Grammarly vs Copyscape: Which plagiarism detector is worth investing your time and money in? Let’s find out!
Grammarly and Copyscape are two essential tools every writer must use to check their content.
Grammarly is like a second pair of eyes looking over your work. Copyscape is also a must-have. It’s an advanced plagiarism checker and if you employ a few writers, it helps ensure they’re not copying existing content, inadvertently or otherwise.
But which tool is best for freelance writers and business owners, Grammarly or Copyscape? Here I cover my experiences with each tool, what I like about them and how you can use either.
| Product Name | Availability | Pricing | Use For | Features | |
| Grammarly | Mac, iOS, Windows, Android, and Grammarly desktop app users. | $29.95 per month, $59.95 every three months, or $139 per year. | Those who’re looking for a writing assistant and plagiarism checker in one. | Tone recognition, plagiarism checker, and vocabulary enhancement. | Try Now |
| Copyscape | Mac, iOS, Windows, and Android users. | Three cents for your first 200 words and one cent for every 100 words after that. | People looking to check for plagiarism in other languages. | Advanced plagiarism checker and batch search options. | Try Now |
We tested dozens of grammar checkers, and Grammarly is the best tool on the market today. It'll help you write and edit your work much faster. Grammarly provides a powerful AI writing assistant and plagiarism checker.
Contents
My Testing Criteria
Before writing this comparison, I looked at the following criteria to check if Grammarly and Copyscape are practical options. These criteria include:
- Use cases
- Ease of Use
- Accuracy
- Pricing
- Additional features
- Flexibility
Both Grammarly and Copyscape meet these criteria perfectly. Grammarly and Copyscape’s plagiarism checkers are the most accurate on the market. Also, both tools are super affordable. Even if you’re a student or part-time writer, using these services won’t break the bank.
Grammarly and Copyscape can run on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android devices, making them functional for most writers or users. However, Grammarly is also available via various add-ons for Word, Google Docs and mobile. That said, the plagiarism reports are less useful via the add-ons.
Why Trust Us?
Ever since I started my career as a freelance writer, I used Grammarly’s paid version to check my writing before sending it to clients or publishing it. This gives me peace of mind knowing that it’ll catch some errors that I might’ve missed.
I also rely on Copyscape. I use it as it includes other plagiarism detection features like:
- Private indexing
- WordPress integration
- Case tracking
These features are everything you need to check if your content is being duplicated on the web.
What Is Copyscape?
Copyscape is a plagiarism detection service founded by Gideon Greenspan in 2003. You can enter your article’s URL into Copyscape to check if it matches other web pages for plagiarism.
If you’re writing an essay, you can also paste it into Copyscape to check for accidental plagiarism. Compared to Copyscape alternatives like Quetext, Copyscape is far easier to use.
Who Is Grammarly And Copyscape For?
Grammarly and Copyscape are two powerful tools that can streamline your writing and editing process. Grammarly checks your writing for grammatical and structural problems while Copyscape surfs the web to find duplicate content.
These tools can positively impact the lives of:
- Freelance writers and bloggers
- Small business and website owners
- Content marketers
- Writers
- Students
Let’s cover some of these use cases.
1. Freelance Writers And Bloggers
Accidental plagiarism can negatively impact the SEO of your article and website. Even if you’re writing original content, some of your words might match a completely unrelated website, and search engines might penalize you for duplicate content.
But if you’re using Grammarly or Copyscape to check your work for plagiarism, then they’ll show you websites where similar content is live. You can then rewrite or cite accordingly.
This gives you peace of mind knowing search engines and clients won’t misinterpret your original work for copied content.
2. Content Marketers and Website Owners
Grammarly and Copyscape are perfect tools to check for grammatical errors and plagiarism issues if you’re a content marketer or website owner.
Most marketers and website owners employ other professional writers to write posts, landing pages, and social media copy. So you must have a duplichecker to see if newer writers copied long walls of text from other websites. Use them as part of your hiring process.
3. Students
Submitting work that contains plagiarism is an offence in most colleges or schools. Even if you never intentionally copied text from the internet, your college or school might find accidental plagiarism.
Accidental plagiarism describes forgetting to cite sources or unintentionally paraphrasing someone else’s work. In a worst-case scenario, this can lead to a disciplinary hearing or suspension.
However, head over to Grammarly or Copyscape, copy and paste text, and each tool will show how much percent is potentially plagiarized. After making the necessary edits and citations, you can hand in your assignment with peace of mind.
(If you use Grammarly, you can correct other common writing mistakes and aim for a higher grade)
Learn how to avoid accidental plagiarism
Grammarly vs Copyscape: Our Test
We tested several articles using both tools and also evaluated their pricing and ease of use and other criteria.
Ease of Use
Both tools are super easy to use. All you have to do is head over to Chrome, type in their respective websites, and copy-paste your content. You could also download Grammarly’s browser extension and save more time.
It’ll take a few seconds for both tools to analyze your work, and you can make changes from there.
When you paste writing in Grammarly, it gives options for personalizing edits towards your writing style. For example, if you’re writing a blog post, you can opt for a more informal tone and Grammarly won’t tell you to edit any informal words.
You can also access a report that shows your word count, average sentence length, and word length.
This functionality sets Grammarly apart. It doesn’t just check for spelling issues and plagiarism issues but ensures that your writing is engaging and clear.
Copyscape enabled me to check a live URL and see if this content is in use elsewhere. This is useful for checking existing live content. However, it’s not possible to check articles via an add-on or desktop app. However, it only takes a few clicks to test a URL, hence the below result.
