6 Best AI Detection Tools for Different Use Cases

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AI content detector platforms use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify text written or media assets produced with a generative AI model. Teachers, editors, writers, or any reader who wants to know whether a piece of content is human-authored or computer-generated can use them for a wide range of use cases, from preventing students from turning in AI-generated essays to detecting bot content among posts and comments in online forums. As generative AI tools continue to improve, reliable AI detection tools become more important. While generative AI platforms like ChatGPT have many positive applications, their usage has raised concerns about ethics, authenticity, and potential security risks. AI detectors can help mitigate those risks by providing transparency, ensuring academic integrity, and promoting quality.

I evaluated the best AI detector solutions to see how they compare, closely looking at features, costs, and pros and cons to help you determine the best option for your organization’s needs. Here are my picks for the top six AI detection tools:

• Originality.ai: Best Overall AI Detector
• GPTZero: Best for Educators
• Copyleaks: Best for Content Marketing Agencies
• Sapling.ai: Best for Customer-Facing Teams
• Winston AI: Best for Data-Driven Professionals
• Grammarly: Best for Cross-Functional Collaborators

Top AI Detectors: Comparison Chart

 I’ve summarized how the top tools compare in terms of use case, features, and price. Note that all prices are with a one-year commitment.

	Best For	AI Detection Score	Plagiarism Checking	Highlight AI text	Chrome Extension	Starting Price
Originality.ai	Best Overall	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	$12.95 per month
GPTZero	Educators	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	$18.33 per month
Copyleaks	Content Marketing Agencies	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	$7.99 per month
Sapling.ai	Customer-Facing Teams	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	$12 per month
Winston AI	Data-Driven Professionals	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	$12 per month
Grammarly	Cross-Functional Collaborators	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	$12 per month

I picked Originality.ai as the overall best AI detection tool. It ranked first for core features and ease of use and tied for content accuracy. Read to learn more about each tool’s use case, pricing, and key features, or see my scoring logic.

Originality.ai is one of the best AI detector tools on the market. It uses advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to scan text for signs that it was created by AI, as well as plagiarism. Requiring 50 words or more of content to work effectively, Originality.ai boasts better than 94 percent accuracy on text generated with GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and ChatGPT, 99 percent accuracy on GPT-4 content, and 94.5 percent accuracy on paraphrased content. Scanning content with this tool returns the AI percent score and the original content percent or human score.

Product Design

Originality.ai’s clean and intuitive user interface helps streamline the process of checking content for originality. You can easily add content to be checked by uploading a file, entering a URL, or writing the text. The platform’s user-friendly dashboard displays the analyzed content, AI detection score, and color-coded sections to highlight possible plagiarized phrases. 

Originality.ai has upgraded its multilingual detector version 1.3, now incorporating OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo, which offers improved accuracy across all tested languages. Version 1.3 performs better than version 1.2, with excellent prediction quality across standard metrics and for all AI models. 

Why I Picked Originality.ai

Originality.ai tops the list due to its affordability, robust feature set, usability, and high accuracy rate. The tool offers limited free scans so you can test the platform, while paid plans are affordable for smaller teams and organizations. Managers or owners can assign roles to team members, making it ideal for organizations with distributed editorial teams. Finally, Originality.ai deploys excellent computing power to scan text when running its detection model, compared to other tools.

Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
High accuracy score	Sometimes highlights human text as AI
Simultaneous plagiarism scanning	Slightly more expensive than some free AI detectors

Pricing

• Free: Daily scan, 300-word limit
• Base Subscription: $12.95 per month, billed annually; $14.95 per month
• Enterprise: $136.58 per month, billed annually; $179 per month
• Pay as You Go: $30 one-time payment for up to 3,000 credits

Features 

• AI detection for generative AI models including GPT-3, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, Gemini, Gemini Pro 1.5, Claude, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, Llama, Mistral, Grok, ChatGPT, and GPT-4o-mini
• Exceptional detection accuracy
• Website and URL scanning
• Team collaboration
• Built-in plagiarism detection

GPTZero is a classification model developed by Princeton student Edward Tian to help educators predict and detect AI-written text. It analyzes texts based on their “perplexity” — a measurement of the randomness of a text — and “burstiness,” which measures the predictability of content based on patterns. According to the developer, the tool was trained on a large and diverse human-written and AI-generated training dataset , focusing on English prose.

