Merlin: Plagiarism Checker Review
We tested the Merlin Plagiarism Checker to see how it compares to Originality.ai’s plagiarism detector. Read our detailed Merlin plagiarism checker review.
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Merlin AI is an online plagiarism detection platform designed for students and content professionals to quickly verify the authenticity of their content.
In addition to plagiarism detection, one of Merlin’s popular features is AI Chat, which can be used to generate AI articles. Read our Merlin AI Review to learn more about its AI article generation capabilities.
For the purposes of this review, we wanted to focus specifically on the plagiarism detection feature to see how the free Merlin Plagiarism Checker compares to the industry-leading Originality.ai Plagiarism Detector; particularly when it comes to direct plagiarism (copy and paste) and patchwork plagiarism.
Our at-a-glance rating is below:
Merlin Quick Review
- Ease of use - 10/10
- Price - 7/10
- Speed - 9/10
- Performance - 3/10
- Summary - 7.25/10
We tested the Merlin plagiarism checker comparatively with the Originality.ai Plagiarism Checker in four different plagiarism tests. See the full results below.
What Is Merlin?
Merlin is a free online plagiarism checker and platform with AI tools. Its free plagiarism checker is designed to quickly check for plagiarism by comparing the pasted or uploaded text to a database. It also notes that it uses advanced algorithms for text analysis and pattern recognition.
In the free version of the tool, it states whether or not plagiarism was found (without a specific percentage). It also provides a breakdown of individual details of the pasted text into the number of words, sentences, and paragraphs.
Why are people interested in Merlin & who is it best for?
Merlin’s plagiarism checker is designed for a range of different use cases including:
- Students, who might use Merlin to help them quickly and efficiently check their essays for plagiarism.
- Content professionals including content writers and editors may use the tool to review blogs and online articles.
- Journalists and authors could use the tool to review news articles, books, or other material before publishing.
How much does the Merlin Plagiarism Checker cost?
Merlin’s plagiarism checker is free to use for the first three plagiarism checks (it provides 3 free initial credits to run a scan).
After this time, the platform encourages users to upgrade. Check out the chart below for a quick overview of the plans that Merlin offers:
Upgrading to a premium plan does come with a usage limitation. Specifically, it notes that “extreme usage may result in account restriction.”
The Plagiarism Checker Test
For this test, we focused exclusively on Merlin’s plagiarism checker.
We divided the test into two parts:
Part 1: Plagiarism Test With Published Blogs
Step 1: First, we took two blog posts from the Originality.ai blog.
Step 2: Next, we pasted the blog content directly into the Originality.ai plagiarism checker and into Merlin’s plagiarism checker and then ran each respective tool, documenting the results.
We chose text samples directly from the Originality.ai blog:
Part 2: Plagiarism Test With Patchwork Plagiarism Samples
Step 3: For the second part of the test, we chose examples of patchwork plagiarism. Patchwork plagiarism is an example of plagiarism that, due to the fact that it pulls from numerous sources, is typically harder for many plagiarism detectors to identify.
Step 4: We then ran both samples through Merlin and the Originality.ai Plagiarism Checker to compare results.
Unlike the Originality.ai plagiarism checker, which gives a specific percentage of plagiarism found, the free version of the Merlin plagiarism checker only lets the user know if plagiarism was found or not (with no highlighting and no percentage of plagiarized content detected).
Note: Interestingly, during our test, although we used the exact same text and ran it through both the Originality.ai Plagiarism Checker and the Merlin Plagiarism Checker, Merlin sometimes noted a slightly different word count.
The Results
Plagiarism Test With Published Blogs
Blog Sample 1: 7 Benefits of Using a Sentence Grammar Checker
Originality.ai Plagiarism Checker: 100% Match
Merlin Plagiarism Checker: No plagiarism detected.
Blog Sample 2: What Does a Marketing Agency Do?
Originality.ai Plagiarism Checker 100% Match
Merlin Plagiarism Checker: No plagiarism detected.
Patchwork Plagiarism Test
Patchwork Plagiarism Sample 1
Originality.ai Plagiarism Checker: 65% Match
Merlin Plagiarism Checker: No plagiarism detected.
