Copyleaks is one of the strongest enterprise AI plus plagiarism detection suites on the market and it is also what an increasing number of universities run on every essay you submit through Canvas, Moodle, or Blackboard. The institutional report goes to your professor first and the plagiarism similarity index lands in the same document as the AI score. TextSight is the tool you run on your own draft before that institutional report fires. Sentence-level highlights show exactly which lines a detector reads as AI, with ESL-aware calibration so formally-taught prose does not get over-flagged, a free tier that needs no email, and a .edu Pro plan at $13.99 a month. This page is the student-side framing: not which one to pick, but how to use both so the Copyleaks report does not surprise you on submission day.
A short feature table first, from the student perspective. The narrative sections below go deeper on each row, with the parts where Copyleaks is genuinely the institutional standard called out clearly.
| Feature | TextSight | Copyleaks |
|---|---|---|
| Primary product | Student-side AI detector plus AI rewriter, sentence-level | Enterprise AI plus plagiarism suite, LMS-integrated |
| Detection type | AI authorship, sentence-by-sentence with per-line rationale | AI plus deep cross-source plagiarism in one report |
| Free tier | 3 scans/day, 5,000 chars, no email, no card | About 25 scans/month, account required |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly, direct-to-student card billing | Per-seat institutional, $8 to $12 per student per year |
| Entry price (monthly) | $9.99 Starter, $0 free tier | Around $10.99 personal plan, credit-based |
| Pro annual effective | $14.99/mo Pro on annual ($179.88/year) | Institutional contract, not publicly disclosed |
| .edu discount | Verified .edu Pro at $13.99/mo, auto-applied | None at the individual level; institutional license only |
| Sentence-level evidence | Live in scan view on free tier, every sentence rated | In instructor-facing PDF, document score primary |
| ESL FPR (100-passage) | 6% on identical-quality ESL essays | 16% on the same ESL sample set |
| Native FPR (100-passage) | 3% | 4% |
| GPT-4 TPR | 92% | 94% |
| Claude TPR | 90% | 92% |
| Bundled AI rewriter | Yes, rewrite a flagged sentence in the same view | No, detection and plagiarism only |
| REST API | Available on Business at $29.99/mo annual | Available; enterprise contract required |
| Best fit | Pre-submission draft check on the student side | Institutional record on the school side, LMS-integrated |
Prices verified May 2026. Verify on each tool's pricing page before subscribing. Win markers reflect the student-side feature gap, not a third-party audit.
A 100-passage internal benchmark on TextSight against six widely-used detectors on the same input set. Same essays, same scoring rubric, same day. TPR is true-positive rate on AI-authored text; FPR is false-positive rate on human-written text. ESL FPR is run separately on essays from Indian, Filipino, and Chinese students writing university-level English.
| Detector | GPT-4 TPR | Claude TPR | Native FPR | ESL FPR | Combined |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TextSight | 92% | 90% | 3% | 6% | 91% / 4.5% |
| Copyleaks | 94% | 92% | 4% | 16% | 93% / 10% |
| Originality | 95% | 93% | 4% | 19% | 94% / 11.5% |
| Quillbot | 86% | 83% | 8% | 14% | 84.5% / 11% |
| GPTZero | 89% | 86% | 5% | 22% | 88% / 13.5% |
| ZeroGPT | 85% | 82% | 6% | 21% | 83.5% / 13.5% |
| Grammarly | 80% | 77% | 7% | 20% | 78.5% / 13.5% |
Copyleaks catches AI authorship slightly more often than TextSight on the headline TPR row, 94% vs 92% on GPT-4 prose. Two points. Look at the next column. On the human-written ESL sample set, Copyleaks false-flags 16% of identical-quality essays as AI; TextSight false-flags 6% of the same set. For a student writing in English as a second language, the false-positive number is the one that decides whether an honest draft gets sent to academic integrity review. The catch-rate gap is two points; the false-positive gap is ten.
Students are running this scan thirty minutes before a deadline. The realistic loop is: paste draft, scan, read the red sentences, edit the worst five, re-scan, submit. TextSight returns sentence-level highlights on the free tier in roughly thirty seconds, with rhythm, vocabulary, and cadence rationale per line so the edit is targeted rather than guessing. Copyleaks runs once on submission inside the LMS; the institutional report goes to the professor first. The benchmark numbers above explain why a student pre-flighting on the TextSight side is the workflow that protects honest work, before the institutional verdict lands.
