Qiqqa

I have been using Qiqqa for approaching ten years.
The concept and initial execution is great.
It helps me organise my literature brilliantly.
However, the software has not been maintained. It is badly behaved.
The alternate versions have bare-minimum management facilities.
The developer has stopped interacting with his clients.
He claims that the software is not defunct, because 200 people are still downloading it.
Alas, this is another story of people getting sucked in with rave reviews of the promise which this software represents.
This is another good example of how I have lost half my life to half-baked software by enterprises which don't stay enterprising but rest on their laurels.
None of us doubt that Jimme Jardine is a brilliant fellow.
But I wish that he would stop building new non-corporate enterprises and would give some attention to his loyal client base. We have a royal dilemma of what to use as an alternative, because everything else is a step down.
Until then the classification of discontinued is correct.
Some serious developer should buy the enterprise and resurrect it and make it talk to a wider range of word processors than just MS Word. This is seriously overdue.

I have tried other softwares such as Zotero and Mendeley but none of them provide the functionality and flexibility that Qiqqa does. Qiqqa still has things to be improved but even without those improvements, Qiqqa is the number one.

The development may be slow: there are no news since 2015, but the program is still downloadable and working

This is the best software for my Ph.D. It really helps to keep my articles assembled. Thanks for the devs behind this software.

Non-open approach to your data, buggy; some isolated promising features

When I tried Qiqqa I had problem retrieving data from Google Academic.

The mind mapping feature was not useful. I couldn't draw my own mind maps as in FreePlane nor could I export the mind map to any open format.
To me, mind mapping was the main reason I came to qiqqa.

I was, however, impressed by the reference manager capabilities. In fact, I did find a new relationship between my papers thanks to qiqqa. It was artificial intelligence as it best!

Qiqqa PDF reader is not better than many other alternatives such as Foxit PDF Reader. For instance, customised keyboard shortcuts is a basic feature in any good PDF reader. Foxit does it nicely, why reinventing the wheel? I would be plased if all comment and underlines from Foxit Reader are available in Qiqqa. That's all, no need for an underperfoming reader.

I did not like it at all that Qiqqa COPY my PDF files from my OneDrive folder to the userspace folder. Qiqqa does not work with one's PDF files but rather makes a copy of them and changes the names for an obscure ID. It seems inefficient but more importantly, it means losing one's data when Qiqqa fails or disappears.
This is the more striking aspect of Qiqqa. Data is trapped inside Qiqqa environment without possibility of getting back the PDF with the notes, underlines, etc.