Qiqqa vs Zotero

Qiqqa is a research and reference manager for finding, reading, and annotating PDFs and turning research into bibliographies. Its library tools include document previews, duplicate detection, automatic PDF import, OCR, and full-text search across multiple libraries. It imports references from Mendeley, Zotero, EndNote, JabRef, and other BibTeX-exporting programs. Expedition groups library contents into themes, while citation, author, keyword, and related-document tools help locate papers. The PDF viewer supports highlights, annotations, and free-form drawing, with reports that can collect abstracts, notes, and marked passages. Qiqqa InCite supports Microsoft Word citations and bibliographies using community-contributed styles, and can suggest papers from a library while writing. Users can share libraries, assign roles, and collaborate on annotations and metadata. A free Android companion app supports offline viewing, annotation, and highlighting. The open-source repository describes a Windows tool and says commercial Web Library cloud sync ended in 2021. Premium costs $6.67 a month; Premium+ costs $41.67 a month.

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.