Originality.ai is the SEO agency standard. Clients literally ask "what is the Originality score" by name, which makes it the default deliverable inside most retainer contracts. TextSight is the newer agency-grade tool built around sentence-level evidence for client trust, white-label PDFs on Business, a flat-rate $39.99 monthly subscription instead of a credit meter, a REST API with a bundled AI rewriter endpoint, and the audit log a procurement reviewer wants to see. This page is the honest agency comparison: where Originality is still the right call, where TextSight wins, and why many mature agencies just run both.
A short feature table first, scoped to the work an agency lead actually does. The narrative sections below go deeper on each row, with the parts where Originality.ai is genuinely the better call called out clearly.
| Feature | TextSight | Originality.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Primary product | AI detector plus AI rewriter plus plagiarism risk in one workspace | AI detector plus plagiarism, AI rewriter sold as a separate product |
| Detection type | Sentence-level evidence with per-line rationale | Document-level score with highlighted segments |
| Free tier | Yes, 3 scans per day, 5,000 chars per scan, no card | No persistent free tier, demo scan only |
| Pricing model | Flat-rate subscription, four tiers from Free to Business | Credit-based, one credit per 100 words, credits roll forward on most variants |
| Entry price | $9.99 monthly Starter (or $7.49 monthly on annual billing) | $14.95 monthly Base for 2,000 credits (200,000 words) |
| Pro annual effective | $14.99 monthly billed yearly, unlimited scans | $30 monthly Pro for 15,000 credits (1.5 million words) |
| .edu discount | Pro at $13.99 monthly with verified .edu email | None published |
| Sentence-level evidence | Per-line confidence with rhythm and vocabulary rationale | Highlighted segments, document-level score |
| ESL FPR (100-passage) | 6 percent on tuned ESL sample | 19 percent on identical ESL sample |
| Native FPR (100-passage) | 3 percent on native English sample | 4 percent on native English sample |
| GPT-4 TPR (100-passage) | 92 percent catch rate on GPT-4 generations | 95 percent catch rate on GPT-4 generations |
| Claude TPR (100-passage) | 90 percent catch rate on Claude generations | 93 percent catch rate on Claude generations |
| Bundled AI rewriter | Included on Starter and above, REST API endpoint on Business | Sold as a separate Originality product on a separate subscription |
| REST API | Detection, AI rewriter, and bulk scan behind a single Business key | Mature detection API, AI rewriter API billed separately |
| Best fit | Small and mid-size agencies, ESL writer rosters, white-label client PDFs | Established SEO agencies with mature Originality workflows and named-in-contract scores |
Prices verified June 3, 2026. Verify on each tool's pricing page before subscribing. Win markers reflect our reading of the feature gap, not a third-party audit.
Four genuine agency-side reasons Originality is still the default detector inside large SEO content shops, and why an established team should not switch on price alone.
Originality.ai has been the default AI detector inside large SEO content teams since 2023. Clients literally ask "what is the Originality score" by name, freelancer briefs require an Originality screenshot as the published deliverable, and editorial calendars pull the score directly into Airtable or Notion. When a retainer contract names a specific detector, it is almost always Originality. Inside that workflow, switching is not a single-tool decision, it is a renegotiation with the client about what counts as the canonical AI score. TextSight does the same detection job, but the brand recognition gap is real and an agency lead has to weigh it honestly.
Originality sells credits at one credit per 100 words. Base is $14.95 monthly for 2,000 credits, Pro is $30 monthly for 15,000 credits, and unused credits roll forward on most plan variants. For agencies with spiky client load, a quiet month does not waste a flat subscription, and a launch-heavy month with one big client does not require an upgrade. TextSight flat-rate Business at $39.99 monthly (or $29.99 on annual) is predictable but assumes consistent volume. If your monthly word count swings hard month-to-month, the credit math can land cheaper on Originality, and that is a defensible reason to stay.
Originality is wired into the agency content stack that SEO teams already pay for: Surfer for content briefs, Frase for SERP analysis, Clearscope for editor scoring, and Originality for the publish-or-not detection score at the end of the pipeline. SOPs name the score thresholds by Originality value, freelancer onboarding documents specify the report format, and your internal QA process is built around the dashboard. Inside that integrated stack the switching cost is not one tool, it is the editorial workflow that ten people learned by muscle memory.
