Citavi 2026: Benefits, Features & Pricing

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On this page

Overview
Pricing and Plans
Features
User Reviews

Overview

Citavi

4.4

(42)

Pricing

Starting at $519.00 per year

About Citavi

Citavi is an all-in-one scholarly note-taking and reference management solution. It helps researchers organize, collaborate, take notes, and write/manage citations - all within one platform. Citavi can be used by individual researchers or teams. Its tools are designed to increase work efficiency, break down tasks, secure data, and more.

Citavi Screenshots

Citavi Pricing and Plans

Starting price: $519.00 per year

Free Trial

Free Version

Basic

$519.00

per user, per year

No plan information available

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Citavi Features

Popular features found in Knowledge Management
Access Controls/Permissions
Catalog Management
Collaboration Tools
Commenting/Notes
Content Management
Data Import/Export
Discussions/Forums
Document Management
Self Service Portal
Text Editing
More features of Citavi
Alerts/Notifications
API
Chat/Messaging
Content Library
Content Publishing Options
Data Synchronization
Document Classification
Drag & Drop
File Management
File Sharing
Full Text Search
Metadata Management
Multi-Language
Project Management
Real Time Editing
Real-Time Notifications
Reporting & Statistics
Search/Filter
Single Sign On
Tagging
Task Management
Task Planning
Task Scheduling
User Management

Citavi User Reviews

Overall Rating

4.4

Ratings Breakdown

74%

10%

Secondary Ratings

Ease of Use

3.9

Value for money

4.1

Customer support

4.4

Functionality

4.3

Ganjar W.

Verified reviewer

Civic & Social Organization

11-50 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed February 2019

Reference Manager and Knowledge Manager in One Pack

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Citavi is a reference manager which works well with various word processor software. However, Citavi is more than reference manager. It also provides tools for users to quote important texts, to write summary and to arrange the references according to your article's structure. After you have done those, when you are working with your article, Citavi will detect the current chapter of your article and will show you relevant references and knowledge (those quotations and summaries that you have made before). Very handy! Citavi also provides a free student version which allows users to manage up to 100 references. This is very generous, considering Citavi has excellent features necessary for writing scientific articles.

Cons:

Citavi does not work on Mac. Users need to install third party software to allow Citavi in a Mac. That's a shame since this limits the user base.

Vendor Response

Dear Ganjar, Thanks so much for your review! I'm very glad to hear that you like Citavi so much. Regarding Mac compatibility, you'll be happy to hear that we are currently working on an online version that will work with Mac and Linux computers. It should be available later this year.

Replied February 2019

Jakob H.

Verified reviewer

Research

Self-Employed

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed June 2021

Extremely powerful tool, withoud which I could not work

I have been using Citavi since my last years of high school all through university and for my PhD thesis. Without citavi, I would not know how to effectively organize my sources. With citavi, it is super easy to keep track of thousands of sources and also retrieve them again after years, even if you didnt know anymore that you have a source.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

The product is incredibly powerful. In my opinion, there are two core functions: on the one hand, you can use Citavi to organize materials (like papers and other files). On the other hand, you can use citavi to facilitate citing those materials when writing papers. But, you do not have to use both. Already, the organizing function is incredibly powerful.

Cons:

Personally, I am not missing anything. But you have to keep in mind that it is an incredible powerful tool, so you need time to discover those functions you need most.

Vendor Response

Thank you for taking the time to write a review, and glad to hear that you like Citavi so much.

Replied September 2021

Karen B.

Verified reviewer

Research

Self-Employed

Used daily for less than 6 months

Review source

Reviewed October 2023

Does not function as expected - promise refunds they do not honour

Terrible. I have contacted them three times and they have promised finance will contact me about a refund. They don't and no refund is forthcoming.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

The sales pitch is great. The technical support do come back to you even if it is to say hey that is how our product works sorry about that.

Cons:

It does not do what you need it too. It is very cumbersome and has bizarre quirksYou need to spend a lot of time watching videos and working it out to learn how to do things that should be pretty easy to do. They promise refunds but do not honour them.

Reasons for switching to Citavi

Because the sales pitch was great it sounded like it had more functionality and was more modern. In reality it was hard to use and didn't have all the features you need.

Paul J.

Verified reviewer

Higher Education

5001-10000 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed May 2021

The must have Literature program for research and education

By using a literature program you want to collect knowledge and want to share it. Working together in a team can be done now with the cloud version very easily without boundaries. Making comments, notes and using the citations for the resulting article can be done quickly and efficiently.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

The list of features is very long. All in all it is the easyness of using the program at first which makes it possible to use it for beginners and also later on for real research. We can make Citavi as required for our students without making them troubles - it is the opposite. Often students discover that they get more time concentrating on the content and do not have to think about citation rules, e.g.

Cons:

For sure there are missing features - this is always the case when you use a software as this is a living process. But the missing points are on a high level. Often it could be discovered that they have been built in already when asking the support people. So, there is no speacial feature which could be presented here.

Reasons for choosing Citavi

First of all the easyness. The software is much "lighter" than other products. A very important point also is support: I never have seen any company in the last 30 years which is quicker but also coming to the point than Citavi. And we as university are not combined in any way with this company, we also have other software products for literature out of which I could choose from.

Vendor Response

Thank you very much for your kind review and detailed comments! We're very glad to hear that you think that Citavi is easy for students to learn but can also support more intense research later on. We're also very glad to hear that you've had a good experience with our support team!

Replied June 2021

Verified

Reviewer

Writing and Editing

Self-Employed

Used monthly for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed December 2022

Good software for reference management

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Functionality

Pros:

The category function, where you can categorize your literature sources, meaning divide your literature sources per topic. You can take notes or extract portion of a document and label it as direct or indirect citation

Cons:

It's free of charge until 100 references. This is few for a normal project/manuscript or for a thesis

Miriam L.

