Resources

Short, practical guides for choosing and switching to free tools, plus links to good documentation elsewhere.

Switching guides

How to switch from EndNote to ZoteroExport your EndNote library as XML, then import it into Zotero with File → Import. Save the XML in the right folder and your PDFs come across too.
How to switch from Mendeley to ZoteroZotero can import your whole online Mendeley library, folders included, using File → Import → “Mendeley Reference Manager (online import)”.
How to open SPSS .sav files in R with havenInstall the haven package, then read_sav() loads your SPSS data into R with value labels and special missing values kept. write_sav() saves back to .sav.

Stars: how many people have bookmarked the project on GitHub or GitLab. It is a rough signal of popularity, not of quality, and projects hosted on SourceForge, Savannah or Bitbucket have no star count at all.
Last commit: when code was last pushed to the project's repository. A recent date means someone is actively working on it. An old date isn't always bad: some mature tools change slowly.
Licence: the terms you get the software under. Copyleft licences (GPL, AGPL, LGPL, MPL) keep the code open when it's shared; permissive licences (MIT, BSD, Apache) allow almost any use. "Free, proprietary" tools cost nothing but you can't see or change the code, and some limit commercial use.
Not open source: shown when a tool has no public source code, so there is nothing to count.

Start from the job: list the handful of things you actually do in the paid tool every week, and test those first.
Check files in and out: make sure the free tool can open your existing files and export what your colleagues, supervisor or supplier needs.
Check where it runs: Windows, macOS, Linux or the browser, and whether your organisation lets you install it.
Look at activity: the last-commit date and recent releases tell you whether bugs get fixed.
Read the licence: especially for business use: some free proprietary plans are for non-commercial use only.
Trial it on real work: run one real but low-stakes project in both tools and compare the results before switching fully.
Find the help: official documentation, forums and community chat matter more than a feature list when you get stuck.

SPSS data files: PSPP, JASP and jamovi can open .sav files directly. In R, the haven package reads them with read_sav().
SPSS syntax: PSPP understands much of SPSS's syntax, but not every procedure. Run an old analysis in both and compare the output before relying on it.
MATLAB code: GNU Octave runs a lot of MATLAB code unchanged. Toolbox functions are the usual gap, so check those first.
EndNote and Mendeley libraries: Zotero can import a Mendeley library directly, and EndNote libraries via an exported XML or RIS file. Check that attachments and notes came across.
Overleaf projects: download the project as a zip and open it in TeXstudio with a local TeX distribution such as TeX Live or MiKTeX.
Qualitative projects: ask whether your current tool can export the REFI-QDA exchange format, and whether the free tool can import it. Otherwise plan to re-import documents and recode.

The Turing Way ↗A community handbook on reproducible, ethical and collaborative data science.
Software Carpentry lessons ↗Free lessons on the Unix shell, Git, Python and R for researchers.
R for Data Science ↗Free online book on importing, tidying, visualising and modelling data in R.
haven: read SPSS, Stata and SAS files in R ↗Documentation for the R package that imports .sav, .dta and .sas7bdat files.
Zotero: importing from Mendeley ↗Zotero's own guide to moving a Mendeley library across.
jamovi user manual ↗Getting started with jamovi, including opening data from other programs.
GNU Octave documentation ↗The official Octave manual.
Open Source Initiative: licences ↗The approved open-source licences and what they allow.

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