Originality plagiarism is a mature product with a deeper crawled-web index and returns explicit source-match URLs, which is what an academic-integrity review, a procurement onboarding, or a legal copyright dispute actually needs. TextSight ships a Plagiarism Risk indicator in every scan, but it is a publish-or-not signal, not a full source-attribution report. For editorial workflows that require traceable plagiarism evidence and a URL list, Originality is the better tool today.
If your agency fits any of those four patterns, the rest of this page is informational rather than persuasive. Originality.ai is the tool for the job, and the honest recommendation is to stay there.
For small and mid-size shops, white-label-heavy agencies, and any team running automation through a REST API, here is where TextSight beats Originality on the agency work that matters.
TextSight Business is $39.99 monthly or $29.99 monthly on annual billing for effectively unlimited scans inside fair-use, plus the REST API, audit log, and white-label PDFs. There is no credit meter to top up and no surprise overage when a launch-heavy month doubles your scan volume. For an agency with consistent retainer load, the flat-rate math is cheaper than the equivalent Originality Pro at $30 monthly once you count the credits a busy month actually burns and the AI rewriter subscription Originality bills separately.
The Business tier exports scan PDFs with your agency logo, your brand colours, and your reviewer name in the header. The TextSight footer is removable on that tier. For agencies that ship scan reports as part of the deliverable, white-label PDFs cut the post-scan formatting step out of the workflow and let the client see your agency name on the artefact rather than a third-party detector brand. Originality exports retain the Originality brand by default, which is fine if that is the canonical name the client asked for, and a liability if your agency wants to own the deliverable.
Every scan returns a sentence-by-sentence colour map with per-line rationale (rhythm flat, vocabulary cluster, paragraph cadence). When a client pushes back on a scan score, you forward the specific flagged sentences and the rewrite happens at the sentence level instead of redrafting the whole piece. Originality shows a strong document-level score with highlighted segments, which is great for a publish-or-not decision but less actionable when the writer has fifteen minutes to ship a fix before deadline.
Originality classifier was tuned for native SEO content, and on formally-taught English from non-native writers it over-flags clean human prose. TextSight tuned its detector in 2025 against writing samples from Indian universities (IIT, IIM, DU, JNU), Filipino education programmes, and Chinese postgraduate writing. On identical-quality essays our internal false-positive rate is roughly 40 percent lower. For agencies with globally distributed writer rosters, the calibration gap means fewer false escalations from clients who scanned the piece themselves before you saw it.
The Business REST API exposes detection, the AI rewriter, and bulk scanning behind a single key, so a single backend call can score a draft and request a rewrite in the same workflow. The audit log records every scan with user, timestamp, document title, and confidence score, exportable as CSV for monthly client reporting or a later content-dispute defence. The workspace ships five team seats with per-project history scoped to each client. Originality exposes detection via a more mature API, but the AI rewriter is a separate product on a separate subscription and the audit log surface is lighter. For pipelines publishing hundreds of articles a month, the TextSight bundled endpoints cut both code and total tool spend.
For agencies with student interns, journalism-school placements, or part-time university staff, verified .edu emails get Pro at $13.99 monthly instead of the standard $19.99 ($14.99 on annual). The discount is automatic at signup with a .edu address, and the same account ladders up to Business when the intern converts. It is a small line item, but at five interns a year it adds up to a meaningful saving across the workspace.
A 100-passage benchmark run in June 2026 across both detectors on identical inputs. Same prompts, same paragraphs, same AI rewriter settings. Numbers are catch rate on AI-generated samples (TPR) and false-positive rate on human-written samples (FPR). The ESL FPR row is the one that matters most for agencies running globally distributed writer rosters.
| Metric (100-passage sample) | TextSight | Originality.ai |
|---|---|---|
| GPT-4 true-positive rate | 92 percent | 95 percent |
| Claude true-positive rate | 90 percent | 93 percent |
| Native English false-positive rate | 3 percent | 4 percent |
| ESL false-positive rate | 6 percent | 19 percent |
| Combined accuracy (TPR / FPR) | 91 percent / 4.5 percent | 94 percent / 11.5 percent |
For an agency vetting freelancer output across a globally distributed writer roster, the ESL false-positive rate is the single number that determines how many escalations land in your inbox each week. Originality scores a 19 percent ESL FPR on our identical sample, which means roughly one in five clean human-written drafts from a non-native English writer gets flagged. TextSight scores 6 percent on the same sample, which is roughly one in seventeen. Across a 200-piece monthly publication schedule with a quarter of the work coming from ESL writers, that delta is the difference between three or four false escalations and ten plus, every month. The freelancer scorecard math improves by the same factor: writers stop accumulating phantom AI flags that hurt their internal rating but came from the detector, not the writing.
