Overview
Mendeley and SciSpace both hold a library of papers and both cite them. Beyond that they diverge: Mendeley is a reference manager that has become simpler over time, and SciSpace is an AI workspace that has become broader.
Reference management. Mendeley still does the core job well. The Web Importer pulls a paper from a journal page with clean metadata; Mendeley Cite inserts citations and bibliographies in Word; PDFs are stored and lightly annotatable; and 2 GB is free. G2 reviewers consistently describe it as among the most user-friendly reference managers to onboard, and its Word citation handling is the feature reviewers praise most. If your only need is store and cite, Mendeley remains a reasonable free choice.
What changed — told through users, not us. In 2022 Elsevier retired Mendeley Desktop in favour of the web-based Mendeley Reference Manager. Reviewers on Capterra and Software Advice describe the transition candidly: the new app is “a lighter version,” “very similar… but still feels a bit strange and non-intuitive,” annotation options are “very limited,” the mobile app “is not possible to run… on your tablet” anymore, and some report sync issues when changing devices. Mendeley has no AI search, summarisation or extraction features.
Where SciSpace picks up. Connect your Mendeley library (SciSpace added Mendeley integration in the November 2025 update) and the AI works from your saved papers: ask a question across them and get a cited answer, chat with any PDF, extract sample sizes and findings into a comparison table, and draft with in-text citations in the AI Writer. You don’t abandon the library you built in Mendeley — you put an AI layer on it.
Where Mendeley genuinely wins. It’s free with 2 GB of storage and no subscription to outgrow. Mendeley Cite in Word is mature, reliable and supports thousands of styles — SciSpace has no Word plugin. Onboarding is genuinely easy. The Web Importer is excellent. And for a researcher who simply needs to collect and cite, none of SciSpace’s AI features are required. If that’s you, stay on Mendeley.
Our verdict
While Mendeley and SciSpace both manage your papers, they solve different problems — and connect. If you left Mendeley for the AI features, connect your library and keep both. If you left because Desktop went away, SciSpace won’t bring it back — but it does the reading and writing the web app never did.
 Choose Mendeley if you want to… |  Choose SciSpace if you want to… |
|---|---|
| Use a free reference manager with 2 GB storage | Search 280M+ papers in plain language with cited answers |
| Cite in Word with a mature, reliable plugin | Chat with, explain and extract data from your PDFs |
| Collect papers with a one-click Web Importer | Draft a paper with in-text citations in one workspace |
| Keep the simplest possible store-and-cite workflow | Add AI to the library you already built in Mendeley |
Summary vs synthesis: the difference that matters most
Synthesis groups studies by theme, method or finding to show where the field agrees and where it leaves gaps. Mendeley holds the papers and their highlights; the synthesis happens elsewhere. Connect that library to SciSpace and the agent compares the papers in a table, surfaces agreements and contradictions, and carries them into a cited draft.
Value for money
Mendeley’s free tier covers reference management fully; you only pay for storage. SciSpace’s Premium buys the AI stages Mendeley doesn’t offer — search, reading, extraction, writing. They price different jobs.
| Plans (monthly) | | |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Reference Manager + 2 GB storage | Limited Copilot, basic lit review, citation extraction |
| Entry paid | Storage upgrades | Premium — $20/mo ($12/mo annual) |
| Higher tier | Larger storage tiers | Advanced — $70/mo |
| Team | Institutional (via Elsevier) | $18/seat/mo ($8/seat annual) |
