GUIDES · ZOTERO ALTERNATIVE
Looking for a Zotero alternative?
Zotero is excellent at collecting and citing references, and it is free and open source. Docr’d is for the reading that comes after: scans rebuilt into searchable text with real equations and tables, notes that link back to the page, and drafts built from the evidence. You can bring your Zotero library across in a few minutes and keep using Zotero alongside it.
What Docr’d does differently
- Scans become text. Hosted reconstruction turns photocopies and old standards into selectable, searchable text, with formulas as editable LaTeX, tables as real tables and figures with their captions. Every line links back to its spot on the page. See PDF to Markdown and PDF to LaTeX.
- Search reaches inside documents. One search covers your notes and the text of every document, reconstructed scans and formulas included.
- Notes point at the evidence. Notes are Markdown with math, and a quote brings its citation and page number along. A link reopens the exact page and region of the document.
- From reading to writing. Build an outline from your marks and notes, then export it as a cited Markdown draft with page locators, ready for pandoc.
- Finding what to read next. Explore the references, citing papers and similar work of anything you have saved on a research map, and follow journals, authors and feeds in one inbox.
Where Zotero is the better fit
- Zotero is free and open source. The Docr’d desktop app is free, but hosted OCR, sync and discovery need a free place or a paid plan.
- Zotero has word processor plugins for Word, LibreOffice and Google Docs. Docr’d has none: you copy formatted citations, or keep a BibTeX, BibLaTeX, RIS or CSL JSON file updated automatically for LaTeX, pandoc or another tool to read.
- Zotero is mature, with a large community and many add-ons. Docr’d is in early access, so expect rough edges.
Side by side
| Docr’d | Zotero | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free desktop app; paid plans for cloud features | Free; 300 MB of file storage included, with paid upgrades or your own WebDAV |
| Platforms | macOS, Windows, Linux and a web app | macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android, plus a web library |
| Scanned PDFs | Rebuilt into searchable text, formulas and tables | Read and annotated as they are; no built-in OCR |
| Search inside documents | Full text, including reconstructed scans and formulas | Full text of PDFs with a text layer, EPUB, HTML and plain text |
| Citation styles | 14 common styles built in, plus independent CSL style files you import | More than 10,000 CSL styles |
| Word processor plugins | None | Word, LibreOffice and Google Docs |
| Export | BibTeX, BibLaTeX, RIS, CSL JSON; documents as Markdown or LaTeX | BibTeX, RIS, CSL JSON and more |
Bringing your library across
Docr’d reads your Zotero data folder directly and copies what you choose: references, PDFs, EPUBs and snapshots, the marks you made in Zotero’s PDF reader with their colours and comments, notes, tags, related items and collections. Zotero itself is never changed, so you can try Docr’d without giving anything up, and import again later to bring over what is new. The Zotero import guide walks through it step by step.
From Mendeley, EndNote or another reference manager, export a BibTeX, RIS or CSL JSON file and import it from the same place. Those files carry references only, so add the PDFs afterwards.