Article Note: This article “Top 10 Online Plagiarism Checker Tools – All Details & Comparison” was first published on 5th February 2018. We have last updated this article on 24th July 2020 with fresh information.
When writing an article or essay, it is essential that the student or researcher provide proper attribution whenever outside sources are used, and especially avoid plagiarism issues. Indeed, professors and universities enact strict plagiarism rules, and failing to abide by them can lead to serious consequences including the threat of expulsion.
Fortunately, there are plenty of online plagiarism checker tools to choose from. This article will highlight 10 companies that offer such services. Copyscape, Grammarly, Small SEO Tools, EduBride, Enago, Study Moose, Quetext, The Penster, Unicheck, and PapersOwl. Please note that this article does not offer an endorsement of any of the websites or regard any of them as completely superior to the others. Indeed, all of them offer the basics that will protect the student from academic misconduct. Instead, the purpose is to be informative and highlight and compare the features. This allows the reader to make the right decision based on their budget and expectations.
1. EduBirdie
The laws related to plagiarism are extremely strict and violation of any such laws may put you in big trouble. When it comes to content making, you can always refer to websites available on the internet without infringing any copyright issues. If you have written some content or got it done by some other individual then you have to make sure it is 100% free from plagiarism. A tool like EduBirdie is definitely helpful to get your job done easily.
EduBirdie is a free plagiarism checker tool that lets you check your content to avoid any form of duplication. The only thing you need to do is to copy the content and paste it into the given field. Or you can attach the file to check it for plagiarism. Once submitted, the website will give you a report demonstrating the unique percentage of your content.
Whether it is an essay, academic paper, technical descriptions, case studies, product details, or whitepaper, you can check any form of text through this tool. EduBirdie not only looks after the plagiarism but also takes care of the privacy of your content. The website maintains utmost confidentiality in maintaining the data of users thereby making sure everyone checks their content with total confidence. This is what makes EduBirdie one of the best plagiarism-checking websites of today’s time.
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2. Copyscape
This is another tool that facilitates the checking of plagiarism at a quality level. Copyscape was started by Indigo Stream Technologies Ltd. It is an organization whose co-founder is Gideon Greenspan. Along with the plagiarism tool, Copyscape also comes featured with an additional service called Copysentry. Copysentry is an extra feature that helps Copyscape users to secure their website by alerting them if anyone copies the content of their website by emailing them about the same.
Copyscape also features much improvised and powerful plagiarism checking with its service known as Copyscape Premium. Previously, the premium service was charged at 5 cents for one search of plagiarism. This pricing was available up to 2nd April 2018 only. After that, the pricing is 3 cents for the first 200 words of the content and 1 cent for every 100 words after the first 200 words. For this purpose, the Copyscape users can buy premium credits with the help of a credit card or PayPal, prior to checking for plagiarism.
The main difference between Copyscape’s free plagiarism checking and Copyscape Premium is that the Premium search provides more results of copied content. This is limited to up to only 10 results in the case of free search. It also allows searching for offline content searches.
3. Enago Plagiarism Checker with AI-based Grammar Check
Enago offers its Plagiarism Checker tool for a wide base of users. From research students to content writers, from researchers to academicians, all can use the Enago Plagiarism Checker to check their documents for duplicate content, verify text similarity, and correct grammatical errors. Enago Plagiarism Check tool, in partnership with Turnitin, runs a powerful AI engine in the background to scan text from across 91+ billion current and archived webpages and 82+ million published scholarly articles, technical reports, student thesis, research papers, and conference articles. While users can always use this Enago Plagiarism and AI Grammar Check, more advanced tools such as Power Mode are available for an additional pricing package. Power Mode offers 40% more text suggestions and has 92% accuracy. Users can make use of this Power Mode to rectify their grammatical mistakes such as contextual spellings, scientific words, word choice, sentence structure, phrasing improvements, vocabulary, etc. Enago Plagiarism Check is ideally suitable for all kinds of formal writing where users can instantly correct their writing to make it readable, concise, fluent, and clear. Its grammar check helps in removing fragmentation in writing to improve the document’s readability scores.
Users can go for the Basic Package which costs $12. What they get here is pretty awesome. Users can scan their content and compare it with that of 91+ billion archived pages from across the internet. It spots plagiarised language and also checks for grammar errors. With a more Advanced Checks package available at $19, users can scan their writing and compare it with additional 82+ million Scholarly Articles. Power Editing Package costs just $6 for which you get the most powerful AI-powered document editing tool. Enago comes with secure encryption and searches over 20 languages for diverse writing. Users get their reports in their email within just about 5 minutes.
