The core functions of all three programmes are essentially the same, that it, to simplify in-text citations and generating a reference list for your research paper, assignment or thesis/dissertation.
Technical Support
While Mendeley and Zotero are open source free-to-use platforms, EndNote is subscription based and with the subscription, we get an immense amount of technical support and access to instructional resources that are of greater quality than that of Mendeley or Zotero.
Cost
With the latter two programmes, however, your storage capacity is limited and you have to pay extra if you want or need additional storage. With EndNote, you essentially have unlimited storage.
Windows/Mac Compatibility
All three programmes are compatible with Windows and MacOS and with MS Word and MS Word Online. However, Mendeley and Zotero seem to have the edge when it comes to being compatible with open source word processors.
Availability on other platforms
All three programmes have a local desktop and online version available. However, EndNote also has an app for iPads, but not for Android just as yet.
Functionality
All three programmes have similar means of importing references, either through direct export from databases, adding them manually, importing PDFs that generate references if the necessary metadata is available. Mendeley has a very convenient, if somewhat unstable, web importer that makes importing multiple references from a website much easier. EndNote also has a web extension called EndNote Click, which works well on Google Scholar and some academic databases, like Web of Science and PubMed. But it still has a ways to go before it is as effective as Mendeley Web Importer. EndNote can also be connected to your institution, i.e. SU, and through that you can find the full text of references if we have access to them. This is not a fool-proof system either and it does not always find the PDFs, but it is a new feature of EndNote and is sure to improve in effectiveness.
Style editing is perhaps where EndNote outshines Mendeley and Zotero by far. EndNote has a simplified style editor that allows you to customise your referencing style to exactly fit the needs of your department, faculty or the journal you aim to publish in. EndNote also has an online library of 7000+ styles available, so before you decide to create a style for a journal, be sure to check there isn't one available already. Mendeley and Zotero make use of a Citation Style Language editor to create and edit styles and these are tricky, even for experienced users to navigate and use.
All three platforms have online search functionality that vary in effectiveness. Our advice remains that you should rather stick to using academic databases when you search for academic sources.
Mendeley does have one feature that is sorely missed in EndNote. That is its notebook. While you can make notes and annotations in PDFs on EndNote, with Mendeley you get a notebook where you can view and navigate through all the notes you have made in all of your PDFs. We're holding thumbs that EndNote will develop a similar feature soon. The benefit of EndNote being a subscription based platform is that they continuously need to innovate to maintain their client base, so we are certain that features that are currently lacking will soon be added.
Sharing and Collaboration
All three platforms have great sharing and collaboration options available. Unfortunately, with all three your team will all have to use the same platform since they are not cross-compatible. So if you use EndNote, your whole team will have to use it and this can make it difficult if you are collaborating with colleagues from other institutions who do not have access to EndNote. One thing that does make EndNote different to Mendeley or Zotero is that you can share your entire library with colleagues, or just the folders you want to share. With Mendeley and Zotero, you can only share folders.
Yes, we have an institutional subscription, which means that any student or staff member at SU can get EndNote. However, we still discourage undergraduates from using reference managers, since they first need to learn how to reference and cite properly before they can make optimal use of reference managers.
No, you do not have to switch over to EndNote, especially if you are in the advanced stages of your thesis/dissertation. It can be a tedious and distracting exercise to switch over to EndNote at the later stages, so we recommend that you rather finish your current research project before switching over.
Unlike EndNote for Windows, EndNote Mac does not prompt you to create a new library the first time you launch the software and you need to do it manually. To learn more on how to do that, check Step 15 in the installation instructions here.
Unfortunately, there is no way to replicate these folders and you will have to manually reorganise your references once you have imported your Mendeley library to EndNote.
Yes, you can either share your entire library, or specific folders (called Groups in EndNote) with colleagues. More about sharing with EndNote can be viewed in these PDFs:
Windows
MacOS
Yes absolutely. EndNote works perfectly well without internet access. The online library serves more as a backup of your data.
You can learn more about importing references here:
Windows
MacOS
You can learn more about importing references here:
Windows
MacOS
