Zotero

Zotero is a free, open-source reference management software that helps you collect, organize, cite, and share research sources. It works as a standalone program or browser extension that seamlessly integrates with Word, LibreOffice, and Google Docs.

Zotero alternatives ➤

What is Zotero?

Zotero is a free, open-source reference management software that helps you collect, organize, cite, and share your research sources. It was created by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University.

Some of the key features of Zotero include:

Capturing references from web pages with one click
Organizing sources into collections and tags
Annotating PDFs and attaching files to entries
Creating in-text citations and bibliographies in Word, LibreOffice, and Google Docs
Collaborating and syncing libraries across devices
Hundreds of citation styles to choose from

Zotero comes in a few different forms: it runs as a standalone desktop program that works with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari web browsers. Browser extensions allow you to save references directly from a web page into your library. There are also mobile apps for iOS and Android devices that sync with your desktop library. An online account at zotero.org gives you web access to your library and additional syncing and backup capabilities.

In summary, if you need to organize, cite, and share research sources, Zotero is an excellent free option for students, academics, and independent researchers in need of a capable reference management solution.

Official Links

Official Website
www.zotero.org

The Best Zotero Alternatives

Top Apps like Zotero

EndNote, DEVONthink, Mendeley, Citavi, Research Rabbit, BibDesk, TheBrain, Qiqqa, Paperwork, SciSpace, JabRef, Paperpile, Bookends, Litmaps, Consensus, Biohunter, SCRiBBR APA Generator, Docear, Researcher PRO, EasyBib, Scite Ai, MyInfo, PaperShip, PDF Stacks, MyBib, Bibliography.com, FoxTrot Professional Search, Peerlibrary, Reference Manager, BibGuru, WizNote, BibSonomy, PDF Search, Weava, PubChase, KBibTeX, Zenreader, Auratikum, BibMe, Bibtex Editor, DeepDyve, I, Librarian, Bibfilex, Biblioscape, RefWorks, Refeus, UbikReader, Paperly, ZoteroBib, bibus, SciPlore MindMapping, TextCite, ACS ChemWorx, Surfmark, OutWit Images, RefMe, OutWit Docs, Droideley, WebNotes, Surfulater, FingerPDF, ProCite, BibTeXSearch, Citationsy, Cite This! are some alternatives to Zotero.

Sugggest an alternative ❐

EndNote

EndNote is reference management software produced by Clarivate Analytics. It allows users to:Search hundreds of online resources to collect references and PDFsOrganize references, images, PDFs and other filesRead and annotate PDFsCreate rules to automatically organize references as you workSync your references and files to your EndNote online libraryAccess your...

DEVONthink

DEVONthink is a document and information management application developed by DEVONtechnologies for macOS. It serves as a central database for organizing documents, notes, bookmarks, email messages, and other data in one searchable and automated system.Some key features and capabilities of DEVONthink include:AI-based classification and tagging of documents using...

Mendeley

Mendeley is a popular free reference management software used by millions of researchers worldwide. It helps you build your own searchable library, organize and annotate your PDFs, generate citations and bibliographies, collaborate and network with other researchers online, and discover the latest research.Some key features of Mendeley:Cloud sync...

Citavi

Citavi is a reference management and knowledge organization software designed for students and researchers. It helps users throughout the entire research process, from searching and collecting relevant sources to organizing knowledge and finally citing sources and automatically creating bibliographies or reference lists.Some key features of Citavi include:Collecting references...

Research Rabbit

Research Rabbit is a software designed for researchers, academics, and students to manage their research and references more efficiently. It has features that allow you to:Import papers, articles, books, and other sources easilyOrganize sources into folders and tag them with custom tagsAnnotate PDFs and highlight important passagesTake notes and...

BibDesk

BibDesk is a free and open source reference management software designed specifically for macOS. It helps researchers organize their documents and references for research papers, articles, theses and other projects.Key features of BibDesk include:Maintains BibTeX formatted databases of references and integrates well with LaTeX and Text editors like...

