Writing and editing
Google Docs is the obvious one, but worth stating clearly: for most university essay writing, Google Docs is equal to Microsoft Word. It autosaves, it's accessible from any device, it supports comments and collaboration for group work, and it exports to .docx if you need to submit in that format. The only cases where Word has a genuine technical advantage over Docs are mathematically intensive formatting (use LaTeX for that anyway) and very complex multi-level lists that need to match a specific template exactly.
Hemingway Editor gives you a readability score and highlights complex sentences, adverbs, and passive voice. It won't write better prose for you, but it will make overloaded sentences visible. The free web version works without an account at hemingwayapp.com.
Readable and similar tools show your text's reading level according to several different formulas. Academic writing generally aims for a specific register — not dumbed down, but not needlessly complex. Knowing your essay reads at a postgraduate level versus undergraduate level gives you one useful signal.
Word and character counting
Google Docs has a word count function (Tools → Word count), but for a quick check of a paragraph or excerpt without opening a full document, a standalone text tool is faster. Our text tools page counts words and characters instantly with no login or setup — paste your text and the count appears immediately. Useful when you're checking whether a 250-word abstract is actually 250 words.
Converting between file formats
Smallpdf and ILovePDF handle the most common student conversion tasks: PDF to Word so you can edit a document someone sent you, Word to PDF for submission, merging multiple PDFs into one. Both have free tiers that cover occasional use well. The paid tiers are mainly for high-volume or batch processing.
For images: Squoosh (squoosh.app) is a Google tool that compresses and converts between image formats entirely in your browser. Useful for reducing image file sizes for presentations or web submissions without needing Photoshop.
For audio and video conversion less common academic tasks but they come up: Handbrake is a desktop app but it's free, open source, and handles video format conversion reliably. For occasional audio work, Audacity is the standard free desktop option.
Unit conversions for science and engineering students
Lab reports routinely require unit conversions — meters to millimeters, Celsius to Kelvin, atmospheres to pascals. While most students end up using Google for these, a dedicated converter is neater and doesn't require parsing through search results. Our unit converter handles the most common conversions quickly. For more specialized scientific units, Wolfram Alpha handles essentially any physics or chemistry conversion and shows its working.
Citation and reference management
Zotero is the gold standard for reference management and it's completely free and open source. You install a browser extension and whenever you're on an academic journal page, a news article, or a website you want to cite, you click the extension icon and Zotero saves the full reference information. When you write your paper, Zotero integrates with Google Docs and Word to insert citations and generate a formatted bibliography in whatever style your department requires — APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and hundreds of others.
The combination of Zotero and Google Docs handles almost everything most arts, humanities, and social science students need.
Mendeley is a similar tool owned by Elsevier and has a larger user base in STEM fields. It's free for basic use. The main practical difference is that PDF annotation and storage are better in Mendeley, while Zotero has stronger privacy credentials and more flexible export options.
Diagrams and visual notes
Excalidraw is a free, open-source drawing tool that works in a browser with no account required. The hand-drawn style is visually clean and useful for quick conceptual diagrams, mind maps, or sketching a flowchart during a study session. Diagrams can be exported as PNG or SVG.
draw.io (now diagio.com) is more feature-complete and better for formal diagrams: flowcharts, UML diagrams, network topology maps. Also free, browser-based, and can be used without creating an account.
Password management for all your university accounts
Students typically accumulate logins quickly: the university student portal, online library access, assignment submission systems, VPN access, multiple coursework tools. Managing these with the same password or with browser-saved passwords creates real risk. A free password manager handles all of them with one master password. Bitwarden is free for individual use and works on all devices — see our guide to password managers for setup details.
Tools that look useful and usually aren't
It's worth mentioning a few categories that attract students but don't deliver much value.
Online grammar checkers beyond basic spell-check tend to flag non-errors, miss context-dependent mistakes, and produce formulaic writing when you follow their suggestions too closely. Use one as a quick sweep if you like, but don't treat its suggestions as authoritative, and don't pay for a premium version.
Study timer apps are plentiful. Most students don't need an app for this — a phone timer and the Pomodoro technique (25 minutes focus, 5 break) work fine without installing anything. The activity of searching for the perfect productivity app is famously less productive than just doing the work.
Online "paraphrasing tools" are going to be flagged by most plagiarism detection tools, because the underlying structure of the text remains similar. They also produce awkward prose. If you're using a paraphrasing tool because you're not sure how to express something in your own words, the better approach is to put the source away and explain the concept out loud to yourself, then write that down. That's the actual skill you're developing.