Citavi Review 2026

Citavi is a reference and knowledge management tool from Lumivero with Web and Desktop apps, an AI assistant for key insights and passage summaries, 11,000+ citation styles, and a Word add-in.

Citavi is a long-standing reference and knowledge management tool — originally a Swiss product, now owned and distributed by Lumivero — that has retained a loyal academic and policy-research user base across 30+ years. In 2026, Citavi ships in two flavors that share one account and cloud-synced projects: Citavi Web (browser-based, available at citaviweb.citavi.com — this is new compared to the historically Windows-only Desktop product) and Citavi Desktop (Windows). Both connect to your Citavi account so projects stay in sync across machines. The product is organized around three interlocking modules: Reference Management (auto-import via the built-in browser picker and academic database search, automatic metadata extraction, 11,000+ citation styles), Knowledge Organization (quotes, summaries, comments, and images captured from PDFs and all automatically linked to their source reference), and Task Planning (per-reference tasks, due dates, progress tracking). A 2026 addition: Citavi's AI assistant provides AI key insights (overviews of an entire article) and AI passage summaries (single-click summary of any paragraph or section). The Word add-in then assembles inline citations and bibliographies from the structured project rather than the global library, which is the workflow academics cite as the reason they stay on Citavi instead of migrating to Zotero or Mendeley. Citavi integrates with Lumivero's NVivo for qualitative analysis. Pricing is per-platform and per-license-type: individual licenses (students, researchers, professionals — Web only, Desktop only, or both), organizational/team licenses with volume pricing for 10+ users, and institutional site licenses that give free access to all students, faculty, and staff at participating universities. A free trial requires no credit card.