AllCitations vs Cite This For Me: What's Actually Free

Cite This For Me is free for Harvard referencing and charges £6.99 a month for everything else. That is the whole comparison in one line, and it is stated on the company's own plans table: under "Citation style," the free account reads "Harvard Only," and Premium reads "MLA, APA, Chicago, Harvard & 7,000 more." AllCitations covers 30 styles with no account, no ads, and no paid tier. If you are writing in Harvard and want a plagiarism checker bundled in, Cite This For Me is a reasonable £6.99. For APA 7, MLA 9, Chicago 18, or something like OSCOLA by Thursday, the free tier's limits matter before you start pasting sources into it.

Every claim below about Cite This For Me comes from pages on citethisforme.com fetched on 10 September 2026. Prices are in pounds because that is the currency its plans table displays.

Quick comparison

What Cite This For Me does well

It has been running since October 2010, which its About section states plainly, and it absorbed RefME along the way (the RefME name still appears in the markup of its Harvard generator page). Fifteen years of being the tool a lecturer mentions in week one is worth something. Students arrive already knowing where the buttons are.

The source-type coverage is real. Its Harvard generator page lists archive material, artwork, blogs, broadcasts, chapters of edited books, conference proceedings, court cases, dictionary entries, dissertations, e-books, edited books, email, encyclopedia articles, government publications, interviews, journals, magazines, music and recordings, newspapers, online images and video, patents, podcasts, presentations, press releases, religious texts, reports, software, and websites. The homepage claims "50+ source types." A patent, a court case and a press release in one dropdown is a genuinely wide net, and most free tools stop at book, journal, website.

Auto-fill works the way you would want. Its own description: "the Cite This For Me™ citation generator automatically tries to find your source's information based on details you provide. That could be anything from the author's name to the source's URL to the article's DOI number." Paste a DOI, get most of a reference back.

The Chrome extension matters more than it sounds. Citing as you read, from the page you are reading, is a better workflow than keeping a tab open and copying URLs into it. AllCitations has no extension.

The bundle is the real pitch. £6.99 a month buys citations in the full style catalogue, plagiarism detection on up to 30 papers a month, unlimited grammar checking, and "expert help with your papers." If you want one subscription covering all of that, no citation-only tool competes, and we do not pretend otherwise.

Its Harvard guide is also honest about something most guides skip. It says: "'Harvard referencing' is an umbrella term for any referencing style that uses the author name and year of publication within the text to indicate where you have inserted a source." That is correct and it is the single most useful sentence on the page. More on why below.

Where Cite This For Me falls short

The free tier is one style. Its plans table lists the free account's citation style as "Harvard Only." The free Harvard generator page does show a style selector offering APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, ASA, IEEE and AMA, so the picker is not locked. What the plans table describes as the free entitlement is Harvard. If you are writing in APA 7 and planning to lean on the free tier, test the export or save step early, before you have 40 sources in a project you cannot get out.

Free citations expire in a week. The plans table again: under "Save citations," the free column reads "Only for 7 days," and Premium is where saving becomes permanent. For a semester-long dissertation with a rolling bibliography, a seven-day window is the constraint that pushes you to subscribe.

Removing ads is something you buy. The banner across the top of its homepage sells Premium as "All of our citation styles and writing tools, none of the ads." Ad-free is positioned as a paid feature, so ads are part of the free experience by design.

Its stated Chicago edition is two editions old. This is the one that costs marks. The footer on its guide and generator pages reads: "We cite according to the 9th edition of MLA, 7th edition of APA, and 16th edition of Chicago (8th edition Turabian)." MLA 9 and APA 7 are current. Chicago is not: the Chicago Manual of Style's own site presents the 18th edition, "18th edition text © 2024 by The University of Chicago," and Turabian's current edition is the ninth per the same publisher's Turabian page. A tool declaring Chicago 16th is describing a 2010 manual. If your department asks for Chicago 18, that gap is yours to close by hand.

The plagiarism checker keeps your paper. Its homepage discloses this directly: "The papers you upload will be added to our plagiarism database and will be used internally to improve plagiarism results." That is a normal arrangement for plagiarism services and it is stated up front, which is to its credit. Read it before uploading an unpublished thesis chapter.

"7,000 more" styles is a catalogue count, not a quality guarantee. A large style catalogue almost always means a Citation Style Language repository underneath, and that is genuine breadth. The edition question still applies to whichever style you pick out of it. Breadth of catalogue and currency of edition are separate things.