A typical undergrad writes one essay a week. TextSight's free tier (3 scans/day, 5,000 chars, no signup) covers that load with room for two re-scans after editing. During midterm or finals weeks, .edu Pro at $13.99/mo unlocks unlimited scans, 10,000-character pastes for longer essays, and a 90-day history that becomes evidence if an institutional false flag ever needs to be contested. Cancel back to free after finals; the math works out to roughly the cost of one textbook chapter pdf per semester. The 6% ESL FPR is the reason the .edu plan exists at a sub-$15 price point.
Four things Copyleaks does for the student record that TextSight does not and will not try to. Acknowledging them is the whole point of writing this page as a pairing rather than a replacement.
Copyleaks ships the AI detection score and a deep cross-source plagiarism similarity index in the same PDF. For thesis, dissertation, and capstone work where similarity index matters as much as authorship, that bundle is the actual deliverable that your committee will reference. TextSight surfaces plagiarism-risk signals but does not run a full cross-source database; if your assignment is graded primarily on similarity to web crawls, academic corpora, and prior institutional submissions, Copyleaks or your school's bundled tool is the more authoritative source.
If your school uses Copyleaks (and a growing list of universities in the US, UK, India, the Philippines, and the Gulf do), every essay you submit through Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, or Brightspace is automatically scanned on the way through. You do not click anything. You do not configure anything. The instructor opens the report inside the LMS; you see the grade. That zero-effort, always-on integration is exactly why pre-flighting on your own side matters.
Copyleaks supports detection across about 30 languages including Spanish, French, German, Mandarin, Arabic, Hindi, and Portuguese. For an international student writing in their first language, or a multilingual program where assignments arrive in mixed languages, that breadth is the difference between having a usable tool and having no tool at all. TextSight is currently English-focused and tuned hard against English ESL writing; if your essay is in a non-English language, Copyleaks is the more capable single tool.
For appeals, academic-integrity hearings, internship deliverables, or any setting where the report itself is part of the artefact, Copyleaks ships a recognisable enterprise format that integrity offices accept on sight. TextSight gives you a clean Pro-tier PDF export, but the institutional pedigree of the Copyleaks layout is a real thing on the appeals desk side.
If you are submitting through an institutional LMS and your school already pays for Copyleaks, you cannot opt out of that part of the workflow. The rest of this page is about what to do on your side before the institutional report runs.
For students writing four to eight essays a semester across mixed-policy courses, here is where TextSight beats Copyleaks on the work that matters to you, the writer, before the institutional report runs.
Copyleaks personal plans exist (around $10.99 a month for a credit-based pack of about 100 scanned pages) but the whole product is engineered around institutional and corporate buyers paying per-seat. TextSight sells directly to students from a free tier with no signup, Pro at $19.99 monthly or $14.99 on annual billing, and verified .edu emails at $13.99 monthly. No procurement, no waiting, no credits to count, no IT ticket. That is a different market shape, not a feature delta, and it is the first reason students land on this page.
The single biggest gap in the student-side Copyleaks experience is that the institutional report runs after submission and goes to your professor first. TextSight closes that gap. You see what a sentence-level detector will likely flag before clicking Submit. Copyleaks runs once on submission inside the LMS; TextSight runs as many times as you want (3 a day on free, unlimited on Pro). Edit, re-scan, edit again. The loop is the actual product, and Copyleaks's institutional enforcement role means it cannot ship one in that direction.
Every TextSight scan returns a sentence-by-sentence colour map with a short rationale per line: rhythm flat, vocabulary cluster, paragraph cadence, sentence-length variance. You see the exact sentences that drove the score and you edit those lines, not the whole essay. Copyleaks's report shows a document-level percentage with sentence detail inside the instructor-facing PDF; as a student paying out of pocket on the personal plan, the per-line evidence you actually need to edit lives behind a workflow built for someone else.
Institutional detectors have been challenged in higher-ed press for over-flagging formally-taught ESL writing because non-native English at university level often reads as low-burstiness and detectors read low-burstiness as machine-generated. Copyleaks is multilingual but not specifically ESL-calibrated for English written by Indian, Filipino, or Chinese students. TextSight is tuned against exactly those samples; our internal testing shows roughly 40 percent lower false positives on identical-quality ESL essays. For ESL students worried about wrongful flags before submission, the calibration gap matters more than the language list.
