If you’re writing for a business website or a college paper or even just a personal blog, it’s important to avoid plagiarising content. The might be an obvious thing to say to writers and marketers who avoid copying content, but there are a few reasons why a plagiarism checker makes sense.

1. We are all products of our influences and sometimes we use someone else’s words without realizing it. Unintentional plagiarism can lead to the same consequences as intentional plagiarism.
2. If you hire writers to help with content, landing pages, and emails, it’s important to check their work for plagiarism. Whether your contracted or staff writers mean to copy the content or not, you can’t take the chance that you might inadvertently publish copied content. 
3. Plagiarized content on the internet will almost always struggle to rank well on Google. The algorithm that power’s the world’s most popular search engine is designed to favor unique content. Originality is key. Plagiarised content is generally (but not always) useless for generating organic traffic to a website.
4. There are legal reasons for avoiding plagiarising content. Companies have been sued and journalists exposed for passing another creator’s content as their own. Students have lost grades and authors have been financially bankrupted thanks to their use of copyrighted material. 

The solution is to use high-quality paid plagiarism checker software. Sounds straightforward, right? But not all applications are equal. In fact, some industry-standard checkers are downright terrible at discovering duplicate content. People are still using plagiarism tools that were good 10 years ago. Times have changed. 

If you’re serious about making sure that the content you publish is unique and original, you will need a plagiarism checker. Now, you might ask if it needs to be a paid product. In most cases, the answer is yes. Paid plagiarism checkers are better. But not always. Read on to learn about the best plagiarism checking products and one free plagiarism checker, which is just as good as the rest. 

Copyscape is the tool favored by businesses, universities, and marketing companies. If you buy content from a content marketing agency, you will generally receive a “passed Copyscape checks” stamp of approval. 

But is Copyscape the best? 

The truth is no. It’s not the best. Far from it. In fact, I believe that Copyscape is one of the least reliable tools for checking the uniqueness of a piece of writing. Why is it so popular? Copyscape‘s popularity seems to stem from its reputation and longevity. It’s been around forever, everyone knows it, and people presume it’s the best because others have said so. 

I recommend you test some writing samples in Copyscape and then test the same content in other tools. The difference in quality might shock you. Try the best tool to see what I mean.

WriterZen is a content creation platform that helps writers find keywords, keyword topics, and build content based on artificial intelligence recommendations. Instead of switching between keyword research tools, writing apps, and plagiarism checkers, writers can concentrate on writing. No more switching back-and-forth between apps. The free plan allows you to check up to 5000 words per day for plagiarism, so it’s worth signing up for a free account.

While you’re there, make sure you check out the other cool features for writers. 

Quetext is a Kansas city-based company that focuses on one thing, plagiarism detection. And it achieves its promise of accuracy, privacy, and integrity.

Quetext is a simple tool with a powerful backend. The software’s Deepsearch ™ technology, which uses contextual analysis, fuzzy matching, and conditional scoring to produce a detailed plagiarism report.

While the website promises a fast search, don’t expect instant answers. You might have to wait for up to a minute for results. In some ways, it’s comforting to know that the Deepsearch algorithm is going “deep” on the internet to find any connection between your query and what’s already published on the billions of websites out there. 

Quetext also offers a citation assistant. This is useful for academic paper and scientific paper writers who want to create citations to articles or research papers they reference (or copy verbatim) in their writing. 

You can exclude certain sources (for example your own website and review sites) and every search generates a report that you can refer to at any time. Results are displayed with color-coding to show exactly what parts of the text are potentially “copied”. Clicking on each section of the text displays the source. 

The Premium plan costs $9.99 a month after a 3-day free trial. The “free” version is a limited set of searches that give you a pretty good idea of the quality of results. 

It’s a wonderfully simple tool with lots of potential. 

Whitesmoke is a robust and complete English grammar checker software for desktop and web. 

This grammar checker, style checker, and spell checker is similar to better-known competitor Grammarly but is cheaper (and with regular discounts, it is often more than 50% cheaper).

With the plagiarism detector tool, credits come as part of each plan. You get 500 credits to use and you can purchase more if you need them. 

Writer is a superb proofreading web app that also offers a free plagiarism checker for everyone. Yes, that’s 100% free. And in extensive testing, it appears to produce similar results to Quetext. 

I always recommend using multiple plagiarism checkers, just like I recommend using multiple content editing tools. And as this tool is free, there’s no reason not to add it to your toolkit. 

Writer uses AI to determine if your text is similar to another piece of text. And this is where artificial intelligence can improve on other checkers. Writer doesn’t just look for exact copies, it flags suspiciously close language based on sentence structure and related terms so you can edit your content for true originality. 

Check for plagiarism regularly so that your rankings remain strong and Google recognizes your ownership of your content. Use PlagiaShield, a fast and accurate plagiarism detection service, to ensure all pages on your website are original.

PlagiaShield helps you identify content thieves, prevent articles with copied content from being uploaded, and identify backlink opportunities. Other tools require you to check URLs individually, but this tool can check your entire domain at once and monitor changes at the same time. 

Small SEO Tools

This is a completely free plagiarism checker that comes as part of a suite of SEO tools for plagiarism. The site relies on display ads to support the processing of the millions of visits a month to the site. And while the results are good, the ads are one aspect that will not only distract you but slow your progress. 

It’s hard to even find the check plagiarism button. It’s usually buried under a jumble of ads. In addition, you’ll need to complete the reCAPTCHA every time you want to run a plagiarism check. It might not sound like much, but once you’ve used a premium tool like Quetext or Writer, the clutter of the Small SEO Tools website can be off-putting. 

One nice feature is the ability to upload different file formats like .doc, .pdf, and .odt. You can also select files directly from your Dropbox or Google Drive storage. And of course, as with the other tools, you can simply paste text into the entry field. 

After you’ve run your checks for plagiarized content, you can also click the “Check Grammar“ button for a free grammar check. It’s nowhere near as thorough as Grammarly or ProWritingAid, but it’s a good first check and can act as a backup check to support premium products. 

Small SEO tools for plagiarism also offers checks in languages such as Spanish, French, Chinese, and German. 

If you’ve been writing for the web for any amount of time, you’ll probably have heard of Grammarly. But did you know that the world’s most popular grammar checker tool and proofreading app also has a plagiarism checker?

Most people use the free version of Grammarly but it’s worth upgrading to a paid plan to get all the features (clarity-focused sentence rewrites, consistency, compelling vocabulary, and more) that have made the tool the standard for proofreading on the internet. And with a paid plan you also get Grammarly’s plagiarism checker in your web browser, Google docs, native Windows and MacOS apps, mobile phone apps, and Microsoft Word. 

Grammarly’s paid features are one of the more expensive on this list at around  $12 a month. However, you get the full suite of writing tools along with the plagiarism detection tool with a paid subscription.

ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid is one of the best tools for improving your writing, and I recommend it to everyone. There’s also a plagiarism checker feature, which is extensive, but expensive. At the lowest plan, each check costs $1. Buy 1000 checks for $200 and each check works out at 20c. Still more expensive than Copyscape, but it’s a lot better than that tool. It’s worth considering ProWritingAid’s Plagiarism Check service as a backup service to support your primary tool. It’s no harm double-checking important pieces of content. 

So there you have it. The best paid (and free) plagiarism checkers available for writers of all genres and mediums. Which is the best? Well, that depends on your writing style, workflow, and preferences. Check them all out and combine tools. If you also need grammar checkers and writing assistants, it’s best to go for a tool that incorporates everything. Otherwise, Quetext and Writer are the paid plagiarism checker tools I recommend for starters.