Zotero or EndNote
Both are reference managers: they collect and organise papers, insert citations in Word and build the reference list. They differ in price, Chinese national standard styles, cloud storage and AI features. Both manage only the papers you have already found; finding support for a written paragraph and checking whether a reference is real is what Acadwrite does.
Product details checked against both websites, style repositories and purchase pages on 22 October 2026. Numbers in brackets link to the sources at the end of the page.
Choose by the job in front of you
| What you need to do | Start with | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Spend nothing | Zotero | Free and open source with 300 MB of free cloud storage; 2 GB costs $20 a year if you need more.[1][2] |
| Your university requires GB/T 7714-2025 | Zotero | The style repository has the 2025 numeric, author-date and note styles; EndNote's official style is a numeric one published in 2021.[3][8] |
| Sync many PDF attachments to the cloud | EndNote | With a purchased licence, EndNote Web attachment storage is unlimited; unlimited Zotero storage costs $120 a year.[7][2] |
| Chat with, summarise or translate PDFs inside your library | EndNote | EndNote 2025's Research Assistant chats with documents, extracts key takeaways and translates whole PDFs or selections; only the 2025 version has it.[9] |
| Find support for a paragraph you have written | Acadwrite | Reference managers insert only papers already in your library; Acadwrite finds the sentences that need sources, searches candidates, checks the originals and flags weak support. |
| Check whether AI-supplied references are real | Acadwrite | The reference checking skill verifies authors, year, volume, pages and DOI against authoritative bibliographic data and never substitutes a similar paper. |
Side by side
Grey text means the vendor's pages do not say. Acadwrite is not a reference manager and appears only in the rows where it is relevant.
| Zotero, EndNote and Acadwrite compared | Zotero | EndNote | Acadwrite |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free and open source, developed by a nonprofit[1] | EndNote 2025 one-time purchase: $275 full, $150 student, $125 upgrade; 30-day trial[6] | Pay per use at ¥2 per credit; citation finding costs 5 credits per document |
| Cloud storage | 300 MB free; 2 GB $20, 6 GB $60, unlimited $120 a year[2] | Free EndNote Online 2 GB; unlimited attachments on EndNote Web with a licence[7] | Workspace holds your PDFs, notes and drafts |
| GB/T 7714 | Both 2015 and 2025 editions, each in numeric, author-date and note styles[3] | Official style is a numeric one published in 2021; no 2025 style found[8] | Reference list generated with the text |
| Total styles | Over 10,000 (10,868 in the repository that day)[3] | Over 6,000 or 7,500+ (the two pages differ)[12][7] | Not applicable |
| Word add-ins | Word, LibreOffice and Google Docs, installed with the app[4] | Word desktop and Apple Pages; Google Docs and Word Online with 2025 and 21[7] | Drafts written in the workspace and exported to Word |
| Import and export | RIS, BibTeX, CSL JSON, EndNote XML and more[5] | BibTeX, RIS and tab-delimited[10] | Not applicable |
| AI features | No built-in AI | 2025 Research Assistant chats with PDFs, extracts takeaways and translates; EndNote says it does not train models on user data[9][11] | Searches literature, adds citations to paragraphs, checks references, writes reviews |
| Finding new papers | No search database; you collect from the web and databases | Shows Web of Science citing articles and related records[9] | Searches journal articles, arXiv and PubMed in Chinese and English |
Skills beyond reference management
Reference managers handle papers you already have. Checking that they are real, understanding them and writing them into a paper each have skills written for academic work. They come from open-source projects on GitHub; enable them in the skill market and use them in workspace chats.
- 23
academic skills from 9 open-source projects, covering writing, polishing, review, verification and topic design
- 50K
stars for nature-skills, source of 10 skills including reference checking, close reading and Nature writing
- 54K
stars for K-Dense scientific-agent-skills, source of 5 skills including scientific writing and critical appraisal
- 14K
stars for AI-Research-SKILLs, source of the conference paper and ideation skills
Star counts as shown on GitHub on 22 October 2026.
Checking and close reading
Reference checkingused in reference checks
Verifies authors, title, year, volume, pages and DOI against authoritative bibliographic metadata, catching year conflicts, author-order anomalies and mismatched DOIs.
nature-skillsPaper reading card
Breaks a paper into 16 fixed sections: method modules, the evidence chain from experiments to claims, and author-stated limits kept apart from critique.
nature-skillsCritical appraisal of claims
Examines design, bias and confounding and statistical misuse, grading evidence with GRADE and Cochrane risk-of-bias frameworks.
K-Dense scientific-agent-skills
Writing it in
Evidence-based scientific writing
Never invents data or citations, applies CONSORT, PRISMA, STROBE and other reporting guidelines by study design, and structures each IMRaD section.
K-Dense scientific-agent-skillsNature paper writing
Combines rules for paper type, section and target journal to draft the abstract through discussion from the author's own evidence.
nature-skillsThesis polishing
For Chinese science and engineering theses: diagnoses or rewrites against more than 60 rules on wording, sentences, punctuation, structure and equations.
graduate-thesis-polish-and-write-skill
FAQ
Styles and prices follow each vendor's current pages.
Zotero or EndNote: which is better?
If you want to spend nothing or need GB/T 7714-2025, choose Zotero: free, open source, with the 2025 styles available. If you have many attachments to sync or want to chat with and translate PDFs in your library, choose EndNote 2025: $150 once for students, with unlimited EndNote Web attachments.
Does Zotero have a GB/T 7714-2025 style?
Yes. The Zotero style repository has China National Standard GB/T 7714-2025 in numeric, author-date and note versions, alongside the 2015 edition.
How much is EndNote, and is there a student price?
EndNote 2025 is a one-time purchase: $275 full, $150 student, and $125 to upgrade from EndNote 21 or earlier. One licence covers one person on up to three computers, and there is a 30-day trial.
Does EndNote 2025's AI train on my library?
EndNote's official blog says it uses commercially pre-trained models through a private setup, does not train public LLMs, and does not pass any user data to LLMs for any purpose.
If I use Zotero or EndNote, do I still need Acadwrite?
It depends on the missing step. Reference managers store papers, insert citations and format them; Acadwrite covers what they do not: finding and checking support for paragraphs you have written, verifying whether a reference is real, and writing a set of papers into a review.
Sources
All pages accessed on 22 October 2026.
- [1]Zotero：Homepage
- [2]Zotero：Storage pricing
- [3]Zotero：Style Repository: GB/T 7714-2025 numeric
- [4]Zotero：Word Processor Integration
- [5]Zotero：Importing standardized formats
- [6]EndNote：Buy EndNote 2025
- [7]EndNote：Compare EndNote versions
- [8]EndNote：Chinese Standard GBT7714 (numeric) style
- [9]EndNote：Product details (Research Assistant)
- [10]EndNote：BibTeX Export style
- [11]EndNote：Introducing EndNote Research Assistant (official blog)
- [12]EndNote：Output styles download