Free, open-source reference manager that collects, organizes, cites, and syncs your research across every device.
Zotero is the open-source standard for managing citations and PDFs. One click captures a paper, book, or webpage; Zotero stores the metadata, attaches the PDF, and drops a formatted citation into your word processor. After 20 years it's battle-tested by grad students, professors, and journalists who refuse to pay for EndNote.
Who it's for: Graduate students, academics, journalists, and anyone who reads more than 20 papers a year and needs citations that don't break.
The Zotero Connector browser extension saves any page, PDF, or preprint to your library with full metadata in a single click.
Highlight, annotate, and extract notes from PDFs inside Zotero. Notes are searchable and sync across devices.
Generate a bibliography in 10,000+ citation styles (APA, MLA, Chicago) without installing anything — perfect for quick citations.
Your library syncs to Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. Free tier includes 300MB of cloud storage; paid plans start at $20/yr.
If you're in academia, research, or serious nonfiction writing, Zotero is the reference manager to beat in 2026. It's free, it's private, and it just works. Spend the $20/yr on storage and never lose a citation again.