a full dark mode for the desktop version. While I appreciate Paperpile’s stability, I am becoming increasingly concerned by the slow pace of feature development.
Reference management offerings are evolving rapidly, with many platforms now offering sophisticated AI integration for paper summarisation and chat to pdf, interactive mind maps, modernised, highly responsive and customisable user interfaces, and seamless, high-speed synchronisationn across mobile and desktop environments. As a researcher, these advancements are no longer just “extras” but are becoming central to an efficient workflow.
Could you let us know if there is an estimated timeline for these upcoming features? I would prefer to keep my workflow within Paperpile as I care about this platform, but the growing gap in feature parity is making it difficult to remain competitive.
Thanks for being a Paperpile customer! I appreciate your vested interest in Paperpile’s continued product development. We relentlessly invest in improving the product in big and small ways.
I’m happy to share some rough outlines of our 2026 roadmap and priorities. With the caveat that, as always with the future, things are subject to change
Our top priority is to keep Paperpile fast, effective and easy to use across the entire product surface area: the web app, Google Docs integration, Word integration, browser extensions, and Android and iOS mobile apps. As you mention, users rightfully expect a lot from their software these days, and our competition isn’t standing still.
In the first half of this year we are focused on rebuilding the backend and UI supporting Paperpile’s citation plugins, enabling a much-improved experience for Google Docs and Word plugin users. This includes a ground-up overhaul of the user experience to be faster and to address many, many feature gaps we’ve identified over the years. (While full dark mode may not ship immediately when these features become available for beta testing, the work we’re doing now is squarely on the path toward making dark mode supported across our entire product surface. So rest assured we’re not sleeping on that.)
We are also actively building out a more fully-featured mobile app with improved stability, support for collaborative features, and an improved user experience on both mobile platforms. This is already taking shape and I’m excited to make Paperpile a clear best-in-class experience on mobile.
There’s a thread of ongoing investment in platform compatibility across the board: achieving beta and general availability (GA) status for Safari, Firefox and Edge support; supporting OneDrive sync and Microsoft SSO; expanding integrations with complementary websites used by scientists.
Finally, a small but forward-looking investment in AI-powered features and integrations. We already added support for saving search results in Google Scholar Labs, and a first integration with ChatGPT and Gemini is coming soon. What’s possible in this space is obviously changing every day, and we continued to evaluate where and when to strategically build features.
That’s all in addition to the ongoing work to make Paperpile “just work” for everyone: continually improving our PDF crawling, metadata extraction, and publication database and search engine; keeping up with changes to publisher websites and browser APIs over time; and supporting the needs of a growing number of institutional subscribers.
Disagree with any of our priorities above? Have examples of where competitors are out-performing Paperpile? I always love to hear concrete feedback and ideas from customers and users! Feel free to email me greg@paperpile.com, or book a 30-min Zoom chat.
