ASDFASD  Without any doubt EndNote is still the best reference manager ever!

You can share entire libraries between PCs and Macs, and this is essential for someone that works with both platforms, or when you collaborate with people that uses different OS. The integration of EndNote with Microsoft Word is great and now it can also work with Apple Pages.

EndNote its ugly and it has a really bad GUI when comparing to Papers or Sente, but it works a lot better than those two together when you need to write a paper or a thesis.

So do not even bother in buying Sente, it is expensive and it lacks the most essential feature on a reference manager the integration to Word and Pages...   
(Version 5.7.5)

ALANTERRA  I haven't explored all the features of Sente, but it seems to be head and shoulders above its competition. I spent the last few days looking at Sente, Papers, Zotero, and one programs that I didn't even bother to look at due to bad reviews (EndNote).

For my needs, Sente is the best. I am trying to organize a couple of thousand pdfs (and a few other kinds of documents), and continue to research various areas from that base. Sente seems to have a strong emphasis on medical research (it uses PubMed as a default database to look for things, and I haven't figured out how to change that). But the tools of being able to look up bibliographic data automatically in Google Scholar, use keywords, and browse pdfs from within the program make the program exactly what I need.

As of Feb 2009, the developers are giving some insight into the next version of the program, which looks to be a useful improvement. It will be a free upgrade to anyone who purchases the program after Jan 1, 2009.  
(Version 5.7.3)

RACHAEL GARRETT  If you are a student is affordable if you purchase a group license for 10 users and then split the costs!! Plus a lot of schools will reimburse you for half of the cost of the software.   
(Version 5.7.1)

ZEBA  One more thing... this is the price for 3 licenses. I need only one license for most of my programs, as most of other users (students) do, but developer is not willing to offer that in their business model.  
(Version 5.6.16)

ASDFASD  It aims to be used in academia, but at US $89.95 it's to expensive to be used by students!

So two thumbs down.  
(Version 5.6.13)

ERNIE BEAL  Can't wait to see which one (Sente or Bookends) ends up implementing direct support for OpenOffice 3.x.   
(Version 5.6.13)

LEV  Gosh, Sente and its competition Bookends don't need reviewers; at the moment, they need a sports commentator. Sente just pulled into the lead with totally customisable conditional fields ("print X unless field A is empty, in which case print Y"). Can't wait to see Bookends' response. Except perhaps I should do some work, instead of watching Sonny Software and Third Street doing *their* work...)  
(Version 5.6.4)

SIMONM  Although you get an initial generous 30 day trial period, after this has expired you can no longer assess future versions of the software! How can we test out new features if the developer won't allow us to trial the software again???  
(Version 5.6.3)

LEV  For those of us in the (non-MLA) humanities, life just got a bit more difficult.

With Sente’s latest iteration, we now have two first-rate reference managers (Bookends being the other) and no excuse for sticking with the lamentable gouging corporatism behind EndNote ($100 a year, more or less, for “upgrades” which consist of bug fixes (more or less)).

Sente now offers “tabbed browsing” -- an onboard WebKit browser with “data detectors” that enable you to home in on, for example, a JSTOR paper and grab its reference and PDF. It has great note-taking capabilities, RTF file attachments viewable from within the app., easily-customisable references for footnotes and in-text styles, and an excellent UI.

The choice is hard.

Bookends is probably a gnat’s-whisker more customisable on the citations front (particularly with its ability to force, to some extent, the behaviour of a citation when an element is missing) and allows the user to rename the same field for different reference types (“Book title” in Books, the same field called “Article title” in Journal Articles, for example). Sente is a bit more authoritarian in this respect.

For online searching and grabbing of references, Sente has the lead. Neither of them has two great killer features -- the ability to copy a note or a quote and have it appear in the target document complete with reference and pages cites, and the ability to link references/notes/quotes to other references with some cognitive functionality, as in the great and lamented Papyrus which never made it to OS X.

(In Papyrus you could link My Great Book to His Lousy Book with the link “Cites” and lo!, His Lousy Book would be linked to My Great Book with the link type “Cited in”. Marvellous).

But I imagine these things will come. The Sente guys and Jon of Sonny Software, author of Bookends, are now engaged in an excellent battle for mastery and for once the end-user is really benefitting from competition. Hooray!

The only thing I can say is: try them out and decide for yourself. But for heaven’s sake, do *decide*. Do *not* follow my example and end up with a Bookends database and a Sente database and *no real clue what’s where*. The end decision will be down, as always, to personal choice. But it’s really good to have such a difficult choice to make.

Kudos (kudoides?) all round.  
(Version 5.6.1)

LYNREID  Sente's 5.4 upgrade takes it from amazing to phenomenal.

This program (in version 4.x, if I recall) single-handedly converted me to a Mac. Nothing manages your searches, keeps you up to date on the literature, organizes your pdfs and other documents, AND functions as your citation manager. Sente does all that, and with the 5.4 upgrade you can now do your search, select a reference delivered by PubMed, and with one click, there's your imported, renamed, stored pdf. Sometimes you have to click twice. (If you're old enough to remember going to the library to photocopy an article, clicking twice is okay. Even if you're not that old, clicking twice is okay.)

Just so you know going in, it's still only amazing if you work mostly in WoS; it's phenomenal properties are for PubMed. But "amazing" is still pretty good. I.e. on WoS you still have to go download the pdf through your own search, and then drag it onto the reference in your library to be automatically renamed, organized, and linked to the reference.

This new release gives Sente many of the features that Papers has and Sente didn't. (Papers doesn't do the citation manager part, but it has some cool tricks that might have tempted you away from Sente. Now Sente has those cool tricks too.)

It can sometimes be a little rough around the edges (I can't get the references to behave as reliably as in RefMan or EndNote), but the other features are so mind-bogglingly useful and easy that I don't mind doing a bit of tidying up.   
(Version 5.4)