There are actually 2 different companies making Mellel and Bookends.
A little background to my bibliography software experience. I've mainly used BibTeX managers, most recently Bibdesk. They're quite basic in function, allowing me to key in records, search for records, organize them via groups, and integrate them with LaTeX.
All these features are available in Bookends. In addition to that, it has much more filters than Bibdesk, allowing you to search various online libraries via an in app interface. My experience with Endnote is limited to Endnote 9, as that's what the university provided. Compared with Bookends, Endnote has more filters. However, in my experience, Endnote is buggy while Bookends is pretty good. Bookends hasn't crashed on me yet, while Endnote used to crash on average once a day.
However, to be honest I don't use enough of the advanced features in Endnote or Bookends to compare them. What convinced me to buy Bookends, was the tech and community support. I've already mentioned how Bookends has less filters than Endnote. One of the missing filters is for dealing with Zetoc, access to the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents. This is a major show stopper, as this is the source of *all* my references. I submitted an email concerning this filter, and within a day I received a reply containing a custom filter to connect to Zetoc. Not only that, I also tried to write my own filters for Zetoc's text files (this is what you get when you access Zetoc off campus), and the help I received was so prompt and invaluable that I managed to write my own filter. This clinched it for me. Bookends provides all the functionality I need, it may not provide all the features of Endnote, but the support is first rate. It is definitely worth buying for the support alone.
I suggest giving Bookends a try. The downloadable trial
does not(!!) expire but it is limited to 50 references per library. That should be enough references for a moderate length paper and will give you a feel for the product. Of course, you could try to get around the limitation by having several libraries..... or you could just buy the full version
