Here are 5 Free Plagiarism checkers that can detect plagiarism in essays, articles, and documents. Such plagiarism checkers are most useful for students, teachers, and writers to ensure their content does not have any plagiarism.
All these plagiarism checkers let you check plagiarism online. You do not have to download or install anything to check for plagiarism with these free plagiarism checkers.
All the plagiarism checkers make tall claims that they can check 100% plagiarism. So, I decided to check each of these plagiarism checkers. Here is a description of the test:
I did two tests for each plagiarism checker. In first test, I took one paragraph of text from myTV, a software I had reviewed recently. This paragraph is available on more than one web pages, so this should be pretty easy to find for any decent plagiarism detection software.
In second test I made minor modifications to each sentence of that paragraph. Basically, I added one or two extra words in each sentence, but all other text remained safe. For example, in the first sentence, I added “own”.
Here are the free plagiarism checkers, and their performance in these tests:
Advanced Plagiarism Checker
Advanced Plagiarism Checker is the best free online plagiarism checker that I have come across. This free plagiarism checker was able to most accurately find plagiarism in both the tests that I did. You can copy the text that you want to scan for plagiarism in its text box. You can also provide URL of a web page if you want to scan that for plagiarism, or you can upload a text file that has the text that you want to check.
After that you can click on “Create Report” button, and this plagiarism checker will check your text for plagiarism. The way it detects plagiarism is by breaking sentences into small phrases, and then searching for each of those exact phrase on Google, and then reporting back the matches to you. As it uses small phrases, it increases the likelihood of finding plagiarism manifold, and that is what primarily makes it better than Dustball (reviewed below). Do remember to play around with its “Sensitivity” control, as that can greatly vary the results.
Test for Plagiarism:
Now let’s test Advanced Plagiarism Checker for Plagiarism tests.
First Test: Pass. In the first test, this free plagiarism was able to accurately identify plagiarism in all the phrases. It also gave links to see original web pages that had the text that I had copied.
Second Test: Pass. In the second test also Advanced Plagiarism Checker was able to find plagiarism. That was really good. This is the only plagiarism checker that passed this test.
Try Advanced Plagiarism Checker here.
Dustball Plagiarism Checker
Dustball is one of the best free plagiarism checkers. This plagiarism checker lets you copy paste the text that you want to scan for plagiarism. You can even update a Word document that has the text that you want to scan for plagiarism. Dustball plagiarism checker will extract phrases from your text, and then searches for those phrases on the web. It will then separately report plagiarism for each phrase.
Dustball has a pretty good concept for check plagiarism. One of the reason I really like this free plagiarism checker is that it does not relies on complete sentences for checking plagiarism, but instead extracts phrases from that. This increases the probability of detecting plagiarism.
Test for Plagiarism:
Now let’s test Dustball for Plagiarism tests.
First Test: Pass. In the first test, Dustball was able to accurately identify plagiarism in all the phrases. It also gave links to see original web pages that had the text that I had copied.
Second Test: Fail. In the second test, Dustball was not able to find any plagiarism. This was because all the phrases that Dustball extracted had the additional words that I added, so it was never able to find an exact match for text. However, I noticed that if I had added words in beginning or end of sentence, instead of in the middle, there was a good probability that Dustball could have detected Plagiarism.
Try Dustball Plagiarism checker here.
Dupli Checker
Dupli Checker is another free online plagiarism detection software. You can copy text it its text box, or upload a text file. This plagiarism detection software will break all the sentences of your text into individual sentences, and will then search for those sentences in Google. It gives a good detection if the text is an exact match, but fails if there are changes in text. It does gives an option to search for text with quotes or without quotes. Latter option can possibly increase the probability of detecting plagiarism.
Test for Plagiarism:
Now let’s test Dupli Checker for Plagiarism tests.
First Test: Pass. In the first test, Dupli Checker was able to accurately identify plagiarism in the text.
Second Test: Fail. In the second test, Dupli Checker was not able to find any plagiarism. This was because it was trying to search for complete sentences, which obviously did not match. Try Dupli Checker here.
Plagiarism Checker.com
Plagiarism Checker at PlagiarismChecker.com is another simplistic free plagiarism checker. It also lets you enter the text that you want to search for plagiarism. However, you need to press “enter” key after each sentence. I am quite surprised that it does not do that automatically. It then just searches for each of those sentences in Google to find plagiarism.
Test for Plagiarism:
First Test: Pass. In the first test, Plagiarism Checker was able to accurately identify plagiarism in the text. However, I had to manually separate out each sentence. If I did not do that, it tried to search for entire text as one sentence, and did not find a match.
Second Test: Fail. In the second test, Dupli Checker was not able to find any plagiarism. This was because it was trying to search for complete sentences, which it obviously did not find.
Try it here.
Article Checker
This is another free plagiarism checker. But this is most useless one. It did not find plagiarism even in the first text (the original text). So, I am not going to waste time writing about it. You can find it here.
All these plagiarism checkers are completely free.
Note: I normally work with lot of new writers, and plagiarism is a big problem for me. Many of the writers try to submit plagiarized articles, and try to use impressive techniques to avoid plagiarism detection. The best plagiarism detection that I have found is “CopyScape“. I use premium version of it. That costs around 5 cents per plagiarism check, but is absolutely worth the price for me. To make it fair, I did the same test with CopyScape, and it accurately identified plagiarsm. Here are the results of second test on CopyScape. If you don’t mind spending money on plagiarism checker, you should try CopyScape Premium.
