The biblatex package by Philipp Lehman is becoming the definitive citation management tool for LaTeX users. Biblatex has relied on the venerable BibTeX program only for sorting and generating a very generic .bbl file without any formatting instruction. Everything else is taken care of by biblatex, which provides a powerful and flexible macro interface for authors of citation styles.

Biber offers a large superset of BibTeX functionality for BibLaTeX users. In addition it offers full UTF-8 (Unicode 6.0) capabilities, fully customisable sorting, output to GraphViz to help visualise complex crossrefs, support for remote data sources, structural validation of the data against the (customisable) data model, and a lot more.