I have nothing bug praise for Zotero. Zotero is absolutely essential to my workflow as a researcher, second only to Emacs. Without Zotero, I would be spending inordinate amounts of time keeping all my papers + associated citation information organized. Zotero just takes care of it all. I love the iOS app—I read and markup papers on my iPad and everything gets synced smoothly.
I've been a paying member for a few years now. Part of it is for the storage (PDF packrat here) but mostly because I want to support development. Please consider supporting them if they help you in your work—they're worth it. https://www.zotero.org/storage
> Zotero is open source and developed by an independent, nonprofit organization that has no financial interest in your private information. With Zotero, you always stay in control of your own data.
Refreshing as a cool breeze on a hot summer's day.
Right up until one tries to set up a self-hosted server (spoiler - you can't, at least not without 'significant effort' - they themselves say that if you ask about it).
Is this intentional crippling / obfuscation, or did they just bother to do the necessary work for the server-side software robust enough to run on different HW & SW setups?
Did you sync all data to multiple computers without a Zotero account? Zotero's documentation said WebDAV could sync attachment files. But everything else required a Zotero account.[1]
I highly recommend everyone to use Zotero. Their original marketing as being 'for academics' is entirely wrong and it is a first-in-class bookmark/knowledge manager.
There are many software recommendations that seem sort of hype-y: Obsidian, Notion, Keybase, etc. Zotero is not that and is a daily driver for me for years. It has also replaced Calibre for me although YMMV there.
I second the recommendation for Zotero, especially if you find yourself buried under PDFs. Two things make it very useful for me. First, it organizes my PDFs and lets me search them, instead of manually searching through directories. Second, it has an OCR plugin, so I can OCR old PDFs and search the text.
I haven't used Zotero in anger for a few years and can't get to my laptop right now to verify. But I used to rely on automatic exports to a folder that I sync'd elsewhere. Never used a paid Zotero subscription, never "self-hosted" it, and had many gigs of data (including PDF attachments) working fine for years.
I used "better bibtex" (?) to ensure files were reliably renamed and moved to an appropriate folder, all automatically.
A real set-and-forget setup that ran without hitch for years.
uh oh - didn't realize sync was paid (stupidly). apparently i am at 99.6% of the free tier
now i'm interested in the answer to your question - i have my own machine running 24/7 that i would love to use. i like the software enough that maybe i'd pay/donate
My kid was talking about all the papers they had to cite in their college class. I started to suggest that they check out Zotero, but they stopped me to explain that their teachers already had them all using it.
Thank you for getting the kids started off on the right foot, professor!
I've been using Zotero as my "book" organizer. I have all my epubs, pdfs, everything there. Since version 7 I think you can read PDFs within Zotero, and I love it. I keep custom labels so I easily search for stuff. The only feature I don't use is everything about citation (funny enough). Before Zotero I had everything in file system directories, but I wanted the feeling of having one place (one app) where I could see all my books by category, by read/no-read, etc.
Having said this, I will probably wait a bit before upgrading to V8 (since I use it everyday, so I wouldn't like to face bugs and the like)
My experience with Zotero was similar - I tried adding my ebook library to it as an alternative to Calibre because I really want to sort of categorize and easily reference my books and/or get like library call number groupings which is not trivial with Calibre.
I deleted it after it only found about half of my books, which incidentially is my chief problem with Calibre.
Someday I will write an indexer with either a web search tool or an LLM interface to better find info on my books but for now I just spend too much time browsing through the files which makes me sad (but not sad enough yet to overcome the laziness)
> I deleted it after it only found about half of my books, which incidentially is my chief problem with Calibre.
Just find the citation on the web like at Open Library or somewhere, grab it, and add the book as an attachment.
I wouldn't drop it because all the stuff may not be done automatically. If you're going to read the books, you should be spending hours with them. I myself only put them into Zotero when I start reading them. I don't need to crowd it with wishful thinking. It's bloated and gets slower the more entries you add.
Post Mendeley shutdown, zotero has been an awesome replacement (while not being controlled by Elsevier). Given the amount of PDF's that I see during researchy times in my life, it's been an absolute godsend. Highly reccommend!
Zotero is the best. However, if your brain is highly tuned to use Mendeley Desktop, note that they backed down on killing it, they just won't add new features (where that leaves security updates I'm not sure).
Readit News
I've been a paying member for a few years now. Part of it is for the storage (PDF packrat here) but mostly because I want to support development. Please consider supporting them if they help you in your work—they're worth it. https://www.zotero.org/storage
Refreshing as a cool breeze on a hot summer's day.
[1] https://www.zotero.org/support/sync
Deleted Comment
There are many software recommendations that seem sort of hype-y: Obsidian, Notion, Keybase, etc. Zotero is not that and is a daily driver for me for years. It has also replaced Calibre for me although YMMV there.
I used "better bibtex" (?) to ensure files were reliably renamed and moved to an appropriate folder, all automatically.
A real set-and-forget setup that ran without hitch for years.
now i'm interested in the answer to your question - i have my own machine running 24/7 that i would love to use. i like the software enough that maybe i'd pay/donate
Thank you for getting the kids started off on the right foot, professor!
https://www.zotero.org/getinvolved
Having said this, I will probably wait a bit before upgrading to V8 (since I use it everyday, so I wouldn't like to face bugs and the like)
I deleted it after it only found about half of my books, which incidentially is my chief problem with Calibre.
Someday I will write an indexer with either a web search tool or an LLM interface to better find info on my books but for now I just spend too much time browsing through the files which makes me sad (but not sad enough yet to overcome the laziness)
Just find the citation on the web like at Open Library or somewhere, grab it, and add the book as an attachment.
I wouldn't drop it because all the stuff may not be done automatically. If you're going to read the books, you should be spending hours with them. I myself only put them into Zotero when I start reading them. I don't need to crowd it with wishful thinking. It's bloated and gets slower the more entries you add.
https://blog.mendeley.com/2025/07/09/mendeley-is-not-going-a...
I'm glad part of their stack is open source but I just wish they made it as easy as a compose file to run this on prem.