Mendeley Reference Manager vs Papis

Mendeley Reference Manager is a web and desktop application for organizing references and supporting research workflows. Users can import PDFs or folders into a library, read and annotate documents, and collect thoughts in Mendeley Notebook. Mendeley Cite inserts citations and builds bibliographies in Microsoft Word using a chosen style. Shared groups let colleagues, course-mates, or co-authors contribute references and annotate PDFs together. Web Importer saves papers, web pages, and other documents from search engines and academic databases; it is available for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. Watched Folders can import PDFs placed in a selected desktop folder. Offline mode syncs library changes after reconnecting. Free accounts include 2GB of storage and five Reading Assistant questions. Paid plans start at $4.99 per month, with higher tiers listing additional storage and Reading Assistant features. Mendeley is available on web, Windows, Linux, macOS, and as a browser extension. The Windows download page lists Windows 10 and above as supported.

Papis is a free, open-source command-line manager for documents and bibliographic records. It stores records in human-readable YAML files and lets users search by fields such as author, title, and tags. Importers can bring data from other bibliography managers and retrieve metadata from sources including arXiv and Crossref. Records can be exported to BibTeX and other formats. The project lists plugins for Vim, Neovim, and Emacs, plus integrations with rofi, dmenu, Zotero, and Firefox. Third-party Python entry-point plugins can add importers and downloaders, and a Python API supports custom scripts. A local web app starts with `papis serve`; the documented address is `http://localhost:8888`. Installation is described through pip, source code, Arch Linux AUR, Nix, and Guix. The project directs questions to GitHub Discussions and bugs to GitHub Issues. If no importer exists for a website, users may need to download its PDF and enter metadata manually.