If you searched for one of these names and landed on the other, you are not alone. Interfolio is a product of Interfolio, Inc. and is not affiliated with Prefolio in any way - we're writing this to clear up the naming confusion, not to make any claim about their service. Once you see what each product actually does, the confusion goes away fast: they solve two completely different problems.
What Interfolio actually is
Interfolio is a credential and dossier management platform used heavily in academic hiring, tenure and promotion review, and some graduate admissions. Its core feature is confidential letter management: a recommender uploads a letter once, and Interfolio stores and delivers it to schools, search committees, or funding agencies on your behalf, without you ever seeing the contents. It also handles faculty search workflows and review packets for institutions. It is infrastructure for moving sensitive documents between recommenders, applicants, and committees.
What Prefolio actually is
Prefolio is a mobile app for students and early-career applicants - pre-med, grad school, job, and fellowship applicants - who want to stop reconstructing their history from memory every application season. You log your shifts, research hours, projects, and reflections as they happen. When it is time to apply, AI turns that logged history into application-ready material: AMCAS activity descriptions, essay outlines, and structured summaries grounded in what you actually did, with citations back to the real entries. Prefolio does not store or deliver letters of recommendation, and it is not a dossier service.
Who each one is for
If you need a way to collect and send confidential letters of recommendation to multiple programs or search committees without a recommender re-uploading each time, that is Interfolio's job. If you need a place to keep an honest, dated record of what you have done, so you are not starting from a blank page when it is time to write, that is what Prefolio is for. Plenty of applicants will use tools like Interfolio for letter logistics and something like Prefolio for the writing and tracking side - they are not competitors, they just don't overlap.
A worked example
Say you're a senior applying to grad programs. You've spent two years doing undergraduate research, and you need three professors to send confidential letters directly to each program - that logistics problem, one letter uploaded once and routed to multiple schools without you seeing the contents, is what a service like Interfolio is designed for. Separately, you also need to sit down and write a statement of purpose that accurately describes those two years of research: the methods you used, what you found, how your thinking changed. That writing problem, and the recall problem underneath it, is what Prefolio is for. Neither product does the other's job, and neither pretends to.
The short version
- Interfolio: stores and delivers confidential letters and credentials, mostly for academic hiring, tenure, and some grad admissions.
- Prefolio: logs your experiences and hours over time, then uses AI to turn that record into essays and activity descriptions you write and control.
Where Prefolio fits
Prefolio exists for the part of applying that happens months before any letter gets sent: building an honest, specific record of your clinical hours, research, jobs, and leadership so that when the application opens, you are editing something true instead of guessing at dates and numbers from a year ago.