TheBrain

TheBrain is a mind mapping and information organization software developed by TheBrain Technologies. It provides a graphical, brain-like interface that allows users to organize information in a connected, web-like manner.Some key features of TheBrain include:Mind mapping interface to visualize connections between ideas, documents, contacts and other informationThe ability...

Qiqqa

Qiqqa is a free, cross-platform reference management software designed to help researchers and academics organize, manage, and cite their references. Developed by Cambridge-based company Digital Science, Qiqqa aims to provide an alternative to paid reference managers like EndNote or Mendeley.Some key features of Qiqqa include:Web browser integration to...

Paperwork

Paperwork is an open source document manager software designed for easy organization and search of documents on your computer.Key features of Paperwork include:Open source software licensed under GPLv3Available on Linux, Windows, and MacStore documents locally on your computer, supports PDF and imagesFolder-based hierarchy for organizing documentsTag documents...

SciSpace

SciSpace is a free, open-source desktop application designed specifically for researchers to organize their references, PDFs, notes, and annotations in one place for more efficient searching and knowledge management.Key features of SciSpace include:Intuitive user interface for organizing references, PDFs, notes, tags and custom metadataSmart full-text search allows finding...

JabRef

JabRef is a free, open-source reference management software that helps researchers organize, manage, and cite bibliographic references like research papers, articles, books, etc. Developed in Java, it works on all major operating systems like Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.Key features of JabRef include:Intuitive graphical user interface for...

Paperpile

Paperpile is a cloud-based reference and citation management software designed for researchers and academics. It allows users to organize, search, read, annotate and cite research papers in a personalized digital library.Key features of Paperpile include:Integration with Google Docs for easy citing and formatting bibliographies as you writeOne-click imports...

Bookends

Bookends is a reference management application designed specifically for Mac users. It helps scholars, students, and researchers organize and format bibliographic data to easily create citations and bibliographies for essays, dissertations, and published papers.With Bookends, you can:Import references from online databases like PubMed and library catalogsOrganize references into...

Litmaps

Litmaps is an online mind mapping and brainstorming application designed to help users organize their thoughts and ideas visually. With an easy-to-use drag and drop interface, Litmaps makes it simple to create mind maps, concept maps, flow charts, and other diagrams to clarify thinking on any topic or project.Some...

Consensus

Consensus is an enterprise-focused blockchain platform optimized for building and running decentralized applications and marketplaces. It combines the security and transparency of blockchain technology with the configurability required by many enterprises.Key features of Consensus include:Proof of Stake consensus - Allows transaction validation through stakeholder voting based on token...

Biohunter

Biohunter is an open-source software application designed specifically for the analysis and simulation of biological network data. It provides researchers with a user-friendly graphical interface to import, visualize, manipulate, and mathematically model biological networks maps in order to study complex systems biology research questions.Some key features of Biohunter include...

SCRiBBR APA Generator

SCRiBBR APA Generator is a powerful free online writing and formatting tool designed to help students, researchers, writers, and professionals cite their academic papers in APA style. This convenient and easy-to-use generator allows you to input information about your sources, such as books, journal articles, websites, and more, and automatically...

Docear

Docear is a free, open source software designed for academic literature management and mind mapping. It combines the functions of reference managers like Mendeley or Zotero with those of mind mappers like Freeplane or XMind.Some of the key features of Docear include:Creating mind maps to organize ideas and...

Researcher PRO

Researcher PRO is a feature-rich reference management software targeted at academic researchers and scholars across disciplines. It helps to efficiently collect, organize, read, annotate, cite, and share research literature, references, and data.Key features of Researcher PRO include:- Store, organize, search and manage an unlimited number of references and...

EasyBib

EasyBib is a free online bibliography and citation tool designed to help students create properly formatted bibliographies and cite sources accurately when writing research papers. It is very user-friendly and easy to use, making it ideal for high school or college-level writing assignments.Users simply enter the details of their...

Scite Ai

Scite is an artificial intelligence company founded in 2020 that focuses on developing writing assistant software to help people write better. Their flagship product is an AI writing assistant plugin that integrates directly into Google Docs and Microsoft Word.The Scite plugin uses advanced natural language processing models to provide real-time...

