Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

BibDesk VS ZoteroBib

Compare BibDesk VS ZoteroBib 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.

ZoteroBib logo ZoteroBib

ZoteroBib is a free service to help people quickly create bibliographies without installing any...
  • BibDesk Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-08-02
  • ZoteroBib Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-09-25

BibDesk videos

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

ZoteroBib videos

Using ZoteroBib to make easy bibliographies

More videos:

  • Review - ZoteroBib
  • Review - Create a Quick Bibliography with ZoteroBib

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to BibDesk and ZoteroBib)
Research Tools
77 77%
23% 23
Reference Management
41 41%
59% 59
Information Organization
78 78%
22% 22
Document Management
79 79%
21% 21

User comments

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

Based on our record, ZoteroBib seems to be a lot more popular than BibDesk. While we know about 25 links to ZoteroBib, we've tracked only 2 mentions of BibDesk. 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

ZoteroBib mentions (25)

  • Free APA Citation Generator – Citify: Simplify Your Academic Citations
    Does it only cite web pages? What can it do over https://zbib.org/ or regular Zotero? - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • Is there an easy place that historians use for quick Chicago style citations?
    Zotero also have https://zbib.org to build citations and bibliographies. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Advice to write a PhD thesis using LaTeX?
    Hopefully, you already organized literature references as .bib file in the bibtex format. There are multiple managers available (survey wikipedia), and research libraries offer workshops on an afternoon to set you up an going. One of them is zotero - open source, cross-platform, well documented (there is a r/zotero, too). With zoterobib on one hand, the doi of journal articles/ISBN of modern books on the other,... Source: about 1 year ago
  • Arts majors that don't require a tonne of referencing? Please help!!
    I also agree with others that you are doing it backwards. Do all your research before you write to avoid this kind of thing. https://zbib.org/ is OP for making reference lists. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Please can someone help me with referencing this website link! The reference in question is on line 708, and in the PDF, half of the website link is missing and it overhangs.
    See, e.g. Installment 12 of learnlatex. And no, you don't have to type the bibtex .bib files on your own - indeed, in case you have an ISBN of modern books (1960s and later) and a doi for journal articles, you can compile this without any installation e.g. With zotero's separate free page zoterobib. Source: about 1 year ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing BibDesk and ZoteroBib, 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.

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

Paperpile - Clean and simple and reference management for the web. Sync your PDFs to Google Drive and cite your papers in Google Docs.

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.

CiteDrive - CiteDrive is a cloud-first, collaborative, BibTeX-native reference manager created by and for Overleaf, LaTeX, and R Markdown users.