note.md

It depends what you want it to do. If you only need a citation manager, Zotero is the long-standing free option. If you only need notes, Obsidian or Notion are popular choices. note.md is built for the people who want all of it in one place (reading PDFs, taking linked notes, managing citations and writing) without juggling four apps or syncing libraries across them.

Zotero is excellent at what it does (managing references), but it's a separate app from where you actually write. note.md keeps the reference manager, the PDF reader, the notes editor and the citation system in one window, with every citation in your draft linked back to the exact highlighted passage you took it from.

Use a single tool that holds all three rather than syncing between them. In note.md, your sources (PDFs) live in Knowledge Management, your notes are written as articles in the same project, and citations created with /cite stay anchored to specific bookmarks inside your PDFs, so months later you can still click any citation and land on the exact passage that justified it.

Yes. note.md is local-first: your notes, your PDFs, your indexes and all AI features run entirely on your Mac. You don't need an internet connection to read, write, search, or run local-AI workflows like /scan or matrix extraction. The one download is the language model behind /scan and matrix extraction: several gigabytes, fetched once when you install it in AI Settings. After that, none of this needs a connection.

No. Your notes never leave your machine. All AI in note.md runs locally on-device. There is no cloud server collecting your content, no telemetry uploading the text of your articles or sources, and nothing of yours used for model training.

With your PDFs, yes: drop any of them into Knowledge Management and note.md reads the metadata out of the file and generates the citation from it; that reading happens while indexing, which is part of Premium, so without it the citation starts from the filename and the rest is yours to fill in. Importing a Zotero export is a different thing and is not supported yet, so collections, tags and Zotero notes do not come across in one step. That import is being worked on. Going the other way already works, since your bibliography exports as a standard .bib file for LaTeX or another reference manager.

Yes. The full writing workspace (the editor, your local vault, Reading Studio, citations, source management, and Graph View) is free forever. Premium unlocks the local-AI workflows.

Semantic search, automatic indexing, Matrix extraction, and Evidence Scan: the local AI features that help you search and organize your own library faster. They surface your work; they don't write it for you.

No. Every AI feature runs locally on your Mac. Your notes and sources never leave your machine, on Free or Premium.

Yes. Students get Premium for $4.99/month or $29.99/year, verified through the App Store.