How to Migrate from Overleaf Without Losing Anything
The hardest part of moving editors is the fear of leaving something behind. Years of projects, a shared workflow your co-authors already know, a bibliography you do not want to rebuild. If you want to migrate from Overleaf, the good news is that LaTeX is just text and files, which makes it far more portable than most software you rely on. Your project is a folder of .tex sources, a .bib, your figures, and a class file or two. Nothing is locked in a proprietary format. This guide walks through the move step by step, so you arrive with everything intact and nothing left on the old platform.
Why people leave Overleaf
To be fair to Overleaf, it earned its position. The template gallery is enormous, almost every collaborator already has an account, and the onboarding is genuinely easy. None of that is in dispute.
The reasons people start looking elsewhere are specific. Free-tier compile timeouts that bite once a document gets large. Premium pricing in the teens-to-twenties per month. Git integration that is GitHub-only on paid plans. Reference managers that import once rather than staying synced. And, increasingly, a data-residency question: Overleaf is US-owned, which raises the EU transfer concerns that came out of Schrems II for universities and labs bound by the GDPR. If you want the fuller side-by-side, see our Overleaf alternatives overview.
The point here is not to relitigate that. It is to get you moved cleanly.
Step 1: Export your projects from Overleaf
Overleaf lets you download any project as a ZIP archive that contains everything: your .tex files, the .bib, figures, custom class and style files, and the folder structure. From an open project, use the menu to download the source as a ZIP. Do this for each project you want to bring over.
A few things worth checking before you call the export complete:
- The
.bibfile is in the archive. If your bibliography lived in a linked reference manager rather than a file in the project, export or re-sync it so you have an actual.bibto carry over. - Figures are included. Externally linked images sometimes are not bundled. Confirm every figure your document references is present in the ZIP.
- Custom class files came along. Journal and university templates often ship a
.clsor.sty. Those need to travel with the project or the document will not compile.
If you have a lot of projects, prioritise. Move the active ones first; archive the dormant ones at your own pace.
Step 2: Import into inscrive
Create a new project in inscrive and bring in your exported files. Because the ZIP preserves your structure, your \input and \include paths, your figure references, and your bibliography path all keep working. There is no format conversion, because there is no proprietary format to convert from. It is the same LaTeX, now on a different host.
Then compile. Most projects build on the first try. Where they do not, the cause is almost always one of two boring things: a missing custom class file you forgot to include, or a package you need to confirm is available. Pro’s AI assistance can suggest fixes for the compile errors it sees, which speeds up that first reconciliation. For figure-heavy or thesis-scale projects, this is also where inscrive’s longer compile window helps: 60 seconds on Free and 480 seconds on Pro, against Overleaf’s 10-second free cap and 240-second premium ceiling, per Overleaf’s published plan limits. Our compile speed guide covers that headroom in detail.
Step 3: Reconnect your references
If you used Zotero or Mendeley with Overleaf, you do not have to rebuild your library. inscrive offers Zotero and Mendeley sync that keeps your .bib always up to date with live citation autocomplete, rather than a one-time import that goes stale the moment you add a new source. Connect your account, point your document at the synced bibliography, and your \cite commands resolve. The Zotero workflow guide walks through the setup.
This is one of the quiet upgrades in the move. A live, synced .bib means the citation you saved this morning is already available in your editor this afternoon, with no manual export in between.
Step 4: Invite your collaborators
A project is only migrated when the people you write with have moved too. inscrive supports real-time collaborative editing with unlimited collaborators on every tier, including Free, with no merge conflicts. There is no per-seat math to do and no need to ration invitations. Add your co-authors and your supervisor to the project, and everyone is back to editing the same live document.
Tell your collaborators what to expect: same LaTeX, same live editing, same shared PDF preview. The transition for them is mostly a new login.
Step 5: Set up Git (and a real backup)
On Overleaf, Git integration on paid plans is GitHub-only. inscrive offers agnostic Git integration that works with any provider through a token or password flow. That matters most for institutions running self-hosted GitLab, where GitHub-only was never an option.
# Add your inscrive project as a remote and push
git remote add origin <your-inscrive-git-url>
git add .
git commit -m "Migrate project from Overleaf"
git push -u origin mainNow you have a versioned mirror under your own control, on the provider your institution actually uses. Combined with inscrive’s built-in advanced version history (rewind to any earlier state at any time), you have two independent safety nets for work you cannot afford to lose.
Step 6: Confirm, then clean up
Before you close the Overleaf tab for good, do a final check on each migrated project:
| Check | What you are confirming |
|---|---|
| Full compile | Document builds end to end, no missing files |
| References resolve | Every \cite and \ref points somewhere |
| Figures render | All images present and placed correctly |
| Collaborators added | Co-authors and supervisor have access |
| Git push works | Versioned backup exists on your provider |
Once those pass, your migration is real, not aspirational. Keep the Overleaf ZIPs in cold storage for a while as a belt-and-braces backup, then archive the old projects when you are confident.
The data portability you gain
There is a reason this migration is so painless, and it is the same reason you should think about where you land. LaTeX is portable by design. Your data is not trapped, which means leaving inscrive later would be just as easy: full project export, anytime, no lock-in. Good data portability is not a one-way door; it is a property of tools that respect your ownership of your own work.
That principle extends to where the data sits. inscrive stores everything on EU soil, hosted by Hetzner in Germany and Finland in ISO 27001-certified data centres, with no third-country transfers, a signed Data Processing Agreement, and an independent audit report. For a lab or university weighing the move, that closes the Schrems II question that prompted the search in the first place. The European Data Protection Board publishes the guidance behind it if your data protection officer wants the detail.
You came to migrate from Overleaf without losing anything. Done right, you lose nothing and gain a 60-second-plus compile, provider-agnostic Git, live reference sync, and your data back in the EU.
Ready to move? Start writing on inscrive.io for free, import your Overleaf ZIP, and keep your data in Europe. See the pricing page for what Free and Pro include.
