Software Alternatives & Reviews

BibDesk VS Reference Manager

Compare BibDesk VS Reference Manager and see what are their differences

BibDesk logo BibDesk

BibDesk is an organizational software created to help you edit and manage your bibliography. It keeps track of your bibliographic information as well as said information's associated web links and files. Read more about BibDesk.

Reference Manager logo Reference Manager

Reference Manager is the powerful bibliographic solution for workgroups, networks and collaborative projects.
  • BibDesk Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-08-02
  • Reference Manager Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-07

BibDesk videos

Automatically importing publications to BibDesk based on DOI and anystyle-parser

Reference Manager videos

REFERENCE MANAGERS | Everything you need to know about Endnote, Mendeley, and Zotero

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to BibDesk and Reference Manager)
Research Tools
76 76%
24% 24
Information Organization
75 75%
25% 25
Document Management
100 100%
0% 0
Books & Reference
67 67%
33% 33

User comments

Share your experience with using BibDesk and Reference Manager. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, BibDesk seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 2 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

BibDesk mentions (2)

  • A doctoral dissertation build system
    What struck me was "Copyright © 2018–2023 Sean Whitton" on the dissertation. 5 years? Ugh. True story: While writing my philosophy dissertation, I dropped out of grad school to become a Mac developer, and a key factor was the open source Mac bibliography app BibDesk. https://bibdesk.sourceforge.io/. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • BibTeX Tidy
    Https://bibdesk.sourceforge.io/ for Macs uses .bib natively. - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago

Reference Manager mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Reference Manager yet. Tracking of Reference Manager recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing BibDesk and Reference Manager, you can also consider the following products

Mendeley - Easily organize your papers, read & annotate your PDFs, collaborate in private or open groups, and securely access your research from everywhere.

Zotero - Zotero is a free, easy-to-use tool to help you collect, organize, cite, and share research.

EndNote - Accelerate Your Research. Save time, stay organized, collaborate with colleagues and get published with EndNote 20.

JabRef - Graphical Java application for managing bibtex (. bib) databases.‎JabRef · ‎JabRef Help · ‎JabRef | Blog · ‎OpenOffice/LibreOffice .

Qiqqa - Qiqqa is a free research and reference management software. It can be used in many organizational projects from the academic to the personal to the business endeavor. Read more about Qiqqa.

Citavi - Citavi is a program for Microsoft Windows that manages literary references and organizes organizational knowledge.