CitePlain vs Petal
CitePlain
citeplain.com
Petal
petal.orgSide by side
| Figure | CitePlain | Petal |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $3.25/mo | $2.55/mo |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 7 | 4 |
| Spec score · Citation generators | 8.9 (#4) | 8.0 (#21) |
| Spec score · Citation Generator Tools | 8.7 (#4) | 7.7 (#16) |
| Support | Email support is handled by one person, with replies promised within one business day and often within a few hours. | The FAQ says Petal generally responds to customer support requests within 30 minutes. |
Plans
CitePlain
- FreeFree
- Pro monthly$4.99 a month
- Pro yearly$39 a year
- Founder Lifetime$89, paid once
- Lifetime Founder$89, paid once
- Lifetime$199, paid once
- Lifetime$199, paid once
In their own words
CitePlain
CitePlain creates citations and bibliographies from web pages, journal articles, books, tweets, YouTube videos, and podcasts. It accepts URLs, DOIs, or ISBNs, and uses publisher citation and Open Graph metadata, with Crossref lookup for DOIs and Open Library for ISBNs. The free plan includes APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 17, Vancouver, CSE, and BibTeX, plus a bibliography builder for up to 50 sources per batch. The extension for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox can read metadata from the active tab and provide BibTeX with a stable cite key for Overleaf or Zotero. Pro adds 24 specialised styles, batch URL import for up to 50 sources, and cloud storage synced across the web app and extension. Free-tier references stay in browser local storage. Pro costs $4.99 a month or $39 a year. Lifetime options are listed at 89.00 USD once and 199.00 USD once. CitePlain describes its focus as individual citations rather than replacing a research reference manager.
Petal
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.