The short answer
Copyleaks sells to individuals and to institutions. Anyone can sign up, and its Personal plan was listed at $16.99 a month. Turnitin sells only to institutions, so students and teachers reach it through their school. Both check for matching text and for likely AI writing. They are separate systems, so their results can differ.
That leads to three practical points:
- If you are one person, you can buy Copyleaks. You cannot buy Turnitin.
- If your school uses Turnitin, that report is the one your work is judged with. A Copyleaks result will not tell you what it shows.
- If you are choosing for a school, both sell to institutions and both connect to a learning management system (LMS). Neither lists an institutional price.
Comparison table
Each cell is taken from the vendor’s own pages, linked in the sources. Prices are the listed US dollar prices on that date.
| Question | Copyleaks | Turnitin |
|---|---|---|
| Who can buy it | Individuals, teams, enterprises and schools. | Institutions only. No individual licences or single-use subscriptions. |
| How you reach it | Sign up on the website. Schools can also connect it to their LMS. | Through your school’s account, on the web or inside the LMS. |
| Free use | The AI detector page says you can scan up to 25,000 characters without logging in. New accounts get a limited number of free credits. The number is not stated on the pages we read. | Not stated on the pages we read. Access comes with the school’s licence. |
| Plagiarism check | Yes. The report includes links to the web pages where matches were found. | Yes. It is called the Similarity Report. |
| AI detection | Yes, in the same report as plagiarism on its paid plans. | Yes, for institutions that license Turnitin Originality and have it switched on. |
| Who sees the AI result | On an individual account, the person who runs the scan. | Instructors and administrators. Turnitin says it is not visible to students. |
| Shortest text for an AI result | 255 characters on the web platform. | 300 words of prose. The upper limit is 30,000 words. |
| Listed price | Personal: $16.99 a month, or $13.99 a month billed annually at $167.88. Education and Enterprise: talk to sales. | Not stated on the pages we read. |
| LMS integrations listed | Canvas, Moodle, D2L Brightspace, Schoology, Sakai, Edsby and Blackboard, on its Education plan. | D2L, Canvas, Moodle, Sakai “and others”. Feedback Studio also lists Microsoft Teams. |
| Languages | AI detection in 30+ languages. Plagiarism detection in 100+ languages. | Similarity content “across 170 languages”. AI detection in a short list of languages (see below). |
Prices and limits change. Read the vendor’s own page on the day you buy or sign a contract.
Who can buy each one
Copyleaks
Copyleaks’ pricing page has three tabs: Individual, Enterprise and Education. The Individual tab shows two plans you can pay for with a card, Personal and Pro. The Enterprise and Education tabs each say “Talk to Sales”. So one person can sign up and scan a document the same day, and a school can also buy it for everyone.
Turnitin
Turnitin’s help center has a page called Can I purchase an individual Turnitin license? The answer is no. It says Turnitin “does not sell individual licenses or single-use subscriptions” and that its services are sold only at the institutional level, to schools, universities and organizations. It tells students and instructors to ask their instructor, library or IT help desk whether the school has a licence.
The same page names one route for individuals: iThenticate. Turnitin describes it as a separate product where independent users buy credits to run similarity checks on their own documents. It is not the same as the Turnitin account a school gives you.
What this means for access in the LMS
Both companies describe an LMS connection for schools. Turnitin’s Similarity product page says the product can be used on the web or integrated “natively or via API and LTI 1.3” into popular learning management systems, including D2L, Canvas, Moodle and Sakai. Copyleaks’ pricing page lists Canvas, Moodle, D2L Brightspace, Schoology, Sakai, Edsby and Blackboard under its Education plan, with grades and feedback synced to the LMS.
Plagiarism checking
Both products compare your text with existing text and show where it matches. They describe what they search in different ways.
