Is Grammarly Good for Plagiarism?

Discover the answer to the question is Grammarly good for plagiarism and what you should know about using it as a plagiarism checker in an article. 

I’m a Grammarly Premium customer. I use the plagiarism checker extensively to find missing citations, check if my work has been plagiarized online, and vet the work of new freelance writers. I’ve also compared it against dozens of other premium and free plagiarism checkers.

The Grammarly Plagiarism compares a piece of writing against any works freely available online. It only takes a few minutes to scan an article and it’s relatively easy to analyze the results. Basically, the Grammarly plagiarism checker highlights instances of potential plagiarism, provides links for comparison, and scores the pieces. 

Grammarly is good for plagiarism checks if you want to scan a piece of writing quickly and easily against other instances of similar content that’s freely available online. It’s also useful if you are looking for a missing link, citation or an online source. 

Considering the Grammarly plagiarism checker comes bundled with a best-in-class checker, and all for $30 a month, then yes, it’s good for plagiarism. For more read our Grammarly review. All of that said, expect these caveats.

Gated Content

Firstly, the Grammarly plagiarism checker does not check a piece of writing against content that isn’t freely accessible. For example, gated research papers, academic papers, out-of-print books, and outside the scope of its checks. If you’re an academic, consider using TurnItIn and or a dedicated academic plagiarism checker like Scribbr.

Longer Works

An editor can check up to 300 documents or 150,000 words daily. It slows down somewhat if you upload length works and you’re restricted to 100,000 characters in a single check. So, if you’re checking something longer for plagiarism, break the work into smaller sections that you can paste into Grammarly one by one. 

Checking Content At Scale

If you want to check dozens of articles at once or protect an entire site against plagiarism, then you may be better served using a dedicated plagiarism tool like Copyscape. That tool enables batch scans. To find out more about your options and their use cases, we’ve rounded up the best plagiarism checkers. 

Heavy Revisions

While Grammarly detects most instances of plagiarism if a writer heavily rewrites a piece and forgets a citation or link Grammarly may potentially miss this instance of potential plagiarism. Paraphrasing may or may not be an issue depending on the intended audience. For example, it could be an issue in academia, but it’s probably less so on social media. To learn more, read our guide to paraphrasing vs plagiarism.

Product Names and Brands

Sometimes, Grammarly flags potential issues that aren’t plagiarism. For example, I installed a plugin that pulls through product information from Amazon. When I put these articles into Grammarly, it flags content from these product boxes as potentially problematic. However, it’s not plagiarism the WordPress plugin is designed to use content from Amazon in this manner.

What Percentage of Plagiarism Is Acceptable in Grammarly?

An editor or writer must decide what percentage of plagiarism to accept. This score is an indication rather than a prescription. I check every instance of potential plagiarism that Grammarly flags to see if you need to revise, rewrite, cut or cite.

That said, a plagiarism score higher than 10% is a red flag. Immediately fix the offending work, include a link or citation, and check the piece with the writer in question. Anything between five and 10% is open to review too. Anything less than 5% is probably, depending on the publication and audience, i.e. academia versus social media.