Alternatives to Mendeley
A reference manager from Elsevier for collecting, annotating and citing research papers. The listings below can replace it for an important use case. Each note says what changes if you switch.
The original
Mendeley
A reference manager from Elsevier for collecting, annotating and citing research papers.
Replacements
Listings that take over the same core job as Mendeley.
EndNote
A long-running reference manager for collecting sources and formatting citations in academic writing.
EndNote is paid software with no free tier, running on Windows, macOS and the web, with automatic citation formatting and an AI assistant, and is not owned by Elsevier.
JabRef
An open-source reference manager for collecting, organising and citing literature in BibTeX and BibLaTeX.
JabRef is free and open source, runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, and stores libraries as plain text BibTeX files suited to LaTeX writing.
ReadCube Papers
A reference manager and PDF reader for organizing, annotating and citing research papers.
ReadCube Papers also combines PDF annotation with reference management but is paid after the trial and adds AI answers linked to source passages.
Similar software
Related functionality, not a direct replacement.
Scholarcy
An AI summarizer that turns papers, articles and videos into interactive flashcard summaries.
Semantic Scholar
A free, AI-powered search engine for scientific literature covering papers from all fields of science.
Scite
An AI research tool that answers questions from scholarly articles and shows how claims are cited.
Explainpaper
A web tool that explains highlighted passages of uploaded research papers in plain language.
ResearchRabbit
A web tool for literature reviews that finds related papers and builds citation maps.
Unpaywall
A browser extension that finds legal open-access copies of paywalled research papers.
