What follow is a guide on how Teachers and students in UK can check plagiarism online and some of the best plagiarism detection Softwares they can use.

Accuracy of Plagiarism Checker Tools

Most Plagiarism checking softwares listed below only check and detect plagiarism from sources that are available online. If you copy paste information from a hard copy material available in your school library, chances are that these softwares might not detect any plagiarism.  They therefore should serve as tools that give you tips on improving your work’s citation.

How Plagiarism Checking Websites Work

Plagiarism Checker websites are more like search engines. They search through the web to see if there is any similar text in the internet and if they find one then the results is plagiarism. A number of them rely on Yandex, Bing and Google Api by making use of the string match technique to check for plagiarized in texts.

Turnitin

This is one of the most trusted Plagiarism checking web app used by Universities and Colleges.  Unlike Grammarly, Turnitin was originally developed to check for plagiarism.

Turnitin is proffered by most Universities because of its one unique feature. It is able compares text with academic papers, journals and books that are not publicly available  in the internet. For instance, those behind firewalls/subscription based.

Another advantage of Turnitin is that, While Grammarly, Plagscan and Copyscape scan plagiarism in sentences, Turnitin scans each letter and symbol which makes it more accurate.

The only downside with Turnitin is that it is ideal for learning institutions and students. As an individual, you will have to use third parties to access it which can be expensive.

Regarding price, turnitin does not publicly share its price quotes because it varies from institution to department. However, our estimates value its price at £ 2.4 (Pound Sterling) per student.

Grammarly

Grammary.com was first launched in 2009 as a grammar and spelling checker software for institutions of learning and students. It has grown to become one of the most popular plagiarism and grammar checker software. Its premium plans start from £ 9.28 per month and is billed annually.

Pros of Grammarly

• Can be integrated to your email, browsers, Goolge Docs, MS Word Documents, ios and android keyboard.
• Can be used for checking Grammar mistakes, punctuation and Spelling errors
• Has a Free version for only checking Grammar, punctuation and spelling mistakes

Cons of Grammarly

• Its plagiarism detection mechanism is very weak. You should not put so much faith in Grammarly if your intention is only to check for plagiarism.

Plagscan

Plagscan is a Germany based company which started as a plagiarism checking software for teachers in 2009.  It is available in four languages (English, Deutsch, Espanol and Francais). Its pricing vary depending on whether you want to use it as an Individual, School, Higher Education, Small Business or Large Enterprise.  For Larger enterprise use, they have an API to automate plagiarism checking by integrating it to your business.

Plagscan is the best alternative to Turnitin if you are not a learning institution. Given a choice between Plagsan and Grammarly for plagiarism checking, I would pick plagscan.

Copyscape

Copyscape is another good plagiarism checker tool that compares text to content available in the web. It is ideal for checking plagiarism in blog articles. It also has an API that integrates with your website and checks every submitted article for plagiarism.

Its price is £ 3.96 per month for £ 10 pages and £ 0.20 per addition page.

Important: There are a number of free and premium plagiarism checking softwares available online.  However, what we have provided above are the one we have found to be near to  as accurate as possible.