Mendeley
Elsevier's free reference manager, with paid AI tools for your own library
Overview
Mendeley is Elsevier's reference manager: a library of papers and PDFs with annotation, sync and citations in Word through Mendeley Cite. Since December 2025 it adds AI tools that work on your own library: Reading Assistant, Compare Experiments and Ask My Library. The reference manager is free; storage and AI are sold in Plus, Pro and Max plans.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 14 Oct 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- 2GB storage
- 5 Reading Assistant questions
- Reading Assistant (unlimited)
- 5GB storage
- Reading Assistant (unlimited)
- Compare Experiments
- Ask My Library
- 10GB storage
- Reading Assistant (unlimited)
- Compare Experiments
- Ask My Library
- Unlimited storage
Use cases
What you can produce with Mendeley
- A synced reference library with automatic citation-detail extraction from added PDFs
- In-text citations and bibliographies in Microsoft Word through the Mendeley Cite add-in
- PDF reading, highlighting and annotation in Reference Manager
- Cited answers to questions about a single paper from Reading Assistant
- Side-by-side tables of methods, results and conclusions for up to ten papers (Compare Experiments)
- Cited answers drawn from your whole library through Ask My Library
- Shared groups and catalogue search for adding papers to your library
Mendeley is still a dependable free reference manager, with straightforward PDF import, annotation, sync and Word citations. The AI added in December 2025 is sensibly scoped: it answers questions about papers you already hold and cites the passage it used, rather than inventing a literature search. Compare Experiments, which tables methods and results across up to ten papers, is the most useful of the three, and it needs Pro at $9.99 a month.
The Desktop-to-Reference-Manager transition has been bumpy, and Elsevier's ownership still puts some researchers off. Zotero is the open-source alternative. For students and researchers who want a free tool that works inside Word, Mendeley remains a safe choice.
What we found
Mendeley is a reference manager. It collects papers, extracts their citation details, stores PDFs for reading and annotation, and inserts citations and bibliographies into Microsoft Word through the Mendeley Cite add-in. It began as a London start-up whose first public beta shipped in August 2008, and the academic publisher Elsevier bought it in 2013. Inside Elsevier it now sits below LeapSpace, the publisher's research AI workspace, which the Mendeley pricing page offers as the next step up.
The software has been through an awkward transition. In 2019 Elsevier introduced Mendeley Reference Manager and Mendeley Cite as successors to the original Mendeley Desktop, and the mobile apps were pulled from the app stores in March 2021. Downloads of Mendeley Desktop stopped in September 2022, but on 9 July 2025 Mendeley reversed course, saying Desktop is here to stay with essential maintenance and security fixes but no new features. It can be downloaded again; new development goes into Reference Manager.
AI arrived on 8 December 2025, and it is deliberately narrow. Reading Assistant answers questions about one PDF and cites the passage it used. Compare Experiments builds a side-by-side table of goals, methods, results and conclusions for up to ten selected papers. Ask My Library answers questions across a user's own library using semantic search, again with citations. All three work only on documents already in the library; looking beyond it is what LeapSpace is sold for.
The core reference manager remains free, with 2GB of storage and five Reading Assistant questions. Plus at $4.99 a month adds unlimited Reading Assistant and 5GB; Pro at $9.99 adds Compare Experiments and Ask My Library with 10GB; Max at $14.99 removes the storage cap. Paying yearly gives a month free. For a student who needs a free citation tool with good Word integration, Mendeley still does the job; Zotero remains the open-source alternative for anyone uneasy about a publisher holding their library.
Compiled by RECATOOLS from public sources: vendor documentation and pricing, code repositories and published reporting.
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Mendeley's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Mendeley unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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