Mendeley – a free alternative

Create a spot-on reference in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and other styles

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What is Mendeley?

Mendeley is a piece of software designed as a reference management tool. The Mendeley software is one of the popular references & citations generators.

What are the pros and cons of Mendeley?

Pros:

  • the basic features of Mendeley are available for free;
  • Mendeley is used by many educational institutions;
  • the Mendeley desktop app allows generating references in many citation styles;
  • the Mendeley download package includes the Mendeley Word plugin and the Mendeley Chrome extension.

Cons:

  • there is no Mendeley online version: to work with the app, you need to download Mendeley and install it as a standalone application;
  • as the Mendeley web version does not exist, using the software from your mobile phone can be inconvenient;
  • the references and in-text citations generated within the Mendeley app contain many errors, which is due to the fact that the developers of Mendeley use the open-source code shared by Mendeley, Zotero, Citation Machine, and most other citation generators;
  • as Mendeley uses third-party code, it cannot react to customer suggestions, eliminate errors, or add new features. As a result, your references remain faulty;
  • errors exist even with basic references such as book references in APA, MLA, or Chicago;
  • the interface of Mendeley is very hard to take grasp of and to master. You need to spend many days on learning how to use Mendeley, how to apply the Mendeley citation tool, and so on. This is hard and this deprives you of precious time to devote to your thesis or paper;
  • the interface is user-unfriendly. In addition, Mendeley contains many supplementary features in addition to the generation of references, which may obstruct your work process;
  • there is no adaptation to the specifics of your country’s citations, and even if translation exists for bibliographic references, it is machine-based and inherently incorrect.

How is Grafiati better than Mendeley?

The approach of Grafiati is groundbreaking to the industry of online citation generators. We are persuaded that the only way to achieve perfect references and citations is not to rely on the outdated open-source citation code used by Mendeley, Zotero, Citethisforme, and other similar services.

Instead of offering 10,000 citation styles, Grafiati offers only a limited number of styles, but all crafted by hand. We develop every algorithm individually, and, as a result, we achieve the greatest depth, accuracy, and, most importantly, flexibility: we can extend and develop our citation tools, add new features, and reach excellence.

So, here is why you would choose Grafiati instead of Mendeley:

  • With Grafiati, you get more accurate bibliographic references and in-text citations formed in accordance with the latest editions of the most popular citation styles such as APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, and the like.
  • Instead of downloading the Mendeley desktop app, you can use Grafiati right away from any device: no need to do any additional actions. Instead of memorising your Mendeley login and password, you can sign in to Grafiati with your social network account.
  • We value your time. As a result, our web service delivers the greatest user experience. You don’t have to read any guides or watch any videos such as Mendeley tutorials at all. We’ve designed all layout, buttons, forms, and tips in a way for you to use them without any special knowledge.
  • We are modern and contemporary: our interface is very convenient, adapted to all mobile device, and pleasant to work with.
  • We offer many tools to make your references perfect: from the flawless ordering engine taking into consideration all the nuances of each particular citation style to the word case analyser tool that will allow you controlling the case of titles in your references when converting between different referencing styles.
  • We allow not only creating references but also formatting your bibliography page according to the chosen style.
  • We keep it simple and not overbear our website with any functions not related to the generation of citations and references.
  • We are always happy to get feedback from you. We are updating our service constantly, and many of our features were implemented based on the requests of our users.

How to use your bibliographic management service?

Grafiati is available as freemium software, which means that you can use our website for free or can subscribe to one of our paid plans in order to get the unlimited opportunities with your citations.

All operations on the service are performed from the homepage for your convenience.

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