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macOS Free app · optional Plus from $2.99 a month · v1.1.2 Beta

Vitae

Academic research management for macOS. Track submissions, grants, projects, collaborators, and your CV in one local-first app. The app is free, with no limits on your record. Vitae Plus is an optional subscription for reports, Word templates and more: $2.99 a month or $23.99 a year, with a 7-day trial, or included for life in the Mac Suite. Notarized, no App Store.

Download for Mac Optional Vitae Plus, from $2.99 a month

Requires macOS 15 Sequoia or later · Apple-notarized · Your data stays on your Mac

Vitae dashboard with sample data: counts of active projects and papers under review, acceptance rate, funding awarded, a list of items needing attention, upcoming deadlines and recent editorial decisions
Your research record on one screen: projects, papers under review, open revision tasks, your acceptance rate, funding, the next deadlines and the latest decisions. The screenshots on this page use sample data for a fictional researcher.

What's inside

Everything an academic needs, nothing they don't

Submission tracking

Log every journal and conference submission with status, dates, each review round, and the decision. Pick target venues with published acceptance rates for about 13,700 journals and conferences, and get a forecast of publication timelines from your own submission history.

Grant management

Track NSF, NIH, and other grants from planning to award: deadlines, requested and awarded amounts, reporting dates, and your share. Search Grants.gov for open funding opportunities from inside the app.

CV & packages

Start from the CV you have. Vitae imports it from Word, PDF, RTF, ODT, or a web page, in APA, Chicago, MLA, IEEE, ACM, Harvard, or Vancouver style, reads your papers, grants, positions, talks, teaching and service, and shows you everything before saving. From then on your CV fills itself from your records. Choose from seven CV formats or build your own, and export several at once to PDF, LaTeX, or rich text that opens in Word. Word (.docx) templates are part of Vitae Plus.

Inbox triage

Connect iCloud, Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Fastmail, or your university mail, read-only. Vitae recognizes messages from journal submission systems, reads them on your Mac, and proposes submission updates. You review each one before anything changes.

Collaborators, projects & ideas

Track coauthors, collaborators, and projects. Link people to papers, grants, and roles so your network stays navigable. Capture research ideas before they are projects: sort them on a board by stage, group them by type or author, plot them by impact against feasibility, or link them on a map, then make one a project with its authors in order. Send any publication to Zotero in one click.

Local-first & private

Everything is stored on your Mac with SwiftData. No account and no cloud sync required, and keeping your record needs no subscription. Vitae takes a daily backup and lets you undo changes, so a bad import or merge is never permanent.

Watch the tour

Your academic record, in one place

Submissions, grants, projects and co-authors tracked in one local record, with your CV built from it.

Play the video on YouTube

A closer look

Every submission, every round

One table holds the whole history: venue, date submitted, decision, and your own estimate of the odds. Open a submission to see its review rounds, manuscript versions, cover letter and submission checklist.

Vitae submissions list with sample data, beside the detail view of one submission showing an acceptance estimate, two review rounds, manuscript versions and a draft cover letter

A CV built from your records

Pick a format, a length and a date range, and the CV fills itself from the papers, positions and grants you already track. Export to PDF, LaTeX or rich text.

Vitae CV and Packages view showing a formatted academic CV for a fictional researcher, with education, appointments and refereed journal articles

Grants from proposal to final report

Requested and awarded amounts, your share, the project timeline and each reporting deadline. Awarded and pending totals sit at the top of the list.

Vitae grants view with sample data: a list of grants by status and amount, and the detail of one NSF award with funding amounts, timeline and reporting deadlines

How close you are to tenure

Set your tenure date and your department’s expectations, and Vitae counts your record against each one: articles, lead-author papers, funding, h-index, invited talks and service.

Vitae tenure readiness view with sample data: time left on the tenure clock and progress bars for journal articles, lead-author publications, external funding, h-index and invited talks

Free & open to support

Vitae is free. If it saves you time, consider supporting it.

All core record-keeping is free, with no limits, and nothing that was free before Plus becomes paid. No third-party ads, no data harvesting. Vitae Plus is an optional subscription, $2.99 a month or $23.99 a year, for newer tools such as reports, Word templates, the revision workspace and Shareables, and it comes with a 7-day free trial. Subscribing, or leaving a one-time tip, helps keep Vitae maintained and updated. Not useful? Email ben@purplelink.llc within 14 days of purchase and it is refunded.

Vitae Plus, from $2.99 a month Leave a one-time tip

Frequently asked questions

Is Vitae really free?
Yes. Vitae is free to download and use, with all core record-keeping and no limits, and nothing that was free before Plus becomes paid. An optional subscription, Vitae Plus ($2.99 a month or $23.99 a year, with a 7-day free trial), adds newer tools: reports such as an NIH biosketch draft, Word export with your own templates, the revision workspace, Shareables, the collaboration map, batch DOI lookup and ORCID sync, Reminders and calendar sync, and themes. It is also included for life in the Mac Suite. You do not need it to keep your record. A tip via Buy Me a Coffee is also appreciated but never required.
Does Vitae show ads?
Not from anyone else. The sidebar has one small card, labelled "From Purplelink", that suggests another Purplelink tool such as ModernTex, Paper Review or Vitae Plus. If a sponsor ever appears there, the card will say "Sponsor" and the sponsor's name, and this page will say so. There is no ad network, no tracking, and no click reporting, and Vitae sends nothing to sponsors. Vitae reads the card's text from a plain file on purplelink.llc at most once a day, and shows a copy built into the app when you are offline. You can hide the card in Settings, under Support; Vitae then stops fetching it.
How does Vitae update?
Vitae checks purplelink.llc once a day and asks before installing a new version. Updates are signed, and Vitae refuses any that fail the check. You can turn the daily check off, or check by hand, in Settings under About. Version 0.1, the first release, cannot update itself; if you still have it, download the current version (1.0.4) once from this page and it will keep itself up to date after that.
Why isn't it on the Mac App Store?
Distributing outside the App Store lets me ship faster and avoid App Store restrictions. The DMG is Apple-notarized, so macOS Gatekeeper verifies it is safe to run. Just open the DMG, drag Vitae to Applications, and launch it.
What macOS version is required?
Vitae requires macOS 15 Sequoia or later.
Where is my data stored?
All your records are stored locally on your Mac using SwiftData, with no account and no sync. Vitae goes online for lookups you ask for, such as citation counts from Crossref or OpenAlex and Grants.gov funding searches, and reads your email only if you connect a mailbox, read-only. It also makes two small requests to purplelink.llc on its own: the daily update check, and the daily fetch of the sidebar card's text unless you hide the card. Neither sends anything about you or your records. iCloud sync is supported in the schema and can be enabled in future versions.
How do I install it?
Download the DMG, open it, drag Vitae into your Applications folder, and launch it. Because it is notarized by Apple, you will not see a Gatekeeper warning.
How does Vitae compare to Interfolio, ORCID, or a spreadsheet?
Vitae keeps your own record between deadlines; if your university requires Interfolio or Watermark for tenure review, you still submit there, using what Vitae exports. See how to track your academic CV and tenure case for a comparison of sixteen options, or best software for tracking your research record for submission trackers, spreadsheets and profile systems.
Vitae is free. If it saves you time, you can get the optional Vitae Plus, leave a tip or support it monthly. It helps keep it maintained.