Scribbr earns its place in the student toolkit through human proofreading and a deep citation ecosystem, with a free AI detector alongside. If you want an editor to clean up your prose and format every reference, that suite is hard to beat. But when the real question is "does my essay read as AI, and where", you want a tool built for exactly that. TextSight scans your draft and shows the precise sentences that read as machine-generated, line by line, then lets you revise them with a rewriter that keeps your meaning intact. Free to try on your next paper, no card for the first scan.
Scribbr is excellent at proofreading and references. Students who go looking for something else usually have a narrower problem: they are worried their essay or thesis will trip an AI checker, and they want to see exactly where and fix it. That is a detection job, not an editing job. Here is how it shows up.
Scribbr is organised around getting a manuscript edited and cited. Its AI detector is a helpful extra, not the heart of the product. If your actual concern before submission is "will this paragraph read as ChatGPT to my professor", you want a tool whose whole job is answering that, not a proofreading service where detection is one tab among many.
On a 5,000-word essay, "42% AI" is unsettling and useless in equal measure. You still have to guess which paragraph caused it. TextSight marks the individual sentences that read as machine-generated and explains each one briefly, so you can go straight to the three lines that need rewriting instead of rereading the whole chapter.
Spotting a problem sentence and fixing it are usually two different tools. TextSight pairs the detector with a rewriter in the same place, so a flagged line in your literature review can be reworded into your own voice on the spot. The rewriter keeps the claim and the facts of the sentence intact. It is for clarity, not for hiding that you wrote it.
The free tier runs daily scans with the full sentence-level view, and the first one needs no card and no signup. You can paste a section of your own essay at 11pm, see where the highlights fall, and decide whether to fix anything, without buying a plan first.
If that sounds like your situation, you are not after a "better Scribbr". You want an AI detector built for student writing. Read on.
These rows are not a scoreboard. Scribbr and TextSight are built for different parts of finishing a paper, so each leads in its own column. A green mark only means that row matters when AI detection is what brought you here.
| Feature | TextSight | Scribbr |
|---|---|---|
| What it is built to do | Detect AI in your writing and help you revise it | Proofread, edit and cite your manuscript; AI detector included free |
| AI result on your essay | Each machine-sounding sentence flagged with a reason | A document-level AI percentage |
| Fixing a flagged passage | Meaning-preserving rewriter in the same window | Human editors revise prose; no AI rewriter |
| Trying it on a draft free | Daily scans, first scan needs no card | Free AI detector; proofreading and editing are paid |
| Human proofreading of a thesis | Grammar, readability and paraphrase tools (no human editor) | Professional editors review and correct your draft |
| Citations and references | Free Citation Generator tool | Citation Generator and reference manager for APA, MLA, Chicago and more |
| Plagiarism checking | Plagiarism Risk indicator included with every scan | Dedicated plagiarism check |
| How you pay | Flat monthly plan, sensible for checking drafts all term | Proofreading usually charged per word or per document |
| Who it suits | Students, academics, writers and educators checking for AI | Students and academics finishing a manuscript |
| Best when you want | To know where your writing reads as AI and fix it | A human-edited, properly referenced final draft |
Scribbr's offering and pricing change over time. We describe its publicly known capabilities rather than quoting specific figures. Verify current details on scribbr.com.
A Scribbr proofread is usually charged by the word, which is fair for a one-time edit of a finished dissertation. If you instead want to check drafts again and again through a semester, a flat subscription is easier on a student budget. Every figure below is what you pay, and the free tier covers the night-before-deadline check at no cost.
Billed $89.88/year, save $30
Billed $179.88/year, save $60
Billed $359.88/year, save $120
Yearly billing saves 25 percent. If your goal is a polished, human-edited dissertation with every reference formatted, Scribbr's per-word editing may be the right spend for that one milestone. If your goal is checking essays for AI all term and rewriting the lines that get flagged, a flat plan keeps the cost steady. View full pricing
Picture a student finishing a chapter. Walking the chapter through both tools shows where each one earns its keep on the way to submission.
The student uploads the chapter, formats every reference with the citation generator in the required style, books a human proofread to tidy the grammar and flow, and runs the plagiarism check. The free AI detector gives a document-level reading on the side. The task here is "make this read like a finished, well-referenced piece of academic work", and the whole suite points at that final draft. The AI number is just one of several things the student glances at.
The student pastes the same chapter into TextSight. The scan comes back with the sentences marked: three in amber, one in red, each carrying a one-line reason it reads as machine-generated. The student opens the rewriter, reworks those four lines into their own phrasing while keeping the argument and the sources intact, then rescans to confirm the chapter reads clean. The task here is narrow and specific: locate the AI-sounding passages and fix them honestly.
If you want a tidy, human-edited chapter with flawless references, that is Scribbr's lane and TextSight does not replace the editor or the reference manager. If you want to know precisely where your writing reads as AI and to rewrite those lines fast, TextSight does that in a couple of minutes. Plenty of students use both across a project: Scribbr near the end for editing and citations, TextSight throughout for detection and revision.
Scribbr and TextSight are not the only names a student runs into. Here is an honest read on the other detectors and the academic situations each one really suits.
GPTZero is the easiest no-card stop when you just need to run a single essay once and move on. It is popular on campus for exactly that. What TextSight adds for a student is the rewriter built in and the per-sentence reasons, so you can fix what gets flagged rather than just read a number. See the head-to-head.
Many institutions run submissions through Turnitin or Copyleaks inside Canvas, Blackboard or Moodle, so your work may already pass through one at grading time. Those are bought by departments, not students, and you rarely choose them. TextSight is what you reach for on your own draft before it ever reaches that system.
If your side gig is producing SEO articles in bulk, Originality.ai is shaped for credit-metered scanning of large content batches and would suit that better than a single-essay tool. For coursework and a thesis it is the wrong shape; for a freelance content backlog it is closer. Read the Originality.ai take.
TextSight is the pick when your concern is your own academic writing reading as AI, and you want to see which sentences and rework them honestly, with a free check before you pay. Scribbr stays the pick for human editing and a full citation workflow. Using both across a paper is perfectly normal.
There is no single best tool for a student. There is the task in front of you. Find the column that matches where your paper is right now.
Most students end up doing both: Scribbr near submission for editing and references, TextSight throughout for catching and fixing AI-sounding lines. They complement each other on the same paper.
The full ranking with detection accuracy, pricing, and the right-tool-for-the-job lens applied to every entry.
See the rankingWhy detectors sometimes flag human writing, how to read a borderline result, and what to do about it.
Read the guideA plain-language explainer on perplexity, burstiness, and what a sentence-level highlight is actually measuring.
Learn the basicsHead-to-head with the other popular free academic detector, with the feature matrix and where each one wins.
Read the compareThe free tier needs no card for your first scan. Paste a paragraph from an essay you wrote yourself, read where the highlights fall, and see whether the detection and the meaning-preserving rewriter earn a place in your writing routine.