AllCitations vs Grammarly: Three Styles or Thirty

Grammarly is a writing assistant that also builds citations in three styles. AllCitations is a citation generator that builds them in thirty. That single fact settles most of the AllCitations vs Grammarly decision before you compare anything else: if your paper is in APA, MLA, or Chicago, both tools can format your references, and the choice comes down to price and where you want to work. If your department grades against IEEE, Vancouver, ACS, CSE, Bluebook, or OSCOLA, Grammarly's citation feature cannot reach your style at all.

Every claim below about Grammarly comes from grammarly.com and Grammarly Support, fetched on 18 September 2026. Claims about AllCitations come from the app's own style list and the code that produces its output. Prices are quoted in the currency the page displayed, and where a page could not be fetched, the claim is left out.

Quick comparison

What Grammarly does well

Auto-capture is the strongest thing in the comparison, and it solves the part of citing that actually wastes time. Transcribing an author list, a volume number, an issue number, and a DOI by hand is where most reference-list errors are born. Grammarly's support documentation describes a free auto-citations feature: install the browser extension, read an article on a compatible source website, and a "Get citation" button appears, which returns "a full citation and an in-text citation for the source you're viewing." The supported sites are the ones research actually lives on, including PLOS One, ScienceDirect, Sage Journals, PubMed Central, arXiv, Springer Open, Frontiers, Wiley, Nature, and Science. You can switch between APA, MLA, and Chicago from a dropdown on the suggestion itself.

Citation Finder does a job no citation generator does. Grammarly describes it as an agent that "reviews your work as you write, flags statements that need support and pulls in trusted sources," then "formats and inserts your citations instantly in APA, MLA, or Chicago style." Finding a source for a claim you have already written is a research task, not a formatting task. We do not do it, and neither does Zotero or Mendeley. Whether it finds good sources is something you have to judge on your own paper, but the feature is real and it is aimed at a genuine gap.

It is already where you are writing. If Grammarly is running in your browser and your document, the citation lives one click away from the sentence that needs it. A standalone generator costs you a tab switch and a paste every time. Across a twenty-source reference list, that adds up.

Third-party trust. University libraries recommend it. National University's LibGuide for APA and MLA styles lists the Grammarly Reference Generator alongside its own style guidance, describing it as a generator that "provides formatted APA, MLA, and Chicago-style citations." Library endorsement is not proof of accuracy, but it does mean a librarian looked at the tool and was willing to put their name near it.

And if you already pay for Grammarly, the citation features cost nothing extra. That is a real argument, and it is the one most likely to make this comparison moot for you.

Where Grammarly falls short

Three styles is three styles. Grammarly's citation pages name APA, MLA, and Chicago, and nothing else. For a large share of students, that is the whole answer and the rest of this section does not matter. For the rest, it is a wall. Engineering papers run on IEEE. Medicine and nursing run on Vancouver and AMA. Chemistry uses ACS, biology uses CSE, sociology uses ASA, political science uses APSA. Law is its own country, with Bluebook in the United States, OSCOLA in the United Kingdom, and AGLC in Australia. None of those are available in Grammarly's citation tool, so a student in any of those fields is back to formatting by hand or finding another tool. Our guide to formatting references across APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard covers the manual method if that is where you land.

No edition is named. Grammarly's citation page says its style formatting "always stays up to date with the latest versions of APA, MLA, and Chicago style guides," and the APA hub page we fetched does not state an edition number anywhere. Read that carefully, because "the latest version" and "the version your instructor grades against" are different things. The current editions are APA 7th, MLA 9th, and Chicago 18th, and each replaced a predecessor that is still on plenty of syllabuses. A course sheet that says APA 6 gets no help from a tool that only offers the latest, and no tool that hides its edition can be checked against that course sheet at all. This is the single most practical difference between the two products: we list APA 6 and APA 7 as separate, labelled entries, so picking an edition is a dropdown rather than a manual rewrite.

The paid line runs through the middle of the feature. The free web generator at grammarly.com/citations produced no account wall when we loaded it, and the auto-citations button works with the free extension. But Grammarly's support documentation is explicit that paid plans are needed to "identify formatting mistakes and format your bibliography or in-text citations." So the generator is free, and the part that catches your errors and assembles the bibliography is not. Knowing exactly where that line sits is worth two minutes before you plan your evening around it.

