Paperpile vs Papis

Paperpile is a reference manager for collecting, organizing and writing with research papers. It can import references, extract PDF metadata, organize libraries with folders and labels, detect duplicates, repair metadata and search collections. Plans include unlimited storage for research PDFs. Citation support includes more than 10,000 styles, with plugins for Google Docs and Microsoft Word. Shared folders and libraries, access permissions, and collaborative PDF annotations and citations support group work. The Android and iOS apps sync with the web library and support highlights, notes and drawn annotations. Users can also search 150 million articles across sources including PubMed, arXiv and CrossRef, and save PDFs with one tap. Integrations include Google Drive sync, Overleaf, browser extensions, and academic databases and publishers. Regular costs $4.15 a month and Expert costs $5.75 a month, with all plans billed annually; a 30-day trial is available. New sign-ups are currently available on Chrome, while Safari and Firefox access is in beta.

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.