Verified reviewer

Writing and Editing

5001-10000 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed February 2021

The best knowledge organisation programme

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

- It offers everything you need for research (finding texts, analysing texts, formatting the in-text citations and the Works Cited, etc.) - It helps you keep track of your tasks (which texts do I still have to read/scan/borrow, etc.) - The customisable categories and keywords are extremely helpful when you quickly need to find all titles concerned with a specific topic. - Allows you to compile grouped lists of titles (e.g. all titles from a certain time span or all titles within a certain category). - Allows you to search all of your quotes and all OCR’d pdfs in your project at once. - The support is phenomenal! They answer extremely fast and always propose helpful individual solutions. I once had a pretty big bug in my project and the support spend several days solving it – even though I’m only a PhD student. Long story short: I couldn’t write my PhD thesis without Citavi.

Cons:

It might be a bit too complex for undergraduate students, but with their 10-25 pages papers and 30 secondary sources max, they don’t need a knowledge management system anyways. I’d say the best time to start using Citavi is in your first M.A. semester.

Vendor Response

Thank you very much for taking the time to write a review. I'm very glad to hear that you've found Citavi to be so helpful for writing your PhD thesis!

Replied June 2021

Verified

Reviewer

Environmental Services

51-200 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

Reviewed May 2019

Great software and solid support

Our experience has been mostly positive, although our few encounters with others besides our sales contact has not been great. The company needs to have a more responsive tech support team willing to talk with customers on the phone. They keep wanting to deflect us to Q&As and email questions. Since we are in North America and Citavi is in Europe, this can mean at least 24 hours before our query is read and responded to.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Can be adaptable to our house style, has gatekeeper functionality, quite easy to learn and use

Cons:

Support is not as responsive as we had hoped; The Rep on the sales side has saved us from extreme frustration; support people unwilling to help in any way besides email - which we find inflexible and counter to our reasons for choosing this provider. Citavi is lucky to have that rep on their team!

Vendor Response

Thanks for your review, and please accept my apologies for our support team not living up to your expectations! Since we are a small company, we unfortunately can't provide 24/7 support yet. Our support hours do indeed reflect our European location. However, we aim for a 12-hour maximum response time for questions from anywhere in the world. I am sorry that this was not the case for you, and I will work with my colleagues to ensure that this doesn't happen again. We always begin with email as it allows us to use screenshots, attach guides, share links to FAQs, or send a link to a chapter in our 500+ page manual. We usually can resolve problems quickly, and we currently have a 97% satisfaction rate: www.citavi.com/rating For issues that can't be fixed via email, we set up a live support session, which lets us view the customer's screen. I am very sorry that you had such a bad experience. We will work to ensure that future interactions with our support team will be positive ones!

Replied May 2019

Bryan H.

Verified reviewer

Legal Services

1001-5000 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed June 2019

Citavi 6.0 Review

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

Citavi is a comprehensive software that can handle reference management, annotation, outlining, organization, citation, and more. I use it daily for my scholarship requirements at my university and to work on my dissertation. I can't imagine managing all of my resources, annotations and ideas without it. It's absolutely essential for me and I would highly recommend it. I've also found the Citavi support team to be outstanding - very knowledgeable and I've always received a response within 24 hours.

Cons:

Very little. It could be a bit more user friendly, especially with citations, and can be occasionally buggy, but that's because it has so much functionality.

Vendor Response

What a beautiful review. Thank you so much, Bryan! Please note that our support area at https://help.citavi.com/en allows you not only to ask questions and report bugs, but also to share your ideas with us. All the best for the completion of your dissertation with Citavi!

Replied June 2019

Thomas H.

Verified reviewer

Education Management

1001-5000 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed January 2021

Organizing

Citavi allows me to manage a big part of my scientific work at one place

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

The possibility to link dozens of scientific sources, to analyse literature digitally, to import literature sources directly from the internet and to manage bibliographies when writig publications is great, because ist is so easy and reliable.

Cons:

The export of all the citations and comments out of one single source should become less laborious.

Reasons for switching to Citavi

The Reference Manager was a literature management system, Citavi is in addition to that a knowledge management system.

Vendor Response

Thanks for your kind words and for your feedback regarding the export of quotations and comments from a reference! It's currently possible to do this by creating a selection and then creating an annotated bibliography that includes quotations.

Replied February 2021

Peter R.

Verified reviewer

Education Management

201-500 employees

Used weekly for more than 2 years

Review source

Reviewed November 2020

It's perfect!

I am writing papers in social science/education. (you should give the item education without management to your 'industry drop down menu). It's so helpful in gathering sources quickly and not always re-search citations again. I would never miss it.

Ratings Breakdown

Ease of use

Value for money

Customer support

Functionality

Pros:

CITAVI is a SUPER stable, easy to use and useful program. Within years of working with it I collected 1635 sources, many with quotations and some with full text. The most extreme example for its value: I wanted to contribute to a scientific discussion in a journal where the deadline was already over. But since they were also interested in my statement, they gave me 5 days for the article. So I wrote a theoretical statement about sience in a certain context of 22 pages within only 5 days (working day and night ;-}} ). Without CITAVI I would have needed at least 14 days!!!! I really would never miss it!

Cons:

I am sorry. I worked with Citavi for years (Vers. 2?) and never found a spare wish.

Reasons for switching to Citavi

Because of all the quality mentioned. This was a program, which no other one I found in the internet at that time I switched could comped. AND I WAS RIGHT!

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