Top 7 Best Free Plagiarism Checker – A Good Idea For Writers
Learn how these tools work and their limitations. Protect your academic career today!
Why you are looking for the best free plagiarism checker? If you are writing an academic paper, you are not allowed to plagiarize. You must identify third-party content (such as text and images) and ideas as such and correctly indicate their source. If you fail to do this – even by mistake – you are committing theft of intellectual property: plagiarism.
This is forbidden and can cost you your place at university or even your academic degree. To avoid this, there are best free plagiarism checkers that scan your work online for plagiarism. Learn how these tools work and how trustworthy they are in this article.
How the Best Free Plagiarism Checker Works
A plagiarism checker searches your text for similarities with other sources. Don’t worry: the result of the test often looks worse than it is. Because not all identified similarities in your work are plagiarism.
The software also recognizes e.g. entries in the bibliography or common expressions as a similarity. In addition, it cannot check whether you have correctly cited the sources in the text.
After completing the scan, it’s essential to review the identified similarities in your document to ensure accurate quoting. For indirect quotations, a thorough examination is necessary to determine if they bear excessive resemblance to the source text. If so, consider rephrasing or converting them into direct quotes.
When it comes to academic writing, utilizing custom writing services can also provide professional assistance in handling such nuances.
Plagiarism Checker – A selection
Anyone looking for the best free plagiarism checker using a search engine will quickly find what they are looking for. Here we present some of the first search results and classify them.
Scribbr
Students can find tips on thesis topics on the Scribbr website. Among other things, Scribbr also offers its plagiarism checker. However, you can use it for free. The price depends on the length of your work, the cheapest version for 14.95 euros per document contains up to 7500 words.
Scribbr works with the provider Turnitin, which many universities also use for plagiarism checks. This means that scientific publications are compared with your text for the scan. Your documents will not be published and you can delete your data from the Scribbr servers after the scan.
PlagScan
The provider PlagScan uses internet sources, scientific journals, and sources that you upload yourself to check your text. According to PlagScan, third parties will not have access to your text.
To use the scanner, you have to register there. With the free trial version, you can have up to 2,000 words checked. The prices for the full version for single users start at 4.99 euros for up to 5000 words.
PlagAware
At PlagAware you can have up to 10 pages checked free of charge. To do this, you have to register and can then upload your document. Again, according to the provider, your data will not be passed on to third parties. The costs for the full version start at 12.90 euros for up to 100 pages.
Small SEO Tools
Small SEO Tools’ free plagiarism checker is limited to 1000 words. You can paste text directly from the clipboard or upload a document. The formats .tex, .txt, .doc, .docx, .odt, .pdf and .rtf are permitted. You can display the result of the scan as a sentence or in full and view the sources found.
The website’s descriptions are incoherent, raising doubts about its credibility, and the absence of a data protection statement further compounds concerns.
Nevertheless, upon conducting the scan, a banner will appear, asserting that the scanned content will be automatically erased. When evaluating the trustworthiness of digital marketing tools, it’s crucial to consider factors like transparency and data security.
PrePostSEO
The provider prepostseo.com also declares that it will neither share the scanned content publicly nor store it in its database. This plagiarism checker is also free of charge. You can insert text directly or upload a file. The formats .doc, .txt, .docx, and .pdf are permitted.
There is no mention of a limit on the length of the text, but there is a paid pro version that is limited to 25,000 words – so the free version is probably also limited. The scanner searches the internet for similarities to your text.
Read Also: Top Best Tools to Check Your Website Keyword Position
Plagiarism Detector
The provider Plagiarism Detector free version is limited to 1000 words, there is also a paid pro version. According to the provider, the text that you have checked is “integrated into our internal network and then compared with various databases and the entire Internet”. What exactly this means for data protection remains unclear.
Search Engine Reports
Another provider is from the Netherlands. Search Engine Reports mixes Dutch texts, English-language pop-up advertising banners, and bumpy text passages.
The free scanner is limited to 1500 words, supposedly your uploaded content will be deleted after the scan. Your text will be compared with sources freely available on the Internet. The look of the scan result is very similar to the scanner from Small SEO Tools.
Limits of the software
Plagiarism detection tools, while useful, have their limitations. They primarily compare your content to publicly available online documents or their database.
To ensure thorough checks, especially for critical content like theses, it’s advisable to use a plagiarism checker with access to non-public databases and academic texts. This extended functionality isn’t typically available in free plagiarism checkers, so consider premium productivity apps for comprehensive checks.
In addition, the scanners cannot detect whether you have stolen a foreign idea in your work or plagiarized it from a foreign-language source, for example. Even if you use a plagiarism checker, you ultimately have to critically check your text yourself.
Data protection and hidden costs
Always pay attention to data protection with a plagiarism checker. The countless free tools that you can find online are often not reliable. Find out what happens to the text you upload for review. If it ends up publicly on the Internet, the plagiarism checker at your university may sound the alarm later.
The content of your work will then be 100% similar to the work you uploaded to the tool – and will be flagged as plagiarism.
In addition to paid plagiarism checkers, such as those from Scribbr, many are only apparently free. But most of the time you can only have a few pages or a few thousand words scanned for free.
That is hardly enough for scientific texts, but you have to pay for more. For example, you can have up to 10 pages checked for free with PlagAware, and up to 2000 words with PlagScan.