TextSight's free tier is three scans a day at 5,000 characters per scan with no email, no signup, and no card. Pro is $19.99 monthly or $14.99 monthly on annual billing with unlimited scans, and verified .edu emails get Pro at $13.99 monthly. Many students subscribe to Pro only during midterm and finals weeks and drop back to free between them. Copyleaks's free sampler is about 25 scans a month and is sized for prospective institutional buyers; if you iterate the way a draft-check workflow asks you to, you burn through it in three weeks.
The honest workflow is not Copyleaks versus TextSight. It is TextSight, then Copyleaks. Two tools serving two stages of the same submission flow.
Write the essay in whatever editor you already use: Google Docs, Word, Notion, your LMS. Using ChatGPT for an outline or to break writer's block is the realistic 2026 default and not the issue you are pre-flighting against. Write the prose itself in your own voice from your own notes.
Open app.textsight.ai, paste the final draft, and scan. Free tier handles 5,000 characters in one paste; .edu Pro handles 10,000. The scan returns in about thirty seconds with an Authenticity Score and a sentence-by-sentence colour map. This is the moment you find out whether the AI patterns Copyleaks is trained on are visible in your prose.
Above 75, submit as is. Between 50 and 75, look at the red sentences and rewrite those specifically. Below 50, the essay needs more substantial editing. Use the integrated AI rewriter on the hardest sentences if you have free uses left. The point is to fix the lines that are genuinely AI-shaped, not to game the score on prose you wrote yourself.
Submit through your institution's LMS as required. Copyleaks runs the AI plus plagiarism similarity check automatically. Because you pre-scanned and edited, the AI portion of the report should land in a low-AI range, which is below the review threshold at most institutions. If the plagiarism similarity portion is in scope for your assignment, Copyleaks handles that on the same submission.
Three things. First, you catch the obvious AI-flag-bait sentences before they reach your professor. Second, if you do get flagged, you arrive at the appeal with a sentence-level TextSight report and a documented authoring trail; multiple data points are harder to dismiss than one institutional verdict. Third, you avoid the second-guessing that happens when the verdict shows up cold after submission.
TextSight Pro is $19.99 monthly or $14.99 monthly on annual billing, with verified .edu emails at $13.99 monthly. Copyleaks personal plans start around $10.99 a month for a credit-based pack of roughly 100 scanned pages, and the free tier sits at about 25 scans a month. Institutional contracts are negotiated separately and not visible to students.
Billed $89.88/year, save $30
Billed $179.88/year, save $60
Billed $359.88/year, save $120
Yearly billing saves 25%. Verified .edu, .ac.uk, .ac.in, and .edu.au emails get Pro at $13.99/mo automatically. View full pricing →
Four common student situations and the realistic Copyleaks plus TextSight setup for each. Pick whichever matches your next deadline.
Free tier is enough. Three scans a day at 5,000 characters covers a typical 800-word undergrad essay with room for two re-scans after editing. Copyleaks runs automatically on your school's submission portal. No subscription required on your side.
Setup: TextSight Free plus your school's Copyleaks.
Four to eight essays across two weeks. .edu Pro at $13.99/mo pays back on the first week: unlimited scans, 10,000 character pastes for longer essays, 90-day history for documentation if any one of them gets flagged. Cancel back to free after finals.
Setup: TextSight Pro .edu plus your school's Copyleaks.
Long document, multiple revision cycles, similarity index in scope. Copyleaks is the more authoritative similarity tool because your committee will reference the institutional report. Use TextSight Pro alongside it for sentence-level AI editing on each chapter; the .edu Pro 10,000 character paste covers most chapter drafts cleanly.
Setup: TextSight Pro .edu (AI editing) plus your university's Copyleaks (similarity).
Use TextSight specifically for the ESL calibration. Pre-scan a draft, expect scattered yellows on formally-taught structured prose, focus edits on clusters of red. The 90-day Pro history and PDF export give you specific evidence if a Copyleaks false positive ever needs to be contested at the integrity office.
Setup: TextSight Pro (ESL calibration) plus your school's Copyleaks.
The same pairing logic for the other big institutional tool your school probably also runs.
Read the compare →The general head-to-head, including the institutional procurement and similarity-index angle.
Read the compare →Seven-tool ranking with institutional correlation and false-positive rates side by side.
See the ranking →The college-student landing page with perplexity, burstiness, and the .edu Pro plan.
For college →Free to try. No card. Verified .edu emails get Pro at $13.99 a month.