4. Grammarly
The San Francisco-based Grammarly Inc. is successful and noteworthy for its proofreading software that assists the user with correcting grammar mistakes, but the website also offers high-quality plagiarism-detection services. In fact, 4 million subscribers rely on Grammarly to make sure their papers are authentic and free of any plagiarism issues. Aside from the ability to scan 16 billion web pages, Grammarly also has access to ProQuest’s entire database of millions of sources.
The user is able to test out Grammarly’s plagiarism-detection abilities by copying and pasting text into a box on the company’s webpage, but once you give it a try you are required to sign up for a 7-day trial, after which the options are to pay $29.95/month, $59.95/quarterly, or $139.95/annually for their services. The pros are that you will receive top-of-the-line services, but the major negative is that this price might not be agreeable to casual writers or students who are on a budget.
That said, if you do choose Grammarly to safeguard your paper against accusations of stealing from other authors’ works, you will not only get an accurate and reliable report, you have access to a citation generator in the three most common styles: APA, MLA, and Chicago, and suggestions on how to make your paper better. For example, it will highlight issues with grammar use and writing style along with corrections. If you can handle the relatively steep price, the comprehensive grammar checks to go along with the plagiarism scan really do set this company apart from the others and practically guarantee a perfectly polished paper.
5. Plagiarism checker by Small SEO Tools
Small SEO Tools provides the best ever free plagiarism checker that you just might stumble upon online, today. They’ve got developed their product with a thorough analysis, taking into consideration what the users rummage around for in a non-chargeable plagiarism checker. They’ve got enforced all the methods to form this most effective plagiarism checker free online.
Small SEO Tools understands that students deem tools for running plagiarism checks on their research papers, personal research works, and other such contents, prior to submission. Therefore, Small SEO Tools have a tendency to come up with a free plagiarism computer code to assist students to establish plagiarism. This can be conjointly true for lecturers and writers. The free online plagiarism checker for college students, teachers, scholars, and writers is admittedly the most effective plagiarism check tool.
Webmaster and SEO professionals may get pleasure from plagiarism computer code because it will facilitate them to take care that each one of the contents of their website is exclusive and plagiarism-free. Recent and distinctive content might facilitate them to rank high in search engines. Small SEO Tools recommends that people forever use a plagiarism detector before commercial enterprise or submitting their contents online or offline, to stop any unpleasant scenario.
6. Study Moose
Study Moose is an academic platform headquartered in Wilmington, Delaware that primarily focuses on assisting students with essay writing help. In particular, for a reasonable fee based on the length and academic level, students can receive custom essay examples which they, in turn, can use as guidance when completing their own assignments.
The company also offers a plagiarism checker which, unlike the others, is completely free. For many users, this is a big bonus. In addition, a major feature that differentiates it from other websites is the free option of uploading documents. As noted, the other websites only provide this as part of their paid services.
It could be said that Study Moose’s plagiarism checker is no-frills. Once your report comes back, it highlights the sentences that come back as plagiarized. It also provides a percentage of the total work that was flagged as not being original. The software seems to struggle with scanning lengthy documents. But if you break it up into smaller parts (say, into files of 5 pages each), it does the trick.
The bottom line is that for students who are on a budget and who don’t necessarily need all of the fancy extras that other websites offer (and aren’t interested in being charged monthly fees), this is a reliable choice that will definitely safeguard you from accusations that you lifted sources from other authors.
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7. Quetext
Quetext, based in Kansas City, Missouri, is the developer of plagiarism-detection software that has served more than a million teachers, students, and professionals around the globe. What makes this company successful? Quetext has compiled a database consisting of 20 million books, a million journals, and 35 billion web pages. Their patented DeepSearch™ technology utilizes finely-tuned algorithms that allow the user to compare their paper with billions of sources. In particular, this software does not merely check for a text that is copied word-for-word, it also focuses on context.
To put it another way, it considers the probability that certain work has been lifted from other sources based on the meaning of the text, even if the writer used different words. This adds an extra layer of protection for researchers and authors who worked hard on their texts.
The free version of Quetext’s plagiarism-detection checker runs on an easy-to-use platform. All the user has to do is copy the text and paste it into the box. Then click the “plagiarism check” button and wait as the text is compared to billions of sources. After that, receive a report indicating what percentage of the text was flagged as being taken from other works.
However, the free version has certain limits. The user cannot upload files and is limited to 3 searches and 3 reports unless they upgrade to the paid subscription. But at $9.99/month, most users will consider it worth the cost. This website does not contain all of the features that Grammarly possesses (as discussed above). But if your focus is on making sure your paper passes muster, it is a nice option. Aside from the ability to upload as many as 50 pages at a time (Word or PDF files), the user is able to take advantage of the benefits that DeepSearch offers in terms of complete and thorough plagiarism checking.