MyInfo

MyInfo is a versatile personal information manager (PIM) software that helps users store, organize, and manage their personal data, files, documents, photos, bookmarks, contacts, calendars, notes, and other important information in one easy-to-access, encrypted digital vault.Key features of MyInfo include:- Secure encrypted storage for all your personal data...

PaperShip

PaperShip is a cloud-based document management and collaboration platform tailored for freelancers, consultants, small businesses, and remote teams. It provides a centralized location to store, organize, share, and collaborate on files and folders from anywhere.Key features include:Intuitive file storage and organization with support for dragging and dropping filesReal-time...

PDF Stacks

PDF Stacks is a powerful yet easy-to-use PDF management application for Windows. It enables users to efficiently organize, merge, split, encrypt, annotate and convert PDF documents.With its intuitive tabbed interface, you can carry out various PDF tasks like combine hundreds of PDFs into one file, extract specific pages from...

MyBib

MyBib is a free, open-source reference management software designed to help researchers organize and manage their references and format bibliographies. Originally released in 2002 by Cheng Gao as a Windows-only desktop application, MyBib has evolved into a cross-platform tool that syncs across devices.Key features of MyBib include:Store an unlimited...

Bibliography.com

Bibliography.com is a free online bibliography and citation generation tool designed to help students and researchers easily create citations and bibliographies in multiple formats. The tool supports MLA, APA, and Chicago citation styles.Users can either manually enter in the details for each source they wish to cite such...

FoxTrot Professional Search

FoxTrot Professional Search is an enterprise search solution designed for large organizations. It enables fast and precise search within a company's entire network, including intranets, file servers, email, databases, websites, cloud applications, and more.FoxTrot features powerful indexing and spidering capabilities to keep pace with expanding digital footprints and an...

Peerlibrary

Peerlibrary is an open-source digital library platform designed to help organizations create custom digital repositories for managing digital assets. It offers robust media ingestion, storage, search, and access capabilities to power digital archives and information networks.Some key features of Peerlibrary include:Flexible metadata schema - Customize descriptive fields and...

Reference Manager

Reference Manager is a type of software that is specifically designed to assist researchers, academics, and students with organizing, managing, and citing reference sources for their scholarly work. This type of software is essential for anyone writing research papers, journal articles, theses, or dissertations that require properly formatting citations and...

BibGuru

BibGuru is a free online bibliography and citation management tool designed to help students and researchers organize sources and create properly formatted citations or bibliographies. With an intuitive interface, BibGuru makes it easy to:Search for books, journals, websites, and other sources to add referencesImport references automatically from websites, DOIs...

WizNote

WizNote is a feature-rich note taking and knowledge management app available for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, and Web. It allows users to easily capture ideas and information, organize notes into notebooks, tag content for improved searchability, supports adding images/attachments, sync everything securely to the cloud, and more.Some...

BibSonomy

BibSonomy is a free social bookmarking and publication management system designed for academics and researchers. It allows users to store, organize, tag, and share bookmarks and publication references.Some key features of BibSonomy include:Storing bookmarks of web pages and managing publication referencesOrganizing content with tags and hierarchical foldersSharing bookmarks...

PDF Search

PDF Search is a desktop software application designed specifically for searching text within PDF documents. It provides an easy way to index and search through even a large collection of PDFs to quickly find what you need.The software works by scanning all your PDF files, extracting the textual content...

Weava

Weava is a cloud-based team collaboration platform that provides a central hub for teams to manage projects, share content, and collaborate. Its key features include:Document sharing and real-time co-editing - Weava allows teams to store documents centrally, share files securely, and collaborate on docs in real-time like Google Docs...

PubChase

PubChase is a free web-based recommendation engine that helps researchers discover relevant scientific publications. It was developed by researchers at Microsoft and launched in 2020.Here's how PubChase works: Users sign up with a Microsoft, Google, or Facebook account and import their publication history. PubChase analyzes a researcher's publications, journals they...

