A native desktop app for synthesizing papers across languages, fields, and collaborators — with a knowledge graph that actually shows you what you know.
What's inside
Every feature was built to remove a friction researchers actually feel: papers fragmented across tools, languages siloed by alphabet, collaboration gated by file-format gymnastics.
Two renderers — Canvas2D for crisp overviews, Rust/WebGPU for thousand-node libraries. Lineage mode traces a paper's intellectual chain.
Cross-language search across English, Mandarin, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, and Russian — without losing context.
Inline citations, KaTeX math, threaded comments, version history. Export to BibTeX or LaTeX when you're ready to publish.
Bring your library to every device. Share graphs with specific people, build group reading lists, collaborate without flattening your work.
Nine academic databases plus Zotero, Mendeley, EndNote, BibTeX, and RIS. Drop a folder of PDFs and Tessera takes care of the rest.
Local embeddings for semantic search, MCP integration so your assistant can read your library, and an offline-first architecture you control.
A glance inside
The desktop renderer, captured. Knowledge graph for the marquee shot, document editor for the day-to-day. Read the documentation for a full tour of every view.
Color-coded nodes by type; edges from citations, transclusions, and shared concepts. Drag, search, and filter without losing your bearings.
Cite a paper from your library inline, drop in math, leave a comment on a paragraph for a collaborator, ship the version history along with the document.
I wanted to build an app that's beautiful to use — one that brings joy to research, helps you synthesize across hundreds of papers, and dissolves the silos between your own notes and the research happening in other languages.Dave Foran · founder, Tessera
Available now
The desktop app is the home base — your library lives on your machine, and the cloud syncs at your discretion.
Each link redirects to a fresh signed download. Pick the build that matches your machine.