Product Design

GPTZerosimple UI includes a dashboard that shows the AI detection score and other parameters. You can upload multiple files or drag and drop documents from a folder to check them for possible AI-generated content.. You can quickly switch between tabs to choose basic scan, advanced detection, or plagiarism check. Once GPTZero has scanned the copy,  hover over highlighted areas to see the likelihood that the content is AI-generated. 

Why I Picked GPTZero

GPTZero is a powerful tool for educators, helping them ensure that the students’ work is authentic and maintain academic integrity. If you’re an educator and need a tool to help you work more efficiently, GPTZero’s AI teaching assistant checks spelling, grammar, style, and tone. You can also use GPTZero to examine the flow or logic of your text and enhance content. Additionally, you can record your writing process and use it as teaching material for your students or as proof that the content is your original work.

Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Accepts multiple file types	Occasional false negatives
Useful additional features for educators	Presentation of scores can be confusing

Pricing

• Free: Up to 10,000 credits (10,000 words) per month
• Essential: $18.33 per month, billed annually; $14.99 per month
• Premium: $12.99 per month, billed annually; $23.99 per month
• Professional: $24.99 per month, billed annually; $45.99 per month
• Teams: Starts at $24.99 per member, per month

Features 

• LMS integration
• Detects ChatGPT, GPT-3, GPT-2, and LLaMA
• “Perplexity” score for text randomness
• “Burstiness” score for determining uniformity or pattern of text
• Advanced grammar and writing feedback

Copyleaks is an advanced AI-powered plagiarism and content detection tool designed to help individuals, educators, and agencies ensure content originality. The platform detects content created with ChatGPT, GPT-4, GPT-3, Jasper, and other language models with a claimed accuracy of 99.12 percent. The platform goes beyond common plagiarism detection features and helps secure your intellectual property and copyright by running a comprehensive content audit.

Product Design

Copyleaks offers a user-friendly interface that’s easy to navigate, even for users without technical expertise. Although the platform uses a lot of backend processing and complex AI algorithms to detect AI-generated content, the user experience remains relatively smooth and straightforward. Copyleaks extension allows users to check web pages for AI content without manually copying and pasting content. Copyleaks recently introduced new features, including a writing assistant, learning management system (LMS) analytics, and improved AI detection.

Why I Picked Copyleaks

The platform’s comprehensive reporting features allow you to get specific and clear evidence of whether your content is being used without proper consent, even by large language models (LLMs). With a single scan, you can get a 360-degree view of how your content is potentially being used, helping you identify potential copyright infringement, unauthorized use, and plagiarism.

Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Offers white-label option	Doesn’t show the detection score
API integration for enterprise systems	Varying detection accuracy for the same content

Pricing

Copyleaks pricing depends on the number of credits you need, with each credit equaling 250 words. It offers four pricing plans, billed monthly and annually, with no specific upper limit:

• AI Detector: Starts at $7.99 per month for up to 1,200 credits (300K words)
• Plagiarism Detector: Starts at $8.99 per month for up to 1,200 credits (300K words)
• AI + Plagiarism Detection: Starts at $13.99 per month for up to 1,200 credits (300K words)
• Enterprise and LMS: Contact sales for a quote

Features

• Supports multiple languages, including Portuguese, English, German, French, and Spanish
• LMS integration
• Source code plagiarism detection
• OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology
• AI detection for generative AI models, including ​​GPT-2, GPT-3, ChatGPT, GPT-4, T5, Bert, and Jasper

Developed by former researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Stanford, and Google, Sapling.ai is an AI detector with additional functions, including a grammar checker, punctuation checker, and sentence rewriter. Because the platform has so many tools built into it, it’s well set up for the needs of fast-paced agencies and customer-facing teams. 

Sapling.ai detects GPT-3, GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, and GPT-4 AI content, claiming 97 percent accuracy.. Scanning your provided text, Sapling.ai shows  the total percentage of possible fake or AI-generated content highlights the suspect  content in red.

Product Design

While Sapling.ai offers a robust suite of tools for customer-facing teams, its interface can sometimes feel cluttered. Despite the potential for clutter, the AI detection tool’s essential functionalities remain easily accessible. Sapling.ai is designed for business communication to help teams communicate more effectively with their clients. It provides real-time suggestions to help sales, support, and success teams correspond with customers with personalized responses instead of using AI chatbots. Sapling.ai is also readily accessible via any web browser and offers a limited free tool, making it easier for users to test the tool right away.

