Is Copyscape Premium Still Worth it? We Tried 7 Online Plagiarism Checker Tools.
While Copyscape appears to be the best site for checking if your content has been removed or published elsewhere without permission, there are other tools out there that are just as good, or so they claim.
We use Copyscape a lot on TechWiser, but as it turns out, they’ve been changing prices since April 2018. So instead of a fixed price of 5 cents per article, you now pay 3 cents per search for 200 words and an additional 1 cent per 100 words. This means that a 1200 word article will cost you $ 0.13 instead of $ 0.5. For us, this is more than 100% price increase. So, we decided to take a look at some of the Copyscape alternatives to see if Copyscape is still worth the money.
Experience
To test these online plagiarism checker tools, I will intentionally write a paragraph in which some parts of it will be copied from other websites, just to see how good these tools are for checking my … uh … plagiarism …
To be consistent and fair to plagiarism checkers, I will create and use 5 data samples that were borrowed from various well-known sources. The content has been “ineptly” rewritten to trick these tools.
To make things easier, I’ll post screenshots of just one of them. Service providers will be rated on a scale of 0 to 5, where the higher the better. So a 4/5 rating means the plagiarism checker was able to identify 4 out of 5 samples for plagiarism.
Let’s find out what you pay for!
The text below was taken from NYTimes.
Facebook announced that it will roll out a new Centralized Privacy Settings page where users can control their privacy and security settings. Facebook has faced criticism for how it handles users’ personal data.
The new security system, which will be introduced to Facebook users around the world in the next few weeks, will allow people to change their privacy and security settings from one place, instead of following 15 different links on the site….
As you can see, 44% of the text, 64 words, is copyscape. This is a higher level, but you’d be surprised how some tools don’t even notice.
Read: How to Copy Unselectable Text to Screen
The Plagiarism Checker Test Online
1. grammar
Grammarly, a well-known name in the industry, also has a plagiarism checker. You can use the free version, but then you will be prompted to sign up for a 7-day trial. Plans start at $ 29.99 per month. When I entered the above text, Grammarly didn’t like it.
The first thing Grammarly checked was plagiarism and found the source. I tried again with a different sample and Grammarly passed it, Copyscape didn’t.
Grammarly claims they compare snippets of text from billions of pages! It is a fairly well-known site that has gained a lot of recognition over the past few years.
Grammarly seems to be only good when your source is a large site that isn’t good enough.
Rating: 3/5
2. The refined checker
Another widely recommended and completely free online plagiarism checker tool. Duplichecker’s user interface isn’t the cleanest of all, and the home page was jam-packed with ads. This allows you to search for a maximum of 1000 words in one search.
The site claims to be “100% accurate” for plagiarism checks. Didn’t find anything during my test. Even when you copy and paste 100% without any edits, the site did not work as advertised.
The site is free, it is used and recommended by many writers and bloggers. The question is, how many of these writers are actually doing their job?
Rating: 0/5
3. Small SEO tools
Small SEO tools offer a range of tools that bloggers and webmasters alike will appreciate, such as image compression, DA checker, spell checker, backlink checker, and so on. The list is quite long. They also have a plagiarism checker that is recommended in many reviews on the Internet.
However, the results were poor. Once again, I was disappointed to see that this tool gave my apparently plagiarized content 100% pure information. I tried again, this time with no changes, and again got the same results.
The tool will also allow you to download text from Google Drive and Dropbox. The maximum number of words is 3000 per search. It got me thinking how good their other tools are.
Rating: 0/5
4. PaperRater
PaperRater is a cloud-based grammar and plagiarism checker with a free trial available to test the service. The free plan will allow you to check no more than 5 pages 10 times a month. The premium version costs $ 7.95 and allows you to check 20 pages with 25 plagiarism checks per month. The premium version also offers other features such as faster processing, no ads and matching text display.
Let’s try the free version.
My work got 100% “originality” 3 out of 5 times, and NYTimes articles got a clean slate. I used the free version, but I don’t recommend it to anyone based on personal experience.
Rating: 3/5
5. PlagScan
PlagScan is said to be used by over 1,000 institutions and 1 million people on their website. I have no doubt about it because it is recommended on many sites and blogs. They have a plan exclusively for large organizations.
PlagScan is one tool that works, but not always. The NYTimes sample got 100% original rating, but it did work with 3 samples from relatively small sites. I was asked to create an account before I could download the report.
He came back one day with a different source from the one I was using – Times of India, one of the largest news sites in India. And it was a copy job without modification.
A free account will give you 20 credits or a 20,000 word check for free. Private plans start at $ 5.99 for 26 pages after that. Not really cheap.
Rating: 3/5
6. Plagium
Plagium will give you 1 free search per day, after which you’ll have to shell out $ 0.04 for a quick search and $ 0.08 for a deep search. Anyone who is serious about plagiarism would like a thorough search. To be honest, the plan baffled me. I used the free search after registering a free account. Supports up to 5000 characters.
Plagium found another source, Wikipedia, instead of the original source. I checked the original link which was not clickable and showed an error and the page had a list of news published in 2007 while I was using the recent one. Plagium worked, but I was unhappy. It had to go back to the original source that I used. Only worked twice, for sure.
Rating: 2/5
7. UniCheck (formerly UnPlag)
UniCheck has a clean interface, unlike other plagiarism checkers I’ve tested. No ads to distract you. The free version of the online plagiarism checker will allow you to search 5 times, after which the price will start at $ 3 for 10 pages. Here are the results:
Once the tool was stuck at 30% for more than half an hour and there was no way to interrupt the process. It was unpleasant to say the least.
UniCheck is back with the article source and a few additional results. Immediately after you get to the site, you will feel professionalism. The user interface, results, and registration process are working fine. The site is really slow and can’t match Copyscape in speed and simplicity. On the other hand, it worked as well as Copyscape where it mattered.
Rating: 5/5
Conclusion: Online Plagiarism Checker
Copyscape is still the best online plagiarism checker with a clean and efficient user interface, ad-free and flawless customer support. I know this because as a blogger, it’s part of my arsenal of blogging tools.
I liked UniCheck for the same reasons. It works as advertised, has a clean user interface with no ads, and I’ve heard good reviews of their customer support from some of my writing friends. If you work with thousands of pages, UniCheck is a cheaper solution without compromising on quality.
If you work with long articles of over 1000 words, then UniCheck will save you money as their best plan offers 2000 pages for $ 140, which is $ 0.07 per page. Copyscape, as we saw earlier, is going to be expensive because of the long forms involved.
Read: Auto copy selected text to clipboard [Chrome]