Winner: Tie
Accuracy
While writing this review, I found several instances of Become a Writer Today articles plagiarised by other writers online using Copyscape.
Grammarly didn’t find an issue with this live article. However, I also tested some other articles. When I pasted the below article into Grammarly’s plagiarism checker, it matched my content with eleven different websites and gave me a plagiarism percentage of 5%.
But when I pasted the same piece of text in Copyscape, it didn’t find plagiarism issues.
It appears both tools treat plagiarism in different ways. I’d recommend using both tools depending on whether the content is new or live. At Become a Writer Today, we used Grammarly to check articles in production or being edited. And we use Copyscape to check live articles.
Winner: Tie
Pricing
Free Plans
Both tools provide a free plan. Grammarly offers a free plan where you can check for correctness and engagement. You can also access a lot of the key features of Grammarly Premium on the free plan. However, you can’t check for plagiarism.
With Copyscape, you can compare two articles or web pages to see how they line up against each other… for free. Simply enter the URL or paste the article and Copyscape will tell you if they match or not.
Winner: Copyscape
Premium Pricing
With Grammarly’s premium version, you get three payment options:
- A monthly plan of $29.95
- A quarterly plan costing $59.95 every three months
- An annual plan costing $139 per year
But if you don’t want to spend money on Grammarly right away, then try the free tool. It contains many key features like a spell checker and tone detector, but you won’t be able to use the online plagiarism checker.
With Copyscape, three plans are available:
- Copyscape Premium costs three cents for your first 200 words and one cent for every 100 words after that
- Copysentry Standard costs $4.95 per month, and you can check up to ten pages with additional pages costing 25 cents per page
- Copysentry Professional costs $19.95 per month for up to ten pages and $1 extra per page
Grammarly Premium uses also gets access to writing insights, a grammar checker and an AI writing assistant. Here, Grammarly excels.
Winner: Grammarly
Additional Features
Although Grammar provides an advanced writing assistant, Copyscape offers some other useful advanced anti-plagiarism features like:
- Private indexing
- Copysentry
- Premium API
- Banner protection
- Copysentry
- Batch search
As a freelance writer, these tools automate a huge chunk of your writing and plagiarism checking process.
With private indexing, you can check your work for plagiarism against other offline articles. For example, if you’re writing a post and have several articles waiting to be published, you can use Copyscape’s private indexing to compare these articles against each other. Grammarly doesn’t provide this feature.
Another helpful feature on Copyscape is Copysentry. This feature automatically checks your website for plagiarism daily so you won’t have to check each page manually. The Copyscape API integrates Copyscape into your content production process, allowing you to instantly check writing for plagiarism.
Banner protection allows you to use Copyscope’s banners to warn potential plagiarists against duplicating your content. This is super helpful if you constantly find websites copying your content.
If you sign up for Copysentry, you can protect an entire website against plagiarism. The software monitors billions of pages daily to check for duplicate content. Copysentry sends you an email when copies of your work appear on the web.
This way, you don’t have to manually check for duplicate content every day, Copysentry does it for you.
However, my favorite feature on Copyscape is batch search. Batch search allows you to check your whole website for plagiarism so you don’t have to manually check every page. You can also run this operation in the background so you can do other things at the same time.
Even if you’re writing content in other languages, you can use Copyscape to look for duplicate content. These are significant benefits that Grammarly doesn’t offer.
Winner: Copyscape
Flexibility
Copyscape’s plagiarism works in different languages like Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and German. The only exception is that it only handles pages written in standard world alphabets, not those that use ideograms like Chinese, Korean, and Russian.
Grammarly only works in American, British, Canadian, and Australian English. If you’re writing content in any other language, then Grammarly isn’t suitable (yet). So if you write for clients or own a blog in a different language, Copyscape is a better option
Winner: Copyscape
Areas for Improvement
Grammarly and Copyscape are the best plagiarism checker tools; however, both can still improve in critical areas:
- Grammarly only works in English
- Copyscape’s duplication software doesn’t allow you to save reports
Grammarly Only Works In English
If your first language isn’t English and you’re blogging in other languages, then Grammarly isn’t for you.
Although Grammarly is constantly developing and might accommodate new languages in the near future, it currently only supports English (US, British, Canadian, Australian).
Copyscape Don’t Allow You To Save Reports
Saving reports is a massive benefit that tools like Grammarly provide since you can always come back to look over your work. Unfortunately, Copyscape doesn’t allow you to save reports.
So if you’re checking your assignment for plagiarism and you want to show it to someone else, you’ll need to leave the tab open or run it in the background.
Grammarly And Copyscape: The Final Word
Grammarly and Copyscape are both accurate plagiarism checking tools that benefit millions of writers, students, and business owners. With advanced plagiarism checkers, you’ll always have peace of mind knowing that your content doesn’t contain any plagiarism.
If you employ freelance writers and or have a budget, opt for Grammarly. It allows you to check your work for grammatical errors and ensures your writing is engaging all while detecting plagiarism.
However, if you’re writing content in different languages and need a free or cheap plagiarism checker, Copyscape is a better option. You can check for plagiarism in other languages like Spanish and Italian.
If you have a larger budget, I’d recommend using both tools. Here at Become a Writer Today, we use Grammarly to edit and check individual articles and Copyscape to protect the site’s existing content against plagiarism, using its advanced features like batch search, banner protection, and Copysentry. If you like this article, don’t forget to read our guide to the best plagiarism checkers.
Resources
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