8. The Pensters
The Pensters, with its main offices in Cyprus, is another academic platform site that offers help to students who are struggling with completing their essays and coursework. Its plagiarism-checking services act like something in between Study Moose and the other two websites. On one hand, users can copy and paste 5 texts per month for free. This is really convenient if you are a casual blogger or only write papers from time to time.
On the other hand, it also requires payment once the user reaches the limit. You have the option to receive any additional plagiarism reports beyond the first 5 at 50 cents per page. The fact that the user pays as they go rather than a flat fee can be beneficial for those who are on a budget and who only write a few pages a month.
To illustrate this, students who pay for monthly subscriptions with some of the other services are basically wasting their money during the summer months since they are not writing papers. But the Penster’s “no obligations, no-strings-attached” approach provides the flexibility that the others cannot. When you give it a try, the results are generally accurate and reliable. While this website does not contain a large database of material to check from, it does match up the papers with the billions of web pages that are available on search engines such as Google. So, in the end, it really does achieve what most students are looking for.
9. Unicheck
A cloud-based tool for plagiarism checking Unicheck was earlier known as Unplag. This tool verifies how authentic a document or text is. It provides a similarity report with detailed results of potentially plagiarized text. Unicheck is fast, accurate, and performs real-time searches across more than 40 billion web pages, open access, and educational databases.
It takes up to 20 seconds to check 1 page for plagiarism by the Unicheck plagiarism detector. This plagiarism detection tool is used by companies, individual users (lawyers, writers, bloggers, editors, etc.), and more than 1.1K educational institutions worldwide.
Unicheck is very popular among educators and students. It can be easily integrated into major LMSs (Moodle, Canvas, GoogleClassroom, etc.). It also offers versatile functionality to ease the teaching and learning process. Educators or LMS administrators can set up certain useful features and functionality within the system (pre-check attempts, sharing a report with a student, bulk checks, etc.). Among its most popular and useful tools are similarity checker, text modification checker, authorship verification tool (available in beta version), code plagiarism checker (available in beta version), citations, and reference detection algorithm. It also offers integration of add-ons for Google Docs.
The reports are generated automatically with all similarity results and formatting mistakes indicated.
The report has the following components:
- Originality score that shows what percentage of the checked content matches other sources.
- Matched sources displayed in the side panel with direct links to the sources.
- Matched segments are highlighted in the text according to the type of match (text, quote, reference, character replacement).
The best part about Unicheck is that it is totally safe to check your paper or content for similarity. The plagiarism checker doesn’t save the submitted documents or share them with third parties. All personal data of the users are encrypted and protected.
Unicheck offers an enhanced user experience and affordable payment plans. The clear and visually appealing layout makes the tool and Similarity Report easy to use and understand. Unicheck can find content similarities in more than 20 languages including English, French, Spanish, and supports almost all file formats.
10. PapersOwl
You have no reason to submit an unchecked article when you can run it through a free plagiarism checker. Whether writing academic or website content, you are prone to repeating what someone has written before in a pattern that shows your work was copied from other sites when checked for originality. This does not usually mean you deliberately copied someone else’s work, but it still passes for unprofessionalism.
You don’t have to struggle with plagiarism when you have a tool that will allow you to check a document saved in any of these formats; .pdf, .doc, .docx, .txt, .rtf, .odt. The free plagiarism checker by PapersOwl is a copy-paste option that will check your work as soon as it detects text. You can also browse your files instead of pasting them on the box provided. There is no word limit, which allows you to check long articles and even have them perfected by a professional from the same company at a fee.
When you submit an article for checking, the system takes about 10 seconds to generate a report. It shows you the percentage of uniqueness and the sites that show similarities with your content if it is not 100% original. It then allows you to download your article in whichever format works best for you. All this is free, and there are no indications of a limit in the number of checks you can do in a day.
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Final words
Every writer, blogger, and editor may feel that they do not need a plagiarism check as they have written the content from scratch. But, they need to understand that even if they have written the content on their own it may not be considered original. It may be similar to content that has already been published before. Along with Google, plagiarism checker tools has access to several other resources, libraries, and content database. Hence, it is a really essential step of the publishing and content creation process. Not just writers and bloggers, the tool is also much needed for students.
Most plagiarism checking tools not only highlight the potentially plagiarized content but also provide links to the source text. Tools also ensure that they give a percentage of content that may be plagiarized. So, the plagiarism checking tool is an extremely effective tool to ensure that your content is original and genuine. There is an array of free, freemium, and paid plagiarism checking tools available online. But, not all tools will give you precise results. We always advise you to opt for known and trusted tools so that you get unbiased and reliable results. Read the above blog and get an idea of the top tools available. Then choose one that fits your needs.
Web developer and SEO specialist with 20+ years of experience in open-source web development, digital marketing, and search engine optimization. He is also the moderator of this blog "RS Web Solutions (RSWEBSOLS)".