What "Harvard only" actually means

Cite This For Me's own umbrella-term sentence is the key to its free tier, and it cuts against the tier's usefulness. If Harvard is "an umbrella term for any referencing style that uses the author name and year," then "Harvard" alone does not tell you where the commas go.

The practical version: Harvard at Leeds is not Harvard at Deakin, and neither is Cite Them Right, which is the version most UK universities actually hand out. Our own generator carries three separate Harvard implementations for exactly this reason, including Cite Them Right 12th edition and the Deakin (Australian) variant. When you are told to use Harvard, ask your tutor which Harvard, because a generator set to a generic Harvard will produce something defensible and possibly not what your marking rubric describes. We wrote up the specific differences in Leeds Harvard vs Cite Them Right, and the general format walkthrough is in how to cite sources in Harvard referencing style.

Here is the same journal article in a common Cite Them Right style Harvard and in APA 7, so you can see how far apart two author-date systems sit:

Harvard (Cite Them Right style):

Watson, J.D. and Crick, F.H.C. (1953) 'Molecular structure of nucleic acids: a structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid', Nature, 171(4356), pp. 737-738.

APA 7:

Watson, J. D., & Crick, F. H. C. (1953). Molecular structure of nucleic acids: A structure for deoxyribose nucleic acid. Nature, 171(4356), 737-738.

Both are author-date. The title is in quotation marks in one and plain in the other, the journal name placement differs, the ampersand appears in APA and "and" in this Harvard, page numbers take "pp." in one and nothing in the other, and the initials are spaced in APA. A tool that treats "Harvard" as a single style has to pick one of the many possible answers, and it will not tell you which one it picked.

Which manual edition each tool follows

This is the axis most comparisons skip and the one that determines whether output is usable. Editions are stated, checkable facts.

Carrying two editions of a style at once is not indecision. Courses run on the edition the syllabus was written against, and a student told to use APA 6 needs APA 6, not a tool that has moved on. That is why our generator keeps APA 6 alongside APA 7, MLA 8 alongside MLA 9, and Chicago 17 alongside Chicago 18.

How to format references in APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard walks the four through side by side, with the edition changes noted.

What AllCitations does well, and where it falls short

Where it wins: you need a correct citation in a specific style in the next few minutes and you do not want to make an account. Thirty styles are available immediately, free, with no sign-up, no usage cap, and no paid tier to be nudged toward. The site has no pricing page because there is nothing to price. The catalogue is deliberately weighted toward styles that are hard to find elsewhere: Bluebook, OSCOLA and AGLC for law, ACS for chemistry, CSE for the life sciences, ASA for sociology, APSA for political science, ASM for microbiology, AIAA for aerospace, Nature, Deutsche Zitierweise, and the three Harvard variants. Export goes out as BibTeX, RIS, or Word, and BibTeX and RIS come back in, so a bibliography can move into Zotero or Mendeley without retyping.

Where it falls short, plainly:

• It is not a reference manager. No library, no sync, no PDF storage, no annotation, no shared group collections. For a multi-year project, Zotero is the right tool and we are not a substitute for it.
• Nothing is saved. No account means nothing stored on our side. Export before you close the tab. Cite This For Me's Premium projects genuinely beat this for long bibliographies.
• No plagiarism checker, no grammar tools, no human proofreading. If you want those, that is Cite This For Me's bundle or Scribbr's services, and £6.99 for the set is not a bad price.
• No browser extension. Cite This For Me has one; citing from the page you are reading is a real workflow advantage.
• No mobile app, and a much smaller name. Nobody's lecturer has mentioned us in week one.
• A generator is still a generator. Metadata comes from publishers and publishers get it wrong. Sentence case, missing issue numbers, and a DOI that resolves to the wrong version all survive any tool's formatting step. The checks worth running are in how to use an APA 7 citation generator, and they apply whichever tool you use.

Which one should you use?

Use Cite This For Me if you want citations, plagiarism scanning, grammar checking and proofreading on one £6.99 subscription, if you are writing in Harvard and the free tier covers you, or if the Chrome extension fits how you read. Verify the Chicago output against the 18th edition before submitting.

Use AllCitations if you need a style outside the common four, if you need a specific edition (APA 6, MLA 8, Chicago 18), if you want output free with no account and no ads, or if you need BibTeX or RIS to hand off to a reference manager.

Use Zotero or Mendeley if the real problem is storing and syncing a library of PDFs across a long project. Neither tool above solves that, and a citation generator is the wrong shape for it.

Most people end up using two: a reference manager for the library, and a generator for the awkward source at 1am that the manager formatted strangely. Choosing on style coverage, edition currency, and whether you need the writing bundle will get you to the right pair faster than choosing on brand recognition.