Citation Machine vs Petal

Citation Machine is a web service for generating citations, helping with writing and checking student assignments for plagiarism. It supports thousands of citation styles, including MLA, APA, Chicago and Harvard, and lets users export bibliographies or works cited pages to Google Drive or Microsoft Word. An account can keep citations saved in one place. The Writing Assistant provides feedback on spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity and flow, and offers paraphrasing. Its plagiarism checker compares writing with billions of sources and reports the share of similar language. Citation Machine Plus advertises plagiarism scans, 7,000+ citation styles, 400+ advanced grammar errors and in-text citations. A free 3-day trial is offered and can be canceled anytime; the listed Plus trial price is free. Formatting guides and examples cover MLA, APA, Chicago, full citations and in-text citations. The audience described in its style directory includes high school, college and university students, teachers and independent researchers. Help Center and support pages are linked, and Citation Machine identifies itself as a Chegg service.

Petal is a web-based research assistant and reference manager for academic work, also available as a browser extension. Its plans include a free tier and paid options listed from $4.99/user/mo (annual). It helps users narrow literature reviews and compare studies, while providing a library for uploading and organizing PDFs with collections, metadata, and tags. AI tools offer translation, summaries, explanations, key-point extraction, suggestions for questions and search terms, and conversational assistance. Shared workspaces support group projects, co-authored papers, and reviews. The citation generator supports more than 10,000 styles and can copy citations or export them to BibTeX or Word. References can be brought in through identifiers such as DOI, PMID, ArXivID, ISBN, ISSN, and EAN, or by capturing metadata from URLs. Browser add-ins are listed for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, alongside a Word add-in for citations and bibliographies. The free plan includes 1 GB storage, one seat, three guests, 400 AI credits, two collections, and three annotations per document; citation export is not included.