Originality wins the raw-AI catch rate by 3 points on GPT-4 and 3 points on Claude, which is real and worth naming. For an agency whose client guarantees are written around catch rate on the latest frontier models, those points matter. The honest workflow trade-off is that Originality buys those 3 points at the cost of a 13 point penalty on ESL FPR. If your retainer math depends on writers from India, Philippines, Vietnam, Brazil, or anywhere else outside the native-English bubble, the false-positive cost on clean human writing eats the catch-rate gain. Many mature agencies resolve this by running TextSight for the writer-facing edit pass (where ESL FPR matters) and Originality for the client-facing report (where the brand name and catch rate matter).
Concretely, an agency lead vetting a 50-article freelancer batch sees the workflow play out three times. First on bulk scan: TextSight 100-doc bulk endpoint returns sentence-level confidence in one API call, so the freelancer scorecard updates from a single row of data instead of fifty manual scans. Second on the writer scorecard: the per-line evidence lets you point to specific paragraphs in the rejection note, which makes the freelancer relationship survive the rejection. Third on the client-facing report: the white-label PDF on Business carries your agency logo and reviewer name, not a third-party detector brand, which is the deliverable a procurement team accepts. The combined effect is fewer escalations, faster vetting, and a deliverable the client can take to their own legal team without a third-party logo in the header.
TextSight Business is $39.99 monthly or $29.99 monthly on annual billing, flat-rate. Originality.ai uses credit packs: Base at $14.95 monthly for 2,000 credits, Pro at $30 monthly for 15,000 credits, with one credit scanning 100 words. The AI rewriter is a separate Originality product.
Billed $89.88/year, save $30
Billed $179.88/year, save $60
Billed $359.88/year, save $120
Yearly billing saves 25%. Originality.ai Base is $14.95/mo for 2,000 credits, Pro is $30/mo for 15,000 credits at the time of writing, with the AI rewriter billed as a separate product. View full pricing →
The cleanest agency answer in 2026 is belt-and-suspenders: Originality on the client-facing report side, TextSight on the writer-facing edit side. Here is how that split works in practice.
The client signs the retainer asking for an Originality score, and the published deliverable is the Originality PDF with the score in the header. Procurement teams accept it because the brand is the SEO industry standard. The plagiarism source-URL list lives inside the same report, which covers the legal and IP review pass. None of that workflow needs to change. Originality stays as the client-facing canonical detector and the contract language never has to be rewritten.
Before the piece reaches the client-facing scan, the writer runs it through TextSight first. The sentence-level highlights tell the writer exactly which lines to rewrite, the bundled AI rewriter rewrites those lines in the same workflow, and the audit log records who scanned what at what score. By the time the piece hits Originality for the client report, it scans clean and the agency turns over a deliverable that holds up to the client running their own scan after publication. The combined cost is around $70 monthly per workspace and the editorial speed gain usually pays for it inside the first week.
The split also lines up cleanly with the audit-log story. When a published piece is later challenged for AI content, you have a TextSight audit row showing the writer scanned the draft clean before client delivery, plus the Originality PDF that was the actual canonical artefact at the time. For a procurement review or a content-dispute defence, having two independent detectors agreeing on the same piece is meaningfully stronger evidence than either one alone.
Both detectors are good products built by serious teams. The honest answer is agency-shape specific. Use this picker to find the tool that fits your client roster, your team, and your retainer math.
The full general-audience compare with credit math, plagiarism notes, and migration steps.
Read the compare →Why agency leads pick TextSight: white-label PDFs, audit log, REST API, and client trust workflow.
Read the guide →Bulk scan workflow, audit log, and the agency editorial pipeline built around per-line evidence.
Read the guide →Full tier breakdown for Free, Starter, Pro, and Business. Annual billing saves 25%.
See pricing →Start TextSight free, no card. Upgrade to Business when you want white-label PDFs, the REST API, and the audit log for your retainer clients.