Lean Library Workspace vs Zotero

Lean Library Workspace helps students and researchers discover, organize, cite, and write research. It captures links and citation details from sources such as Google Scholar and PubMed, and saves PDFs when available. Users can highlight and annotate PDFs and webpages, then search their notes. Workspace suggests relevant articles and offers related-article search while writing. It works with Microsoft Word and Google Docs and can generate bibliographies in more than 7,000 styles. References and PDFs are available across computers, phones, and tablets, including Android and iOS. The free basic plan allows up to three projects and three invitations per shared project, but excludes article suggestions, smart citation suggestions, and external cloud PDF uploads. Libraries can subscribe for institution-wide authenticated access and receive usage statistics; authentication supports methods including IP and SSO. The product supports PDF, BibTeX, RIS, NBIB, and XML imports. Its support information says personal information is encrypted through HTTPS, projects can be private or shared at the user's discretion, and data can be permanently removed on request.

Zotero is an open-source tool for collecting, organizing, annotating, citing and sharing research. Its browser Connector can identify research items during browsing and save them to a library. Collections, keyword tags and saved searches help organize material, while a PDF reader and note editor support working with documents. Zotero supports over 9,000 citation styles and integrates with Microsoft Word, LibreOffice and Google Docs. The desktop app stores research locally by default; syncing is optional. Zotero Storage can sync PDFs, images, web snapshots and other files across devices, with access through an online library. Libraries can be shared with any number of people at no cost, and groups support shared collections. The free plan includes 300 MB of storage; paid storage starts at $20/year for 2 GB. Zotero says synced data is encrypted in transit and newly created accounts' data is encrypted at rest with AES-256. The data server is in the United States. The data server software can be run locally, though Zotero says self-hosting is technically challenging and unsupported. Most support takes place in public forums.