KBibTeX

KBibTeX is a cross-platform and open source reference management software designed specifically for BibTeX files. It provides an easy-to-use interface for editing and managing BibTeX bibliography databases without having to directly edit .bib files.Some of the key features of KBibTeX include:Graphical user interface to view, search, add, edit...

Zenreader

Zenreader is an open-source, minimalist RSS reader and news aggregator software. It provides a clean, ad-free interface for subscribing and reading content from websites via RSS feeds.Some key features of Zenreader include:Open-source code and available on GitHub for community contributionsSupport for adding and organizing RSS feeds into categoriesOffline...

Auratikum

Auratikum is an open source mobile and web application launched in 2018 that aims to provide resources, community support, and tools for marginalized groups, specifically women and LGBTQ people, to organize activism campaigns around issues that affect them. It was created by a team of developers and activists who recognized the...

BibMe

BibMe is a free online bibliography and citation tool that helps students, writers, researchers, and educators generate citations and bibliographies in APA, MLA, Chicago, and several other citation styles. BibMe offers a streamlined and intuitive interface for generating accurate citations, saving time and simplifying the research process.One of BibMe's...

Bibtex Editor

Bibtex Editor is an open-source reference management software specifically designed for editing BibTeX files. It provides a graphical user interface for managing BibTeX entries, allowing users to easily create, edit, search, and organize their references.Key features of Bibtex Editor include:Intuitive BibTeX entry editor with autocomplete and error checkingLibrary...

DeepDyve

DeepDyve is an online platform that provides access to millions of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles across thousands of publications. It serves as an affordable alternative to expensive institutional journal subscriptions for researchers and professionals.DeepDyve operates on an online rental model - users can access the full text of journal...

I, Librarian

I, Librarian is a free, open-source virtual library management software for book lovers. It helps individuals organize, track, and discover books in their personal libraries and collections.With I, Librarian, users can catalog all the books they own with details such as title, author, publisher, publish date, genre, cover image...

Bibfilex

Bibfilex is a free, open-source bibliography software manager developed as an alternative to proprietary reference managers like EndNote or RefWorks. It allows researchers, academics, and students to store, organize, manage, and share bibliographic references for their research papers, journal articles, theses, and other academic works.Some of the key features...

Biblioscape

Biblioscape is a reference management software application designed to help researchers organize, manage, and share bibliographic references. It provides tools to:Import references from online databases such as PubMed, Web of Science, Google Scholar etc.Organize references using folders, tags, ratings, and moreAnnotate PDFs and add notes to referencesFormat bibliographies...

RefWorks

RefWorks is a web-based bibliography and citation management tool designed to help researchers easily gather, manage, store and share citations, and generate bibliographies and manuscripts in a variety of citation styles. The software allows users to:Manually enter references or import them from online databases and cataloguesOrganize their research into...

Refeus

Refeus is an open-source web application that serves as an alternative to RefWorks for research reference management. Some key features and benefits of Refeus include:Open source software available free of chargeRuns on modern web browsers with no installation requiredSyncs references and data securely across devices using cloud storage services...

UbikReader

UbikReader is a free, open-source eBook reader application available for Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. It is designed to provide an intuitive, customizable reading experience and help users easily manage their digital book libraries.UbikReader supports all major eBook formats including EPUB, MOBI, PDF, CBZ, CBR, FB2, etc. Users...

Paperly

Paperly is a versatile note taking and document organization software designed to boost productivity for individuals and teams. It comes packed with features to capture fleeting thoughts and ideas, organize documents and web content into searchable notes, enable seamless collaboration between team members, and provide anytime access to important information...

ZoteroBib

ZoteroBib is a free, open-source Chrome extension that integrates with the Zotero citation manager to help researchers and students easily create bibliographies and citations while browsing the web and searching literature databases.One of the key features of ZoteroBib is that it allows you to instantly cite materials and insert...

Bibus

Bibus is a free, open-source reference management software designed for researchers, scholars, and students. It allows users to manually enter or import references from online databases, organize them into customized groups and categories, and create formatted bibliographies. Key features of Bibus include:Support for standard reference types like books, articles...

