ShareLaTeX is Joining Overleaf

We are pleased to announce that our portfolio Overleaf has joined forces with ShareLaTeX.They will be bringing their teams and services together as they continue to build the world’s best tools for collaborative writing.

Over the past 4 years, both ShareLaTeX and Overleaf have been hugely successful — seeing rapid, sustained growth in usage. Their combined community comprises over two million authors at thousands of institutions and enterprises around the world, ranging from students writing up their first group projects to professional researchers collaborating on their papers, grant proposals and more. Naturally, they’ve always been compared and provided each other with some friendly competition, but behind the scenes, they’ve often been trying to figure out a way to work together.

The driving aim behind Overleaf’s acquisition of ShareLaTeX is to bring the best of both editors together in a way that benefits everyone. The ShareLaTeX team has done a fantastic job of building a truly real-time collaborative editing environment, including a great new tracked changes feature, intelligent help for common LaTeX errors, and amazing resources for learning LaTeX. The Overleaf team has at the same time been busy working on its WYSIWYG editing tools for users new to LaTeX and its partnerships with journals, publishers and publisher back-end systems that enable direct submission and streamlined editorial workflows for over 10,000 journals. By working together, they can avoid duplicating their efforts as they look to achieve the same goals.

ShareLaTeX founders Henry Oswald and James Allen said:

“When we first started ShareLaTeX we had no idea how many people wanted to use an online LaTeX editor, and we never expected how popular it has become. We are so grateful to all the support and feedback from our users – it is a wonderful experience building a tool which people really love. After years of conversations, we can’t wait to work with Overleaf. Working with them will allow us to draw on their experience, and share ours, to work towards an even better collaborative LaTeX editor.”

Overleaf founders John Hammersley and John Lees-Miller said:

“We’d like to take a moment to say thanks to all of our users, advisers, librarians, publishing partners and friends in the LaTeX community who have helped Overleaf and ShareLaTeX get to where we are today. We are excited to finally be working together with the ShareLaTeX team to continue building great tools to make scientific and scholarly writing easier, more efficient and more open.”

You can read more details and find answers about this acquisition at the Overleaf blog announcement, or please contact john@overleaf.com with any questions.