Why I use Mendeley over EndNote and Zotero for Reference Management

I use iCloud+iPad to organise the papers I read; it's handy because of iPencil. Then, the days came that I had to import citations to the report; iCloud does not have this function…Everyone around me recommended Zotero. I did some googling and decided to mainly use Mendeley and Zotero for a smaller portion of papers. I care about the six factors listed below, especially the cross-platform(iPad) service and PDF editing function.

A brief summary in the table, Zotero is the best; if it gives me 2G free storage, I will use Zotero.

1. Cost

EndNote is a classical reference management tool, but I am not sure why it is so expensive, $165 to $412 for a one-time purchase. I tried it through free university access, but I don't like it because of the PDF functions.

Mendeley and Zotero are both free, with limited online storage, which makes sense.

2. Platform

As I mentioned, I want an iPad app; EndNote provides it. This is why I tried it in the first place. Mendeley used to have an iPad version, but it ended last year, weird. Zotero does…