SciPlore MindMapping

SciPlore MindMapping is a feature-rich mind mapping and brainstorming software. It allows users to create colorful and visually-appealing mind maps to organize ideas, concepts, and information. Some key features include:Intuitive drag-and-drop interface for quickly building mind mapsVarious styling options for customizing the look of mind mapsAbility to add notes...

TextCite

TextCite is a free online citation and bibliography generator designed to help students, academics, and researchers easily create properly formatted references for their papers, essays, and other works. It supports the major citation styles used in academics including APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and over 9,000 citation styles.The TextCite platform allows...

ACS ChemWorx

ACS ChemWorx is a chemistry software platform developed and published by the American Chemical Society (ACS). It integrates a variety of tools and databases useful for chemists into one convenient interface.Some of the key features of ACS ChemWorx include:2D molecular drawing capabilities for creating and editing chemical structures...

Surfmark

Surfmark is a software application used for video annotation and collaboration. It allows users to import video files, add time-synced comments, draw shapes and diagrams over the video, tag objects and events in the video, and share the annotated videos with team members.Some key features of Surfmark include:Import...

OutWit Images

OutWit Images is a Windows-based program for harvesting images and other media from websites. It provides a graphical user interface that allows users to easily grab all images, videos, PDF documents and other files from a web page with a single click.Some key features of OutWit Images include:Ability...

RefMe

RefMe is a free web and mobile application designed to help students, researchers, and writers easily create citations and bibliographies. It supports 7,500+ citation styles including popular styles such as APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard.Some key features of RefMe include:Intuitive interface for quickly generating citations by manually entering source...

OutWit Docs

OutWit Docs is a powerful software program designed for efficiently capturing, organizing and analyzing information from online sources. It enables users to scrape text, images, links, tables and other data from web pages, PDFs, documents and emails.Some key features of OutWit Docs include:Scraping capability for quickly extracting information...

Droideley

Droideley is an open-source alternative to commercial Android app analysis tools like APK Studio. It allows you to disassemble, debug, and modify Android apps (APKs) through an easy-to-use graphical interface.Some key features of Droideley include:Displays the full Android manifest file and resources like images and XML layoutsShows the...

WebNotes

WebNotes is a free and lightweight online note-taking and note management software. It allows users to create, organize, share, and access notes from any device with an internet browser. Some key features of WebNotes include:Rich text notes with support for formatting options like headings, lists, links, images etc.Notebooks...

Surfulater

Surfulater is a productivity browser extension used to save web pages, articles, recipes, or anything else you find online to view later. It works by integrating with your browser to add a one-click save button to your toolbar.When you come across something you want to read but don't have...

FingerPDF

FingerPDF is a free, open-source PDF viewer and annotation application. It provides users with a suite of tools to view, annotate, organize and collaborate on PDF documents.Some key features of FingerPDF include:Intuitive commenting tools like text comments, highlights, underlines, shapes, drawings and sticky notes for annotating PDFsReal-time collaboration...

ProCite

ProCite is reference management software used to organize and cite references when writing essays and research papers. It allows users to create databases of references, organize them into folders, and automatically generate bibliographies and citations in various styles such as APA and MLA. Some key features of ProCite include: Import...

BibTeXSearch

BibTeXSearch is an open source website developed to help researchers more easily find and manage BibTeX references for their academic papers and publications. It provides the ability to search across many online databases, open access repositories, university bibliographies, and other sources to locate relevant BibTeX references.Once relevant citations are...

Citationsy

Citationsy is an online reference management and bibliography software designed to help researchers, students, and academics organize, manage, and cite their sources effectively. It provides tools to easily search databases and library catalogs to collect relevant references, store them in the cloud, annotate PDFs, and share references with collaborators.Once...

Cite This!

Cite This! is a free online citation generation tool that assists students and researchers with properly citing sources in their writing. It supports the most common citation styles including APA, MLA and Chicago. Cite This! allows users to easily and quickly generate citations for books, journal articles, websites and more...