Patchwork Plagiarism Sample 2
Originality.ai Plagiarism Checker: 89% Match
Merlin Plagiarism Checker: Plagiarism found.
The Findings
During the plagiarism testing, Merlin failed to spot direct copy-and-paste plagiarism in the two blog examples it was given. In both instances, it noted “No plagiarism found.”
It also failed to spot patchwork plagiarism in the first example that we tested.
It did, however, state “Plagiarism found,” in the second patchwork plagiarism test.
A limitation of the Merlin Plagiarism Checker was that the free version of the tool didn’t specify a particular percentage when plagiarism was found. This could make it difficult for users to identify whether the tool picked up on a quote, patchwork plagiarism throughout an article, or if the entire work was plagiarized.
In comparison, the Originality.ai Plagiarism Checker was consistently able to find both direct plagiarism and patchwork plagiarism in the tested examples. The Originality.ai plagiarism checker also provides a clear Match score so that users can identify how much of the text is flagged as matching.
With these results, it’s clear that more testing will need to be done on the Merlin plagiarism checker.
Originality.ai, an Industry Leading Alternative
The Originality.ai Plagiarism Checker is designed for content professionals and is exceptionally accurate when it comes to checking both direct copy-and-paste plagiarism and patchwork plagiarism among other types.
Originality.ai’s plagiarism checker also generates a complete report with highlighted instances of potential plagiarism and sources, helping content professionals quickly make changes and make sure their citations are correct.
Learn more about the accuracy of Originality.ai’s plagiarism checker in our comparative Copyscape Plagiarism Checker and Grammarly Plagiarism Checker reviews.
Merlin: The Final Verdict
Merlin’s plagiarism checker was unable to consistently detect either verbatim copy-paste plagiarism or patchwork plagiarism when we tested it, with only one of the four tests showing any plagiarism found.
This means that if you’re considering using Merlin as a plagiarism checker, it’s a good idea to conduct your own independent tests and verify the results for yourself.
For a more reliable plagiarism checker that handles both direct and patchwork plagiarism as well as many other types of plagiarism, consider the Originality.ai plagiarism checker. Plus, with Originality.ai you get a suite of best-in-class content quality tools including our AI Checker, Grammar Checker, and Fact Checker.
Read more plagiarism checker reviews:
- AHelp: Plagiarism Checker Review
- StudyMoose: Plagiarism Checker Review
- Papers Owl: Plagiarism Checker Review
- Paraphraser.io: Plagiarism Checker Review
FAQs About Merlin
Can Merlin’s plagiarism checker be used to check both academic papers and blog posts?
Merlin’s plagiarism checker lets users upload or copy and paste text directly into its plagiarism checker, with a limit of 10,000 characters. This gives users the flexibility to check academic papers, essays, and blog posts alike.
What other tools does Merlin offer beyond its plagiarism checker?
Merlin offers a number of AI tools, including a YouTube and article summarizer, Merlin AI chat, essay writers and more.
Given the results of the plagiarism checker, if you plan on using any of these tools, it’s a good idea to do your own independent checks to verify the output that Merlin provides.
Sherice Jacob
Frequently Asked Questions
No, that’s one of the benefits, only fill out the areas which you think will be relevant to the prompts you require.
When making the tool we had to make each prompt as general as possible to be able to include every kind of input. Not to worry though ChatGPT is smart and will still understand the prompt.
In The Press
Originality.ai has been featured for its accurate ability to detect GPT-3, Chat GPT and GPT-4 generated content. See some of the coverage below…
View All PressFeatured by Leading Publications
Originality.ai did a fantastic job on all three prompts, precisely detecting them as AI-written. Additionally, after I checked with actual human-written textual content, it did determine it as 100% human-generated, which is important.
Vahan Petrosyan
searchenginejournal.com
I use this tool most frequently to check for AI content personally. My most frequent use-case is checking content submitted by freelance writers we work with for AI and plagiarism.
Tom Demers
searchengineland.com
After extensive research and testing, we determined Originality.ai to be the most accurate technology.
