AllCitations vs BibMe: Editions, Price, and Styles

BibMe's citation guides tell you which editions they follow, and the answer is older than the paper you are writing. Its guides page states that its guidelines follow "APA: Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 6th edition," "MLA: MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th edition," "Chicago: The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition," and "Turabian: A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 8th edition." The current editions are APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 18, and Turabian 10. That gap is the real story in AllCitations vs BibMe, and it matters more than any feature list, because an out-of-date element order is the one thing a reader copies straight into graded work.

Every claim below about BibMe comes from pages on bibme.org fetched on 11 September 2026. Where a page could not be fetched, the claim is left out and this post says so.

Quick comparison

What BibMe does well

BibMe has been running since 2007, according to the copyright line in its footer, and it now operates as a Chegg service. Longevity has bought it something real: it is embedded in university library guides. Search for it and you land on LibGuides pages at Barry University, Bluffton, CT State, Penn State, SMU, and UW-Parkside, among others. If your librarian recommended a citation generator, there is a decent chance this is the one they named. That institutional trust is worth something, and no new tool has it.

The tool itself is also more than a citation generator. BibMe's home page describes three products: a citation generator, a plagiarism checker that scans "against billions of sources," and the BibMe Writing Assistant, which offers grammar checks, a proofreader that "helps pinpoint unclear sections," and a paraphrasing tool. Its Writing Assistant page is titled "Free Writing Assistant (no sign-up required)." AllCitations does none of this. If what you want is one site that formats your sources, checks your grammar, and tells you whether a paragraph reads as too close to its source, BibMe covers ground we do not touch.

The autofill workflow is genuinely fast. Instructor walkthroughs on YouTube show the same pattern every time: pick the style, pick the source type, paste a URL or an ISBN, and let the tool pull the metadata. One librarian tutorial describes the search options as "by author and title or the ISBN or manually add data," then adds the instruction that actually matters: "you would check to see the information was correct then make corrections and then add to your bibliography." That is the right habit with any generator, ours included.

Export is solid too. The home page promises you can "create the perfect bibliography or works cited page and export to your Google Drive or Microsoft Word," which covers the two places most undergraduate papers are written.

The edition problem, and how to check it yourself

Here is the thing to know before you trust any citation generator, BibMe or otherwise: a style manual is a numbered edition, and the number changes.

Four current editions, verified against their publishers this week:

• APA 7th edition, published 2020, per the American Psychological Association's product page for the Publication Manual.
• MLA 9th edition, the current MLA Handbook, per the MLA Style Center, which describes works-cited entries as built from "the MLA core elements" assembled "in a specific order," with containers holding sources inside larger works.
• Chicago 18th edition, published 2024. The Chicago Manual of Style Online carries the notice "The Chicago Manual of Style 18th edition text © 2024 by The University of Chicago."
• Turabian 10th edition, © 2026, per the University of Chicago Press, following the 9th edition of 2018.

Now compare that with what BibMe publishes. Its site footer reads: "BibMe™ formats according to APA 7th Edition, MLA 9th Edition, Chicago 17th Edition." Two of those three are current. Chicago is one edition behind.

Its citation guides are further back. The bottom of bibme.org/citation-guide/ states plainly that "the guidelines on this page adhere to the following editions of the style manuals," and then lists APA 6th, MLA 7th, Chicago 16th, and Turabian 8th. So the generator claims MLA 9 while the written MLA guide next to it teaches MLA 7. A student who reads the guide to understand the rule and then uses the generator to apply it is working from two different editions of the same style in the same sitting.

You can verify all of this yourself in under a minute. Open bibme.org/citation-guide/, scroll to the bottom of the page, and read the edition list. Then scroll to the footer on any BibMe page and read the formats line. The two do not match each other, and one of them does not match the current manuals.

What actually changes between editions

Edition numbers sound like bookkeeping until you see the output. APA 6 and APA 7 disagree about three things you will hit in a first-year paper. Both editions are in the AllCitations style list, so you can generate the same source in each and compare.

A book, in APA 6:

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The same book, in APA 7:

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

The publisher's location is gone. APA 7 dropped it.

A web page, in APA 6:

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (2024). Climate change indicators: Sea surface temperature. Retrieved April 15, 2024, from https://www.climate.gov/news-features/sea-surface-temperature

The same page, in APA 7:

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (2024). Climate change indicators: Sea surface temperature. NOAA Climate.gov. https://www.climate.gov/news-features/sea-surface-temperature

The retrieval date and the words "Retrieved from" are gone for a stable page, and the site name now sits before the URL as its own element.

