OSF vs Zenodo

Verdict

OSF and Zenodo are both free, both fund research openness as nonprofit or public infrastructure rather than selling subscriptions, and both mint a persistent DOI that satisfies funder and journal data-sharing mandates — but they're built for different stages of a project. OSF, run by the Center for Open Science, covers the research lifecycle from planning onward: file storage and version control while a project is active, preregistration templates that timestamp hypotheses and methods before data collection, and public or restricted sharing once it's done, syncing with tools like GitHub, Dropbox and Google Drive rather than duplicating files. Zenodo, operated by CERN and funded through the European Commission's OpenAIRE program, is built more narrowly around archiving a finished, citable snapshot — most commonly a specific GitHub or GitLab release — with generous free storage (50GB per dataset) and no restriction on file type or discipline.

Both integrate with each other and with GitHub, and many projects use both: OSF for the living project and preregistration, Zenodo for the final, versioned archive.

Choose OSF if

• You need to preregister a study's hypotheses and methods before data collection, with a timestamped DOI.
• You want project-level file storage and collaborator permissions throughout the life of the work, not just at the end.
• Your institution needs a compliance dashboard to track preregistration or data-sharing policy across many researchers.

Choose Zenodo if

• You mainly need to archive a finished dataset, codebase or paper with a citable DOI, especially a specific software release.
• Your storage needs are larger per item — Zenodo's 50GB free allowance per dataset is generous for large files.
• You want automatic archiving tied to GitHub or GitLab releases rather than manual project management.

The honest caveat

Neither charges researchers directly, which is worth knowing rather than assuming: OSF is funded by grants and institutional storage add-ons, Zenodo by the European Commission via OpenAIRE and hosted by CERN. That funding model is stable but not identical to a commercial vendor's guarantees — check current terms before relying on either for very long-term (decades-scale) archiving requirements. For turning a repository into something a reader can actually run rather than just download, see Binder, which integrates with both.