- Copyleaks. Its plagiarism checker page lists what each scan searches: 16,000+ open-access journals, “60 trillion websites”, 1M+ internal documents and 20+ code data repositories. The pricing page adds a Shared Data Hub, described as a library of millions of user-submitted documents. The report sorts matches into three types: identical, minor changes and paraphrased. It includes links to the web pages where matches were found.
- Turnitin. Its Similarity page says the Similarity Report compares work against “a vast collection of student submissions, premium publications, and 20+ years of internet content”. The Feedback Studio page describes a repository of student papers, current and archived web pages, and subscription articles from publishers.
The two lists are not measured the same way, so they do not tell you which one finds more. Both mention documents that users have submitted, as well as web pages and publications. If you want to know how matching works in general, see how plagiarism checkers work.
AI detection
A plagiarism check and an AI check are different things. The first finds text that matches a source. The second estimates how likely it is that an AI tool wrote the text.
Copyleaks
Copyleaks’ AI detector page says the detector covers ChatGPT, GPT-4 and GPT-5, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek and Llama models, among others. It says you can scan up to 25,000 characters without logging in and see what percentage of the text is likely AI-generated. Sentence-by-sentence detail is unlocked with a free account. Paid plans add a feature called AI Logic, which Copyleaks says shows why text was flagged. The pricing page says paid plans scan for AI and plagiarism in a single report.
Turnitin
Turnitin’s AI writing detection FAQ says AI detection is available only to customers that license Turnitin Originality, or as an add-on for iThenticate 2.0. An administrator can turn it off. The result appears as an indicator on the Similarity Report, and Turnitin says only instructors and administrators can see it. Inside an LMS, the score is not shown on the LMS screens. The instructor opens the report to see it.
Turnitin also says the AI percentage and the similarity score are “completely independent and do not influence each other”. Our guide does Turnitin detect AI? covers how that indicator works in detail, so we do not repeat it here.
What each vendor says about limits and false positives
A false positive is human writing marked as AI. Both companies write about it. Every number below is the company’s own claim about its own product. We did not test either one.
| Topic | Copyleaks says | Turnitin says |
|---|---|---|
| False positives | The chance of human writing being labelled as AI is 0.03%. A footnote on its plagiarism checker page says its accuracy rating is based on internal testing of English language datasets. | It aims to keep the false positive rate under 1% for documents with over 20% AI writing, and explains that as possibly one in 100 fully human-written documents. |
| Low scores | Not stated on the pages we read. | Scores from 1% to 19% are shown as an asterisk with no number and no highlights, because false positives are more likely there. |
| Minimum length | 255 characters on the web platform, 350 in the browser extension. More text improves confidence. | At least 300 words of prose. With only a few hundred words the result is mostly “all or nothing”. |
| What is not analysed | Not stated on the pages we read. | Only prose sentences in long-form writing. Not poetry, scripts, code, bullet points or tables. |
| Grammar tools | Basic grammar and spell-check functions typically are not flagged. Grammarly’s AI-based rewriting features may trigger detection. | Grammar, spelling and punctuation fixes were not flagged in most of its tests. Text made with generative features will likely be flagged. |
| Missed AI text | Not stated on the pages we read. | To keep false positives low it may miss some AI text. Its example: a document reported as 50% could contain as much as 65%. |
Turnitin’s guide to using the AI Writing Report states that the model “may not always be accurate” and “should not be used as the sole basis for adverse actions against a student”. On plagiarism matching, Copyleaks’ own FAQ says that any plagiarism checking tool can potentially miss small elements.
The two false positive figures are not comparable. They were measured by different companies, on different texts, with different rules about what counts. For more on why human writing gets flagged, see AI detector false positives.
Pricing model
Copyleaks: credits on a subscription
Copyleaks’ pricing page listed these plans:
- Personal: $16.99 a month, or $13.99 a month when billed annually ($167.88). The monthly plan lists 100 credits, enough to scan up to 25,000 words. The annual plan lists 1,200 credits, up to 300,000 words.
- Pro: $99.99 a month, or $74.99 a month when billed annually ($899.88). It includes 25 user seats.
