Overleaf and ShareLaTeX join forces to create community of two million

Two popular online collaborative LaTeX editors, Overleaf and ShareLaTeX, have announced that they are joining forces to create a combined community of some two million authors. The two organisations will be bringing their teams and services together and working collaboratively.

Over the past four years, both ShareLaTeX and Overleaf have seen rapid, sustained growth in usage, with a community comprising thousands of institutions and enterprises around the world, ranging from students writing up their first group projects to professional researchers collaborating on papers and grant proposals.

The two companies have revealed that, behind the scenes, they’ve often been trying to figure out a way to work together in recent years.

Overleaf says that the aim of its acquisition of ShareLaTeX is to bring the best of both editors together in a way that benefits everyone. By working together, they say they can avoid duplicating their efforts as they look to achieve the same goals.

Founder John Hammersley told Research Information: ‘Together, our combined community is more than two million authors. And the exciting part from my perspective is that we've managed to do it such that their whole team is joining Overleaf, including their founders. We've already seen some great collaborations starting internally. There are exciting times ahead.’

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.’

Hammersley and fellow Overleaf founder John Lees-Miller added: ‘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.’