Students are always searching the Internet for the best plagiarism checker. This is to help them eliminate any possible traces of plagiarism that their essays may contain. Many students don’t have the money to spend on plagiarism checkers. That’s why they will look for a free plagiarism checker for college students and hope to get decent results.

What Is the Difference Between Paid and Free Software?

Usually, the best anti-plagiarism software comes with a monthly fee. That cost can be quite high, especially when you take into consideration the fact that students don’t use the program on a daily basis. Moreover, some high-end anti-plagiarism programs don’t use a monthly fee at all and rely only on one-year contracts. Those are expensive and have a powerful search engine and are mostly used by Universities that have the necessary funds for this kind of purchase.

The accuracy of some paid anti-plagiarism applications isn’t something to be joked about. The speed and the libraries that they have at their disposal are staggering, hence the price you have to pay to use them.

Now, on the other hand, you have the free plagiarism software. You can easily find a multitude of sites that offer this kind of service free of charge. Obviously, the major advantage of this sort of plagiarism checker is the fact that it costs zero dollars, but what is its disadvantage?

It may take a while to scan your essay, it has a limited library, and it may not be that accurate. However, if it’s free, it doesn’t mean that it’s bad.  Still, it’s better to use a couple of them to increase your chances of avoiding plagiarism.

• But the question still stands, what is the difference between paid and free software apart from the library and speed?

The primary difference is that a paid plagiarism checker will discover if you plagiarized a sentence by using synonyms and rephrasing. We all know that when a student copies a sentence or a phrase from a random source, he will edit it a lot to hide the fact that it was plagiarized. The process of editing involves replacing the original words with their synonyms and changing the word order in the sentence. This way, the phrase will look different, while still presenting the same information. It can also fool some readers into thinking that the sentence offers different information compared to the original.

Paid anti-plagiarism software can analyze such a situation and alert you, but this can happen when a light edit is applied. On massive edits, the program can be fooled, but in those situations, we have to ask if the edited sentence is still considered plagiarized.

Some professors think that once a sentence is heavily edited, it will no longer resemble the source. As a result, it cannot be called a plagiarized sentence.

Others believe that it doesn’t matter if a sentence is edited. It is still considered plagiarized, especially if it delivers the same idea/piece of information.

You can use many sites that offer a free student plagiarism checker for essays and light academic paperwork. You just have to do some research to find them.

However, if we’re talking about dissertations and large academic works, it is best to use paid plagiarism software. If you can’t afford to buy one, you can ask your supervisor to scan it for you because he probably has access to the university’s program. You can also use paid essay writing services to check your essay, but you can’t be sure that they use a quality plagiarism scanner.