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.
WebDAV support is nice to save money, but from a privacy perspective it’s a huge bummer that the sync servers get all your citation metadata. A better self-hosting story¹ is one path to resolving this. End-to-end encryption² similar to e.g. Firefox Sync is another. Zotero has a security overview³ that shows they clearly care about good practices, but it’s still bothersome to have to trust the server when many other applications have proven E2EE works great even for non-technical users⁴.
Unfortunately from the main Zotero dev’s responses, it seems clear that they have no incentive to implement either and probably never will (look, the same comment from 2½ [now 4!] years ago⁵) without some shift in circumstances (massive increase in funding, new regulatory requirements). Even if a community member implemented the entirety of either solution, dstillman can just (rightly, tbh) claim it will increase their maintenance burden when they are trying to support paying customers.
1: https://github.com/zotero/dataserver/issues/105#issuecomment...
2: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/comment/380780/#Comment...
3: https://www.zotero.org/support/security
4: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/advanced-data-prote...
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!
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.
Personally, I used auto-export for all additional functionality. So, I didn't use any Word (LibreOffice) plugins that hooked into Zotero or whatever. I'd just consume a giant .bib file as and when necessary.
On modern hardware Zotero is probably fine. And it's reasonably flexible. A suggestion: export/import a big refs file (plus PDF attachments) and see if it can handle your daily workload. I suspect it will.
You might say it was just another excuse to curate my thousands of bookmarks and recreate a new tagging structure yet again, but… well, you wouldn‘t be wrong. :-)
This is a sneaky edit completely different from the original post I replied to, which was about how bloated zotero was and how the op had uni stalled immediately and gone back to text files on disk.
I've heard of zotero maybe a year or so ago, and was curious about it, but never took the plunge. I manage the bulk of my info/knowledge base across mostly locally-saved text files, with a few other tidbits leveraging PDFs and word process files (.odt, .docx)...and really i only use the latter for pasting in screenshots. And, then of course simply synching them across devices using syncthing.
While my approach works great for the majority of the time, i can imagine there might be some functions that some other tools might bring me which i might be missing...I suppose one thing that i lack is a graph of linkages for content that might live in different, separate files but might be related, etc. So, would you be willing to share your opinion, experience for what makes zotero better than text files on a disk? :-) Thanks!
I have nothing against text files on the disk but zotero is simply much better as a knowledge/source manager.