Paperpile or Zotero

iakakadiaris
Hello,
What arguments can I use to convince my collaborators to use zotero as opposed to paperpile?
  • emilianoeheyns

    I don't know which, if any, of these matter to you, but I've tried to start using Paperpile a number of times (I was an early adopter and still have a perpetual license in fact) and for me:

    • No Linux/LibreOffice support
    • Chrome-only
    • If you use bib(la)tex, it's useless:
      • no title casing
      • offers an option "Preserve all capitalization by surrounding in quotes" -- this tells me all I need to know about their grasp of or care for all matters bib(la)tex
      • no auto-export or pull export
      • no Overleaf integration
      • and bibtex only actually, no biblatex.
    • No integration with stuff like RStudio/Scrivener/etc
    • No plugin extensibility, so you're stuck whatever they feel like offering
    • Cloud service means if the service folds, so does your research library. You could of course make occasional exports, but these are not backups, and the client software is entirely out of your reach; Zotero always has a local copy, and the client is 100% open source.
    • While Paperpile is not expensive, from the pricing page it looks like if you stop paying, you lose access entirely. With Zotero, your data is always yours. Syncing is integrated, and free if you don't sync (many) attachments, but your bailout strategy is simply "stop syncing/paying" and you can use Zotero indefinitely, including future software updates.
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