Although not as well-known as major competitors Turnitin, Copyleaks or Grammarly, Enago is an online plagiarism checker and AI grammar checker which is aimed at helping academic authors improve their writing for publication. But how does their plagiarism checker compare to the other services they offer? Let’s take a closer look:
Enago itself is a publication support service that offers scientific editing, copy editing and translation services. It has partnered with Turnitin to leverage their plagiarism checker as part of its service offering, although the end result is branded with Enago’s logo:
Using technology developed by Turnitin, the Enago plagiarism checker looks for plagiarism across 90 billion current and archived web pages The plagiarism checker also incorporates paid scholarly articles and open access articles, giving researchers and publishers a wider breadth of sources to scan as opposed to competing plagiarism checkers..
The plagiarism checker itself works similarly to Turnitin, checking for different instances of plagiarism in its various forms. What separates the Enago plagiarism checker from the competition is that it includes the option to add on Scholarly Check, which checks a wide range of paid publication databases and open access repositories including:
In total, Enago checks material from over 1,700 publishers.
Enago Plagiarism Checker is primarily designed for students, professors, researchers and academic publishers. If your school or university doesn’t currently use Turnitin and you want a simple, inexpensive way to search paid scholarly article databases, Enago offers that optional service in addition to AI grammar scanning, translation, copy editing and more.
Intuitive Plagiarism Checker - Generally speaking, Enago’s plagiarism checker works on a similar scale to Quetext, in that it scans for instances of plagiarism across both free and paid databases and provides a report indicating the percentage of similarity in the resulting report. In terms of accuracy, its precision is ranked right alongside Copyscape in that it detects many different types of plagiarism quickly and efficiently.
Scientific Editing - For those looking to publish in high-level scientific journals, this service provides a detailed review and high-quality, precision editing in English while optimizing your work for presentation in a scientific journal. It is one of the most detailed editing services available for academic publishers.
Substantive Editing - This service has a highly-skilled editor look at the logical flow of your work and edit it to maintain proper structure. This service takes advantage of editors who have worked with highly–respectable online journals like Nature and The Lancet to prepare your work for publication.
Copy Editing - At the most basic tier, copy editing involves an overall quality check: editing for grammar and syntax errors in English.
Professional Translation - Enago also offers professional translation services with varying levels of precision depending on where you plan to publish the work. Translations range from a basic translation to a journal-ready translation and a balanced translation level in between. Current languages include French, Spanish, German, Japanese and Chinese.
Enago’s plagiarism checker is essentially Turnitin with a fresh coat of branding paint. It’s important to note that Turnitin does not specifically detect plagiarism; rather it detects similarities in text and displays the resulting similarities as percentages and source links where it found the material.
In a nutshell, Enago compares submitted papers to a proprietary collection of databases (and optionally paid databases) to find any similarities with documents that are already in the system. Although Turnitin’s and by extension Enago’s scanning algorithms are proprietary, they essentially use patterns to identify instances in text where plagiarism may have occurred. It’s up to the professor, researcher or lecturer to decide if plagiarism has actually occurred.
Because Enago uses a combination of machine learning and natural language processing, it is able to detect similarities beyond simple direct copying. It can also detect mosaic plagiarism (also called patchwork plagiarism – where information is taken from multiple sources and combined into a single idea), as well as paraphrasing making it slightly more advanced than your average free plagiarism checker.
As with many online plagiarism scanning services, Enago can suffer from common issues at times including payment problems, quality concerns or technical difficulties. If you run into these types of problems, it’s a good idea to reach out to their customer service team directly. If you find that the scanning process is taking an unusually long time, it’s never a bad idea to clear your browser cache and cookies to see if this speeds up the process. Keep in mind that larger articles or reports will take longer to scan.
All plagiarism checkers have their pros and cons, but here are some ways that Enago sets itself apart from the competition:
Large and Comprehensive Database - Because Enago is powered by Turnitin’s plagiarism checker, it has the advantage of a large and detailed database including billions of web pages, articles, journals, essays and much more.
Helpful Editing and Translation Services - In addition to a plagiarism checker, Enago also offers an AI grammar checker, detailed editing and translation services and citation help for researchers, students and other academic professionals.
Paid Scholar Database Check - Enago’s paid scholarly database plagiarism checker is probably the top advantage of using the software over other plagiarism checkers in that few other checkers give you access to such a wide variety of scholarly research and articles, particularly those behind paywalls.
Cost-effective Option for Students - Having a bulk scanning option helps students and researchers save time and money over pay-as-you-go options.
Expensive for Regular Scans - Enago’s plagiarism checker can start to add up quickly if you’re regularly scanning lots of content, making it more costly in the long run for ongoing scanning services.
Inaccurate Grammar Checker - The AI grammar checker can be hit or miss in terms of its accuracy. Some of its suggestions are simply wrong. If you need a comprehensive grammar checker, an online tool like Grammarly may be a better option.
If you’re choosing between many different online plagiarism checkers, Enago is likely at the top of your list, but is it worth using? Based on what others have said about it, Enago is ideal particularly for scanning scientific papers and other complex academic papers. It especially shines with its Scholarly Plagiarism Check in that it gives you access to paid article databases for as little as $19.
However, over time the costs can add up quite a bit. If you’re thinking of using Enago as an alternative to Grammarly, you’ll find its suggestions are sorely lacking. Unlike other plagiarism checkers, Enago also isn’t free and doesn’t offer a free option. It does, however, do a diligent check of plagiarism and works hard to keep your data secure and private which are frequently areas where free plagiarism checkers can fall short.
Comparing a comprehensive plagiarism checker like Enago, which is geared toward academia, with Originality.AI, which is geared toward business professionals is a lot like comparing apples to oranges. Whereas Enago specializes in helping you prepare your academic papers for publication with translation services, tutoring and different levels of editing, Originality.AI checks writing for the tell-tale signs of AI-crafted content in addition to plagiarism.
Using Originality.AI, you can optionally scan for plagiarism, scan for AI-written content or both simultaneously. Originality.AI has also recently released a readability tool which checks your work for readability according to several different professional scales. With prices as low as 1 cent per 100 words scanned, Originality.AI’s plagiarism checker is best used in combination with its AI checker to ensure top-quality, original writing.
Try Originality.AI for yourself and use its intuitive, user-friendly interface to check your documents for the hallmarks of AI created content. Originality.AI has been trained to spot content created by ChatGPT 3.5 and ChatGPT 4 as well as other popular AI writing software, giving you a full breadth of plagiarism and artificial intelligence checkers for all of your content.