Rock Content Team
rockcontent.com
Jon Gillham, Founder of Originality.ai came up with a tool to detect whether the content is written by humans or AI tools. It’s built on such technology that can specifically detect content by ChatGPT-3 — by giving you a spam score of 0-100, with an accuracy of 94%.
Felix Rose-Collins
ranktracker.com
ChatGPT lacks empathy and originality. It’s also recognized as AI-generated content most of the time by plagiarism and AI detectors like Originality.ai
Ashley Stahl
forbes.com
Originality.ai Do give them a shot!
Sri Krishna
venturebeat.com
For web publishers, Originality.ai will enable you to scan your content seamlessly, see who has checked it previously, and detect if an AI-powered tool was implored.
Industry Trends
analyticsinsight.net
Frequently Asked Questions
Tools for conducting a plagiarism check between two documents online are important as it helps to ensure the originality and authenticity of written work. Plagiarism undermines the value of professional and educational institutions, as well as the integrity of the authors who write articles. By checking for plagiarism, you can ensure the work that you produce is original or properly attributed to the original author. This helps prevent the distribution of copied and misrepresented information.
Text comparison is the process of taking two or more pieces of text and comparing them to see if there are any similarities, differences and/or plagiarism. The objective of a text comparison is to see if one of the texts has been copied or paraphrased from another text. This text compare tool for plagiarism check between two documents has been built to help you streamline that process by finding the discrepancies with ease.
Text comparison tools work by analyzing and comparing the contents of two or more text documents to find similarities and differences between them. This is typically done by breaking the texts down into smaller units such as sentences or phrases, and then calculating a similarity score based on the number of identical or nearly identical units. The comparison may be based on the exact wording of the text, or it may take into account synonyms and other variations in language. The results of the comparison are usually presented in the form of a report or visual representation, highlighting the similarities and differences between the texts.
String comparison is a fundamental operation in text comparison tools that involves comparing two sequences of characters to determine if they are identical or not. This comparison can be done at the character level or at a higher level, such as the word or sentence level.
The most basic form of string comparison is the equality test, where the two strings are compared character by character and a Boolean result indicating whether they are equal or not is returned. More sophisticated string comparison algorithms use heuristics and statistical models to determine the similarity between two strings, even if they are not exactly the same. These algorithms often use techniques such as edit distance, which measures the minimum number of operations (such as insertions, deletions, and substitutions) required to transform one string into another.
Another common technique for string comparison is n-gram analysis, where the strings are divided into overlapping sequences of characters (n-grams) and the frequency of each n-gram is compared between the two strings. This allows for a more nuanced comparison that takes into account partial similarities, rather than just exact matches.
String comparison is a crucial component of text comparison tools, as it forms the basis for determining the similarities and differences between texts. The results of the string comparison can then be used to generate a report or visual representation of the similarities and differences between the texts.
Syntax highlighting is a feature of text editors and integrated development environments (IDEs) that helps to visually distinguish different elements of a code or markup language. It does this by coloring different elements of the code, such as keywords, variables, functions, and operators, based on a predefined set of rules.
The purpose of syntax highlighting is to make the code easier to read and understand, by drawing attention to the different elements and their structure. For example, keywords may be colored in a different hue to emphasize their importance, while comments or strings may be colored differently to distinguish them from the code itself. This helps to make the code more readable, reducing the cognitive load of the reader and making it easier to identify potential syntax errors.
With our tool it’s easy, just enter or upload some text, click on the button “Compare text” and the tool will automatically display the diff between the two texts.
Using text comparison tools is much easier, more efficient, and more reliable than proofreading a piece of text by hand. Eliminate the risk of human error by using a tool to detect and display the text difference within seconds.
We have support for the file extensions .pdf, .docx, .odt, .doc and .txt. You can also enter your text or copy and paste text to compare.
There is never any data saved by the tool, when you hit “Upload” we are just scanning the text and pasting it into our text area so with our text compare tool, no data ever enters our servers.
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This table below shows a heat map of features on other sites compared to ours as you can see we almost have greens across the board!