- Education: no listed price. The page says pricing is based on the number of full-time students at the institution.
- Enterprise: no listed price. The page says to talk to sales.
One credit covers up to 250 words or one image. The page says plans renew automatically and that extra credits can be bought at any time. Its FAQ says API access and LMS integration are part of the education and enterprise offers. Copyleaks describes its API on a separate page.
Turnitin: an institutional licence
We found no price on the Turnitin pages we read. Turnitin sells to institutions, not to students or single teachers, so the cost is agreed between Turnitin and the school. AI detection is tied to a specific licence, Turnitin Originality, so a school that has Turnitin does not always have the AI feature.
Languages
- Copyleaks lists AI detection in 30+ languages and plagiarism detection in 100+ languages. Its plagiarism FAQ adds that a scan only searches for matches in the language you submitted. Cross-language detection is listed as a separate feature under the Pro plan.
- Turnitin says its similarity content covers articles “across 170 languages”. For AI detection, the two Turnitin pages we read do not match. The FAQ lists English, Spanish, Japanese, Modern Arabic, Dutch, German and Turkish. The file requirements page lists English, Spanish, Japanese and Arabic. If your language matters, ask your school’s Turnitin administrator.
Turnitin says that if a paper is in a language its AI detector does not support, no AI report is generated. The Similarity Report still runs.
Will Copyleaks and Turnitin show the same result?
No, and you should not expect them to. There are four reasons.
- They search different material. Each has its own collection of web pages, publications and submitted documents. A match in one collection may not exist in the other.
- They use different AI models. Each company trains its own detector on its own data. Two models can read the same paragraph differently.
- They count different text. Turnitin’s AI percentage is a share of the qualifying prose only, not of the whole file.
- They show results differently. Turnitin hides AI scores from 1% to 19% behind an asterisk. Settings chosen by the instructor, such as excluding quotes, also change a similarity score.
If your school uses Turnitin, ask your instructor whether you may submit a draft. That is the only way to see a Turnitin report before the final hand-in. For reading a report once you have one, see how to interpret a plagiarism report.
Where Plagiarism Checker Plus fits
This is the part where we talk about our own tool. Treat it as our view.
Plagiarism Checker Plus is a self-serve checker, like the individual side of Copyleaks. The first plagiarism check and the first AI check are free with no account, up to 1,000 words each. A free account includes 3,000 words a month. Every matching passage is linked to its source, and the AI detector gives an overall score and a likelihood for every sentence. Paid plans are on our pricing page.
What it does not do:
- It does not connect to any LMS. Copyleaks and Turnitin both do.
- It has no database of other students’ submitted papers. Turnitin does.
- We publish no accuracy figure for it.
- It cannot tell you what a Copyleaks or Turnitin report will show.
It fits a person who wants to find passages that need a citation before handing work in. A school that needs checking inside its LMS should look at the two products above. We compare our tool with Copyleaks attribute by attribute in Plagiarism Checker Plus vs Copyleaks.
What we do not know and did not test
- Accuracy. We did not run the same documents through both products. We do not know which finds more matches or which AI detector is right more often.
- Turnitin’s price. It is not on the pages we read.
- Copyleaks’ institutional price, and how many free credits a new account gets.
- The size of either database. We repeated what each company says. We did not check it.
- How each handles your data. We did not review their privacy policies. Read them yourself before you upload.
- What happens after today. This page shows what we could read on 10 October 2026.
Sources
Each company’s own website, read on 10 October 2026.
- Copyleaks: pricing, plagiarism checker, AI detector and API.
- Turnitin help center: Can I purchase an individual Turnitin license?
- Turnitin guides: AI writing detection FAQ, file requirements for an AI Writing Report and using the AI Writing Report.
- Turnitin product pages: Turnitin Similarity and Turnitin Feedback Studio.
- Plagiarism Checker Plus: our own plagiarism checker, AI detector and pricing pages.