Journal articles differ too. APA 6 wrote a digital object identifier as doi:10.xxxx/yyyy. APA 7 writes it as a full link, https://doi.org/10.xxxx/yyyy. Same identifier, different presentation. An instructor who grades a lot of reference lists can spot the older form without looking twice.

None of these are catastrophic on their own. Together they are the difference between a reference list that reads as current and one that reads as copied from an old handout. If you are told to use APA 7 and your generator hands you APA 6 output, you will be fixing every entry by hand, which defeats the reason you opened a generator.

Our complete guide to in-text citations covers the parenthetical and narrative forms these references pair with, and the APA vs MLA comparison is worth a read if your department has not told you which style to use.

Where BibMe falls short

The edition gap above is the first and largest. Its written guides are three editions behind on MLA and two behind on Chicago and Turabian.

The price is not visible. BibMe's navigation has an "Upgrade" link on every page and its footer has "Manage Subscription," so there is a paid tier. We could not find its cost. The /upgrade page returns a shell that renders its contents after login, and no price string appears in the markup of the pages we fetched on 11 September 2026. The plans exist; the number is not on the public site in a form we could read. For comparison, Cite This For Me publishes its Premium price on a plans table you can read without an account. This post does not state a BibMe price because we could not verify one, and you should not trust any comparison that quotes one without saying where it came from.

What the free tier includes is likewise unstated on the pages we fetched. The home page advertises "thousands of styles," and the Writing Assistant page says no sign-up is required for that tool specifically. Whether the same is true of every style in the generator, we cannot confirm from the public pages.

The guides cover three styles. Its guide navigation lists AMA, APA, ASA, Chicago Style, CSE, IEEE, and MLA, but its guides landing page offers written guidance for APA, MLA, and Chicago only, with Turabian folded in alongside Chicago.

There is an account in the path. "Sign up" and "Sign in" appear in the nav on every page, and one classroom tutorial tells students they "will just need to create an account which they can do with their district gmail." Your bibliography lives in that account, which is a real benefit if you come back to the same paper for a week and a real cost if you are on a library machine at midnight.

What AllCitations does well, and where it falls short

AllCitations generates a citation in 30 styles, free, with no account and no paid tier. The style list in the app covers APA 6 and 7, MLA 8 and 9, Chicago 17 and 18 in both notes-bibliography and author-date, Harvard in three variants including Cite Them Right 12th edition, Turabian in both systems, Vancouver, IEEE, ACS, AMA 10 and 11, ASA, CSE, APSA, ASM, AIAA, Nature, Bluebook, OSCOLA, AGLC, and Deutsche Zitierweise.

Shipping both the current and the previous edition of a style is the deliberate part. Departments change over at different speeds, and a syllabus that still says Chicago 17 is common enough that you should be able to generate Chicago 17 without hunting for an archived tool.

You can pull a source in by DOI, ISBN, PubMed ID, arXiv ID, or a lookup against OpenAlex, Google Books, or Open Library, then export the result as BibTeX, RIS, or a Word document. BibTeX and RIS both import into Zotero and Mendeley, so the output is a route into a reference manager rather than a dead end.

Now the honest limits. AllCitations is not a reference manager. It does not store a library for you, and it has no account to store one in: your bibliography is held in your browser's local storage, which means it survives a refresh and does not survive clearing your browser data or switching machines. Export before you close the tab. It does not check plagiarism or grammar, and it will not paraphrase anything for you. It has no institutional footprint either, so your librarian has probably not heard of it.

And no generator, ours included, can decide what your source actually is. A PDF of a government report hosted on a university server is a report, a web page, or a document in a database depending on details only you can see. Our guide on citing a source you can't find or access walks through that judgment call. The tool formats; the classification is yours.

Which one should you use?

Use BibMe if you want one site for the whole writing pass. Citations, plagiarism scanning, grammar checking, and paraphrasing in one place has real value when the deadline is the constraint, and if your library guide already points there, you have institutional backing for the choice. Read its written guides with the edition list in mind, and confirm against the current manual before you copy an element order.

Use AllCitations if you need a specific style, in a specific edition, right now. Thirty styles, both current and previous editions of the big four, free, no account, no upgrade prompt. It is the better fit for a paper in Bluebook, OSCOLA, AGLC, Vancouver, APSA, or anything else outside the APA-MLA-Chicago core, and for anyone who wants their citations to land in Zotero afterwards.

Use both if you are already a BibMe user. Generate in whichever tool you prefer, then spot-check two or three entries against the other. Any disagreement is worth thirty seconds of your attention, because it usually means one of them is on the wrong edition.