10 Best Free Plagiarism Checkers of 2024 [100% Free Tools]

• Dec 01, 2023
• 6 min read

• Tags: Plagiarism, Plagiarism Checkers

As you’ll soon find out, our list of the best free plagiarism checkers of 2024 is quite exclusive. We haven’t included some popular plagiarism checkers online (Grammarly, Unicheck, and Quetext) simply because they aren’t completely free! So whether you’re a student, teacher, or SEO professional, we’ve filtered out the best plagiarism checkers for you at zero cost.

We’ve included only the plagiarism checkers that are 100% free, or at least offer substantial services for free up to a limit. So in this article, you’ll find genuine, free plagiarism checkers, ranked from 1 to 10 according to their accuracy and ease of access.

So how did we decide upon the top ten online plagiarism checkers?

Methodology to find the best plagiarism checker

We did a mini-experiment to arrive at our ranking. 

We used a college-level essay of 1,700 words and sprinkled it with eight instances of direct plagiarism. Of these instances,

1. Four were from an essay,
2. One was from a research article taken from JSTOR,
3. One was from a book,
4. One from an online newspaper article, and
5. One from a Wikipedia article.

We calculated our rankings based on the number of plagiarized entries flagged by the online checkers. When the numbers came out equal for multiple entries, we relied on three more factors: quality of the plagiarism report, ease of access, and word limit.

To sum up, we’ve ranked the best free plagiarism checkers from 10 to 1 on the basis of accuracy, efficiency, usability, and word limit.

Let’s get to it, then! These are the 10 best free plagiarism checkers of 2024:

1. Duplichecker

Duplichecker ranks first on our list for a combination of the four categories. It found the highest number of sources, only failing to detect one plagiarized passage from an essay and a line from the research article.

You may wonder whether six out of eight is a good enough number for the first rank. You see, free plagiarism checkers, even the best of the best, come with certain limits. Since we haven’t considered tools with paid plans that merely offer a free trial, we’re left with a few good plagiarism checkers.

Most free online plagiarism checkers have lower accuracy rates than paid tools, but even among these, we’ve found the most accurate and usable. Of these, Duplichecker detected the highest variety of original sources, making it our best free plagiarism checker.

Since the tool managed to detect three out of four plagiarized sentences from the essay as well as one from the book, we have concluded that this is the best free plagiarism checker for students and teachers as well as SEO professionals.

Here’s our review of Duplichecker:

2. Search Engine Reports

Search Engine Reports managed to flag five out of eight instances of direct plagiarism. Since it couldn’t flag plagiarism from scholarly sources, the plagiarism checker is probably better suited to freelance writers or SEO professionals than students and teachers.

While we found this tool to be extremely slow, it’s still one of the best free plagiarism checkers out there. Not only does it offer a word limit of 1,500, it also features a minimal amount of ads.

Plus, it does not store your documents anywhere.

This is how Search Engine Reports fared in our study:

3. Copyleaks  

Copyleaks detected the same number of sources as Search Engine Reports, but it ranks below it in our list of the top ten online plagiarism checkers because it’s not completely free.

The plagiarism checker offers a free version of ten pages per month, so it’s not exactly a free tool. But it’s extremely easy to use and offers a clean, detailed report. So this tool is a good option for people who don’t need to run a plagiarism check that often.

However, the tool has two significant drawbacks:

• It requires you to register and log in before you can scan your document.
• It stores your document in an internal database.

4. Small SEO Tools

As the name suggests, this plagiarism checker is directed toward writers and other professionals working with digital content. We found it odd that the tool specializes in webpages, but still failed to detect plagiarism from Wikipedia!

Be warned, the website does tend to be a little moody. Sometimes, it may refuse to cooperate multiple times before you can finally hit the captcha and get your plagiarism report!

However, it’s a positive signal that the online tool managed to detect plagiarism from the book and three out of four instances of the same from the essay.

This is our review of the free plagiarism checker by Small SEO Tools:

5. Plagiarism Detector

If you need a free plagiarism checker to perform a quick review of your article or essay, this is definitely not the one for you. The tool was extremely slow to load. Since it has a word limit of 1,000 words, we had to endure the process twice over!

Like most other free tools on this list, Plagiarism Detector flags web content effectively but struggles with scholarly material. If you’re a teacher who wants to catch lazy students that take their sources from SparkNotes instead of JSTOR, this plagiarism checker might just work out!

Here’s our review of Plagiarism Detector:

6. Plagiarism Checker 

Plagiarism Checker is available in a wide variety of languages, but the tool struggles with detecting both web and scholarly content. The tool also has significantly fewer ads as compared to some others in the list.

The tool managed to detect the Wikipedia entry and two instances of plagiarism from the essay, but not much else.

In the end, does great usability make a difference if an online plagiarism checker can’t detect direct, obvious instances of plagiarism in a document?

This is how Plagiarism Checker fared in our experiment:

7. Writer

Writer is a great online plagiarism checker for web content writers and SEO professionals. It detected plagiarism from both online sources in the essay, while it failed to do the same for any scholarly source.

This makes sense, since the platform is designed to target professionals in the field of marketing, content writing, and editing. 

Writer has a supremely clean interface with no ads or clustered reports. The tool is precise and to the point, at least as far as webpages are concerned.

This is our review of Writer:

8. Prepostseo 

The plagiarism checker features a clean, easily usable interface with minimal amount of ads. However, it flagged only the online newspaper and couldn’t detect any other source.

Here’s our review of Prepostseo:

9. Check Plagiarism

If you’re surprised by the number of tools that only detected only one source, remember that these are free plagiarism checkers! There are several others that detected zero plagiarism, and we couldn’t include them in our list.

Check Plagiarism failed to detect all scholarly sources, and only flagged the online newspaper. The user interface is clean and the tool doesn’t feature a lot of ads.

This is how Check Plagiarism fared in our test:

10. Plagramme

This plagiarism checker features last in our list because of several issues with usability. You have to register in order to use it, and the free version doesn’t offer “full functionality”. The tool is also extremely slow, featuring waiting lines. We had to wait for seven minutes to get our document scanned!

However, Plagramme did manage to detect paraphrasing plagiarism. This makes it one of two tools on this list that could achieve the feat.

Plagramme provides full functionality to teachers for free. Other free accounts only have partial functionality. So if you’re a teacher, give this tool a test run and let us know in the comments if it’s more effective with full functionality!

Here’s our review of Plagramme:

Do you agree with our list of the 10 best free plagiarism checkers? Feel free to leave a comment if you know a plagiarism-checking tool better than the ones on this list!

If you’d like to read more, here are some of our articles:

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Prasanna

Prasanna is on a little break from academia and spends his time compiling fiction writing tips. He enjoys poetry, mythology, and drawing lotuses on any surface he can find.