Zettlr/Zettlr

What it does

Zettlr calls itself a publication workbench. You point it at a folder of Markdown files and it gives you a file tree, full-text search, syntax highlighting, snippets for boilerplate text and themes including a dark mode. It reads citation libraries from reference managers such as Zotero and JabRef, so a citation key in the text becomes a formatted reference in the output. Export runs through Pandoc and LaTeX, with support for Word and LaTeX templates, so a department's required layout can be applied to your own plain text. It supports Zettelkasten-style links between notes, which is the practice of connecting short notes to each other rather than filing them in one tree. The interface is translated into more than a dozen languages. It does not store your work anywhere but your own disk — there is no built-in sync and no collaboration — and it does not run on 32-bit systems. Full export needs LaTeX installed separately.

Why it matters

Who it suits. People writing something long with references: a thesis, a book, a paper, a report that has to come out as a Word file in someone else's template. The combination of plain text files, citation keys and Pandoc export is exactly that job, and it is a narrow enough job that general note applications do it badly. Together with JabRef/jabref above it makes a complete setup with no account anywhere. Skip it if you want notes that sync to a phone, and skip it if you have never used Markdown, because this is not a word processor with a ribbon.

Verdict. Worth an hour if you have a long document with citations ahead of you, and worth skipping otherwise. The reason to prefer it over a general knowledge tool is that it treats export as a first-class step rather than an afterthought — most note applications can link notes, and almost none can produce a correctly formatted bibliography in a supervisor's template. Three caveats. It is an Electron application, so it is heavier than a text editor. LaTeX is a separate, multi-gigabyte install if you want every export route. And release v4.8.0 is dated 18 September 2026 while the default branch is called develop, so a source build is not the same thing as the release. If linked notes matter more than export, siyuan-note/siyuan and logseq/logseq are built around that instead.