CiteTrue vs Citely
Citely checks references against a large scholarly index and helps you find sources for claims you have already written. It is a capable tool with one structural difference from CiteTrue: there is no free tier at all, and the paid credits are counted in the hundreds rather than the thousands.
Why our verdicts hold up
Most citation checkers hand the whole judgement to a language model and show you what it says. Models hallucinate — that is the very problem this category exists to solve — so we put the model last, not first.
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1. Parse, don’t guess
Every reference is split into its parts — authors, title, year, journal, DOI — by a parser built for citation formats, not by asking a model what it thinks the title is.
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2. Look it up in the authorities
The parsed reference is queried against Crossref and OpenAlex, and against the open web when a reference has no DOI. What comes back are real records with real identifiers.
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3. Score the match deterministically
Candidate records are scored with a Sørensen-Dice similarity over title tokens. A record counts as a match only if the title score clears 0.7 and the author list agrees — a year mismatch is reported as a notice, never quietly accepted. The same reference always produces the same score.
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4. Only then, ask a model
A language model is called only when the deterministic pass finds no authentic match — to read the candidates and the source text and decide whether anything fits. It is the fallback, not the judge. That ordering is why a hallucinated verdict has nowhere to enter: by the time a model is involved, the evidence is already on the table.
The practical consequence: a reference marked authentic here matched a real record on title and authors, and you can open that record. It is not a model's impression of whether the citation looks plausible.
How fast it gets through a bibliography
Checking one reference means several lookups across different sources. Doing that one reference at a time is what makes a tool feel slow on a long bibliography, so we run them in parallel and stream the results back.
- References checked in parallel
- 20 at a time in the app, 100 through the API
- A 50-reference bibliography
- Goes out as three waves of parallel lookups, not fifty queued ones
- Results as they land
- Streamed per reference — you read the first verdicts while the rest are still running
- Bulk work
- A supervisor’s stack of theses runs through the API at five times the app’s concurrency
What the money buys
CiteTrue
- Free
- $0
- Plus
- $9.99/mo, or $5.99/mo billed yearly
- Pro
- $19.99/mo, or $11.99/mo billed yearly
- Max
- $79.99/mo, or $47.99/mo billed yearly
- Credit packs
- From $9.99, one-off
30 references per day — about 900 a month
1,000 references per month
3,000 references per month
20,000 references per month
500 to 50,000 references, valid for six months — no subscription needed
Citely
- Free
- None
- Trial
- $9 one-off
- Monthly
- $19/mo
- Yearly
- $14/mo, billed yearly
- Believer
- $347 one-off
No free tier — the cheapest way in is a $9 one-off trial
15 credits
150 credits a month
1,500 credits a year — about 125 a month
5,000 credits over three years
Citely figures taken from their public pricing page on 2026-08-15. Prices change — check theirs before deciding.
What it actually costs you
Headline prices are hard to compare when the two products count usage differently. Here is the same work priced on both sides — including the case where they come out cheaper.
| What you are doing | CiteTrue | Citely |
|---|---|---|
| Trying it once before committing | 30 references a day, free, no card | $9 before you see a single result |
| One paper a month (~40 references) | Free | $14–19/mo |
| A dissertation plus revisions (~800 a month) | Free tier still covers it, about 900 a month | Monthly plan, $19 |
| A supervisor screening 30 theses a month (~1,500) | Plus, $9.99/mo | Beyond the monthly plan’s 150 credits — needs the $347 pack or per-use top-ups |
Side by side
| What you are comparing | CiteTrue | Citely |
|---|---|---|
| Free allowance | 30 references every day, no card needed | None — you pay before you check anything |
| What a credit buys | 1 credit = 1 reference, so a 40-reference paper costs 40 | A credit covers one verification run, capped at about 4,000 characters of references — different unit, so compare by paper, not by credit |
| Cheapest way to start | Free, every day, no card — then $5.99/mo billed yearly | $9 one-off trial, then $14/mo billed yearly |
| Try before paying | Yes, every day, permanently | No |
| One-off purchase | Credit packs from $9.99, valid six months | $9 trial, or $347 for a three-year pack |
| Where you can use it | Web, Chrome extension, macOS app, API and MCP server | Web |
| Interface languages | 11 languages | English |
| Finding sources for a claim | Suggests replacements when a citation fails | Yes — source finding is a headline feature |
| How a verdict is reached | Deterministic matching against Crossref and OpenAlex first — a model is only asked when that finds nothing | Described publicly as an AI citation checker |
| Same reference, checked twice | Same score, same verdict — the matching step is not probabilistic | Not stated |
| Parallel processing | 20 references at a time, 100 through the API, streamed as they finish | Not stated |
So which should you use?
Citely’s source finding is genuinely useful if your problem is "I wrote a claim and need something to cite". If your problem is "I have a bibliography and need to know which entries are real", CiteTrue does that for free every day, and its cheapest paid plan checks roughly eight times as many references per pound as Citely’s.
Check your references now
30 references a day, free, no card. Paste a bibliography and see for yourself.