Why I Picked Sapling.ai

Sapling.ai stands out as an ideal tool for customer-facing teams to offer personalized and timely responses. This platform has partnered with OpenAI to be able to deliver the most helpful suggestions in a team’s response bank and knowledge base. The AI detection tool also helps flag AI-generated content, ensuring that responses to customer inquiries are original rather than generated by an AI tool. Additionally, Sapling.ai is also one of the most affordable tools on this list, making it an excellent AI detection tool for small teams or startups.

Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Easy integration into other apps and software	Occasional false positives and false negatives
Robust free plan	Customer support can be better

Pricing

• Free: No monthly or annual charges
• Pro: $12 per month, billed annually; $25 per month
• Enterprise: Contact sales for quote
• API: Metered

Features 

• Detects GPT-3, GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, and GPT-4
• Auto-complete, snippets, and chat assist
• AES-256 and TLS (HTTPS) encryption
• Integration with third-party apps like Salesforce, Pipedrive, HubSpot, Jira, and more

Winston AI is a leading AI content detector and plagiarism checker software for ChatGPT, GPT-4, Google Gemini, Claude, and other large language models (LLMs). The solution offers a wide range of applications designed for writers, educators, and web publishers. Winston AI also supports optical character recognition (OCR) technology, which allows users to scan image files for AI content. It can detect AI-generated images and deepfakes made with Midjourney, DALL•E, Stable Diffusion, Meta AI, and others.

Product Design

Winston AI’s clutter-free UI and its dashboard enable users to easily choose the action they need, such as scanning content, websites, images, and more. To perform a content scan, you can upload a file, import from a URL, or paste the text before running it for AI detection. The dashboard instantly displays the highlighted text, showing metrics like human score, readability, and percentage of potentially plagiarized content. Winston AI’s color-coded results are also easy to understand, interpret, and share with the team via a link or PDF.

Why I Picked Winston AI

Winston AI provides comprehensive insights into content authenticity for data-driven professionals and teams. Winston AI stands out for its image detection, which uses the latest technology to run a complete analysis to identify whether Midjourney, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and more were used to generate the content in question.

Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Shows human, plagiarism, and readability scores	The free plan is limited to 2,000 words per scan
Supports multiple file documents, including .docx, .png, and .jpg	Requires signup to use

Pricing

• Free: Up to 2,000 (2,000 words) credits
• Essential: $12 per month, billed annually; $18 per month
• Advanced: $19 per month, billed annually; $29 per month
• Elite: $32 per month, billed annually; $49 per month
• Custom: Contact sales

Features 

• AI content detection for ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and more
• OCR capability for scanning pictures and handwriting
• AI image and deepfake detection for Midjourney, DALL•E, Stable Diffusion, and more
• Plagiarism detection capability
• Shareable PDF reports

Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that helps you improve your grammar, clarity, tone, and overall writing quality across various platforms. It integrates smoothly into browsers, word processors, and communication tools, making it one of the most accessible AI writing assistants and detection tools. While Grammarly doesn’t focus specifically on  AI detection , it includes an AI detection feature that identifies suspected AI-generated content from ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Claude, and other LLMs. You can also adjust and improve your content with Grammarly’s tools for original writing, which include plagiarism detection, auto-citations, and citation style formatting.

Product Design

Grammarly integrated plagiarism and AI writing detection features bring together several layers of content verification in one intuitive, centralized user interface. When generating content, you can customize Grammarly’s style preferences and voice settings to  receive tailored recommendations based on your writing’s goals. In addition to Grammarly’s AI detection, you can use its Authorship tool to automatically categorize your text based on where it came from, whether it’s AI-generated content, an online database, or your original writing.

Why I Picked Grammarly

Grammarly stands out for cross-functional collaborators, offering features that enhance communication and simplify workflows across diverse teams. Features like an AI-powered writing assistant ensure professionalism in communication, a tone detector for collaborators to tailor messages to maintain a constructive tone, and integrations with other platforms to support real-time collaboration without disrupting workflow. Moreover, Grammarly’s advanced features, such as its Operational Transformation (OT) protocol and Delta model, enable smooth, multi-user editing of the same document, helping collaborators write faster, resolve misunderstandings efficiently, and spend less time creating content.

Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Seamless integration with various browsers, word processing apps, and communication/collaboration platforms	Occasionally flags stylistic preferences as errors
Operational Transformation (OT) protocol and Delta model for multi-user editing	Limited offline functionality

Pricing

• Free: One user
• Premium: $12 per user, per month, billed annually; $21 per user, billed monthly
• Enterprise: Contact sales for quote

Features 

• Plagiarism and AI content checker
• AI content generation
• Real-time grammar, punctuation, and style corrections
• Tone detection and adjustment
• Knowledge share

5 Key Features of AI Detector Software

When deciding on AI detector software for your organization, there are certain core features to look for. While some tools don’t include all these capabilities, choose the best AI detector that suits your needs.

Accuracy

The accuracy of the AI content detector software is critical to its effectiveness. The tool should be able to accurately identify and flag inappropriate or harmful content, spam, and copyrighted material. It’s important to select a solution with a high accuracy rate, as false positives and negatives can have significant consequences for both creators and consumers.

AI Text Highlight

AI detector software that highlights text makes it easy for users to identify parts of their content that need to be rewritten to sound more human. Some parts of your copy may be flagged as AI-generated when it was 100 percent human-written—the highlighted text helps you know where you might need to adjust or modify your copy.

Plagiarism Checker

Educators, content marketers, and SEO experts will find this feature beneficial. Using multiple tools to evaluate content based on parameters like grammar, plagiarism, readability, and detection score is time-consuming and inefficient. AI detectors with integrated plagiarism checkers take the burden of using multiple tools off editors and managers, enabling them to focus on copy originality and quality.

Advanced Algorithmic Detection

AI detector tools employ advanced algorithms to accurately identify AI-generated text, images, and other media assets. These AI solutions train on massive datasets to distinguish between human-generated and AI-created content with accuracy and reliability.

API Integrations

With API integrations, AI content detector software can seamlessly integrate with other tools and platforms, such as content management systems (CMS), social media platforms, and e-commerce platforms. This feature makes automating the content moderation process easier and reduces the need for manual review.

How I Evaluated AI Detector Tools

In evaluating AI detector tools, I scored each option against six key criteria for individuals and businesses looking for a robust and reliable solution. From there, I divided each category into weighted subcriteria and assigned an overall score out of five to determine the winner for each category.

Evaluation Criteria

In evaluating AI detector tools, I scored each option against five key criteria for individuals and businesses looking for a robust and reliable solution. From there, I divided each category into weighted subcriteria and assigned an overall score out of five to determine the winner for each category.

Evaluation Criteria

In scoring these tools, I put the highest weight on core features and accuracy, followed by advanced features and cost. I also evaluated each solution’s ease of use and customer support. 

• Core Features (35 percent): An AI detector tool’s feature set is essential in assessing its capabilities and effectiveness in analyzing AI-generated content. I considered features like an AI text highlighter, detection score, multiple LLM detectors, reporting dashboard, and more.
  
  Criteria Winner: Originality.ai
• Accuracy (25 percent): A highly accurate AI detection tool ensures users can trust the results and make informed decisions. To evaluate each tool’s accuracy, I tested each option multiple times to see if it could differentiate human-written text from AI-generated content.
  
  Criteria Winner: Originality.ai, GPTZero, and Copyleaks
• Pricing (15 percent): I wanted to ensure that the software offers good value for its capabilities. I looked into the free version or trials offered, pricing plans, and billing options.
  
  Criteria Winner: Grammarly
• Ease of Use (15 percent): A user-friendly interface and intuitive design are important factors when evaluating an AI detector tool. I evaluated each tool’s user experience/interface and its knowledge base.
  
  Criteria Winner: Originality.ai

• User Support (10 percent): Reliable customer assistance is necessary for resolving customer issues, so I looked into each platform’s support solutions via live chat, email, and phone.

Criteria Winner: Grammarly

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Bottom Line: AI Detector Software

The field of generative AI continues to evolve, and as more businesses use AI tools to create content, new ethical concerns arise. Indiscriminate use of these powerful tools can result in intellectual dishonesty or, in some cases, expose sensitive corporate data to security and compliance risks. With these risks in mind, organizations of all types should  select an AI detector tool that works best for their unique situation. 

Before deciding which tool to use for your business, consider our list or look into leading generative AI companies to see what new tools they offer. Whether you work in sales, content marketing, education, or another industry, sign up for free versions or trials to get hands-on experience before deciding which AI detection tool to purchase. 

Learn more about tools to help you create engaging content by reading our guide to the best AI writing tools or the top AI apps to explore.