Prices need checking in your own currency and billing period. The plans page we fetched on 18 September 2026 showed three tiers: Free at "€0/month" with 100 AI prompts a month, Pro at "€12/month" with plagiarism detection, AI detection, and 2,000 AI prompts per member per month, and Enterprise at a custom price. Those figures came back in euros because of where we fetched them, so your page may show a different currency and a different number. Two things are worth doing before you enter a card. First, read the price on Grammarly's own plans page rather than from a tutorial: in the month of discussion we sampled, a YouTube walkthrough of the citation generator told viewers premium "costs $30 per month" and offered an affiliate discount link, which does not match the plans page. Second, check whether the option you selected is billed monthly or annually. A user posting in r/Grammarly on 12 September 2026 wrote that they expected a $12 monthly deduction and instead saw $144 taken at once, which is what an annual plan looks like when you were reading a monthly figure. That is one person's report of their own billing, not a company policy, but the confusion it describes is cheap to avoid.

It edits your prose, not only your references. A citation generator formats a reference and touches nothing else you wrote. A writing assistant rewrites sentences, and some students have become cautious about running one over graded work: a thread in r/TurnitinScan in late August 2026 was titled "I never thought I'd be scared to use Grammarly on my own assignments." We are not going to tell you what your institution's policy is, because we do not know it and neither does any comparison page. What we can say is that the two tools are doing different amounts to your document, and it is worth knowing which is which when you decide what to run on a paper.

What AllCitations does well, and where it falls short

Where it wins: you need a correct reference in a named style and edition, right now. All 30 styles are available immediately, free, with no account and no paid tier. The catalogue is deliberately narrow and pointed at the styles students struggle to find elsewhere: Bluebook, OSCOLA, and AGLC for law, ACS for chemistry, CSE for the life sciences, AMA and Vancouver for medicine, ASA for sociology, APSA for political science, ASM for microbiology, AIAA for aerospace, IEEE for engineering, Nature, and Deutsche Zitierweise alongside three Harvard variants. If you are in one of those fields, this stops being a comparison and becomes the only one of the two tools that works.

Editions sit side by side. APA 6 and APA 7, MLA 8 and MLA 9, Chicago 17 and Chicago 18, AMA 10 and AMA 11 are separate entries in the list. A syllabus that has not caught up to the current manual costs you one selection from the dropdown.

Real CSL underneath. The output comes from Citation Style Language files processed by citeproc, which is the same machinery reference managers use. Paste a URL, DOI, or ISBN and the metadata fills in, and you can export the result as BibTeX, RIS, or Word so it can move into Zotero or Mendeley later.

Where it falls short, and this list is not short. It does not check your grammar. It does not check for plagiarism, and it does not detect AI text. It does not live inside your document, so there is no button on a journal page that captures the citation while you read: you paste the identifier yourself. It stores nothing, which means no library, no tags, no PDFs, and no sync, so export before you close the tab. Thirty styles is thirty styles, and if your target journal has a house style that only exists in the wider CSL repository, Zotero reaches it and we do not. And we cannot tell you which edition your instructor grades against, which is the question that decides whether any of this output is correct for your paper.

The honest overlap. For a straightforward APA 7 journal article, both tools will very likely give you the same reference, because the element order is not in dispute. Section 10.1 of the APA Publication Manual (7th ed.) gives it as author, year, article title in sentence case, italicised journal name, italicised volume, issue in parentheses, page range, then the DOI as a full link with no period after it. Any tool that gets that wrong is broken, and neither of these is broken. The differences show up on the sources that are awkward, the styles that are rare, and the editions that are old.

Which one should you use?

Use Grammarly if you write in APA, MLA, or Chicago, you already pay for it or want the grammar checking anyway, and you value capturing citations from the page you are reading without leaving it. The auto-citations button is the best argument in its favour, and the Citation Finder agent has no equivalent in a pure generator.

Use AllCitations if your style is not one of those three, or you need a specific edition rather than the latest one, or you want the reference without an account, an install, or a plan. It is also the right pick when you are formatting a handful of sources tonight and do not want to evaluate a subscription first.

Use both if your situation is the common one: Grammarly running in the browser for the writing, and a generator open in a tab for the sources it cannot format. Nothing about either tool prevents that, and a reference pasted from one into a document edited by the other is just text.

The check that is worth two minutes either way: take the two most awkward sources in your reference list, a chapter in an edited book, say, or a report with an organisation as author, and run them through whichever tool you plan to use. Compare the output against the manual your course names. Automated tools disagree with each other most on exactly those sources, and the ones you find easy are the ones no tool gets wrong. Our complete guide to in-text citations covers the other half of the job, which no generator finishes for you.