| I'm the author of Polar. An app very similar to both Zotero and Mendeley: https://getpolarized.io/ Both Mendeley and Zotero are better than Polar (for now) with bibliography management but I believe we're better at both at document annotation and knowledge management. We're also Open Source and launched on Hacker News a few months back. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18219960 We're still rather new so not a lot of people have heard of us yet but moving forward very aggressively. I'd also like to thank the Zotero guys for posting their notes about the Mendeley encryption issue. I think this is a completely unacceptable situation and antithetical to what we should expect in the scientific community. The Polar on disk repo is exactly the opposite. We store all your data on disk and your annotations are in JSON format so they're easily hackable. This is part of the design. We MAY add end to end repository encryption at some point but it will be in the users control. We're not doing it to lock the user out or to prevent export. The end to end encryption is so that you can store your repo in the cloud and not have to worry about your data being viewed by anyone other than you. |
I will try your software soon. What I really like so far is the reading progress, which is actually very, very important for me. So far, I have to do this with manual tags in Zotero.
By the way, since this is a work tool, I (and I imagine others) are fully willing and able to pay you for support or storage or other features.
But since Mendeley, me and people I know have become very sensitive about lock-in, encryption and collaboration barriers associated with pro/non-pro accounts. It seems you are determined to take the right steps, I just want to emphasize the importance for your business.
The backlash against Mendeley isn't random. If I build my pipeline on your product, my lifelihood and hours upon hours of crucial work depend on it. This is not a casual software, where switching is inconvenient but not a big deal. Mendeley has f'ed me in a crucial deadline situation, even though I was paying them lots of money. That company is dead to me, and I will badmouth and try to destroy their business any chance I get.