Originality.ai is built for the SEO content agency: a credit meter that bills per scan, a team workspace, shared scan history, and a plagiarism index deep enough for a publisher's editorial pipeline. TextSight is built for the writer doing the work: a flat subscription with no meter to watch, a per-sentence map of what reads as AI, and a rewriter in the same tool. This page is the honest version of where the credit model wins, where flat-rate wins, and which buyer each one is really for.
A short feature table first. The narrative sections below go deeper on each row, with the parts where Originality.ai is genuinely the better call called out clearly.
| Feature | TextSight | Originality.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier (no signup) | 3 scans/day, 5,000 chars/scan, no card | None: paid plan required to scan |
| Pricing model | Flat subscription, predictable monthly cost | Credit-based, pay per scan (~$0.01 per 100 words) |
| Entry price | $19.99/month Pro (flat) | $14.95/month Base (2,000 credits ≈ 200K words) |
| Annual effective rate (Pro) | $14.99/month ($179.88/year) | $30/month Pro Plan (15,000 credits) |
| Sentence-level highlights | Yes: colour-coded per sentence with per-line evidence on free tier | Partial: document-level score + highlighted segments |
| Per-sentence "why-flagged" rationale | Yes: rhythm, vocabulary, paragraph cadence, length variance | No: document-level rationale only |
| ESL calibration focus | Tuned on Indian, Filipino, and Chinese student writing | Tuned for native SEO content; ESL not a stated focus |
| Detection on raw AI output | Strong on raw GPT/Claude/Gemini output | Long track record on raw AI in SEO content |
| Bundled AI rewriter in same scan | Yes: Light / Balanced / Maximum modes | No: separate product (originality.ai/AI rewriter), separate subscription |
| Plagiarism source URLs (database match) | Style-based Plagiarism Risk only | Mature database matching with source URLs |
| REST API | Business $39.99/mo ($29.99 annual), 150K words/month included | Available: credits same as UI ($0.01/100 words) |
| Chrome extension | Free on all tiers | Available on higher tiers |
| Brand recognition in SEO-agency space | Newer brand, growing | SEO-content-agency standard since 2022, 1,300+ blog posts |
| Best fit | Individual writers, students, ESL writers, small teams | High-volume SEO content shops, link-building firms, publishers |
Prices verified May 2026. Verify on each tool's pricing page before subscribing. "Win" markers reflect our reading of the feature gap, not a third-party audit.
Four things Originality does better than TextSight today. Acknowledging them is the point of writing this page in the first place.
Originality.ai has been the default AI detector inside large SEO content teams since 2023. When a content lead says "we ran it through Originality," that sentence parses without explanation inside an editorial workflow. Their team-workspace UX, shared scan history, and reviewer roles are mature, and an entire generation of SEO ops documentation references the product by name. TextSight does the same detection job, but inside a five-plus-seat agency it still needs a sentence of context.
If your team already pays for Originality, the surrounding tooling is built around it: SOPs name the score thresholds, freelancer briefs require an Originality screenshot, and your editorial calendar plumbing pulls Originality scores into Airtable or Notion. Switching is not a single-tool decision, it is a workflow decision. For solo writers or a brand-new team, the lock-in is zero; for a mature team, it is real.
Originality's credit model is one credit per 100 words. For teams with spiky volume, that is a feature rather than a bug, because a quiet month does not burn through a flat subscription. TextSight's flat-rate Pro at $19.99 monthly (or $14.99 on annual) is predictable but assumes consistent use. If your detection volume swings month-to-month, the credit math can be cheaper on Originality.
Originality.ai's plagiarism checker has a deeper crawled-web index and returns explicit source-match URLs, which is what an academic-integrity review or a legal copyright dispute actually needs. TextSight ships a Plagiarism Risk indicator inside every scan, but it is a publish-or-not signal, not a full source-attribution report. For editorial workflows that require traceable plagiarism evidence, Originality is the better tool today.
If you fit any of those four patterns, the rest of this page is informational rather than persuasive. Originality.ai is the tool for the job.
For freelancers, solo SEOs, small agencies, and individual students pre-scanning their own essays, here is where TextSight beats Originality.ai on the work that matters.
Every scan returns a sentence-by-sentence colour map showing exactly which lines tripped the model, plus a short rationale per line (rhythm flat, vocabulary cluster, paragraph cadence, and so on). You edit the specific sentences instead of rewriting the whole draft. Originality shows a strong document-level score and highlighted segments, which is great for a publish-or-not decision but less actionable when you are trying to ship a piece in fifteen minutes.
Originality's classifier was built for native SEO content, which is its job and it does it well. The flip side is that formally-taught English from a non-native writer is not its home turf, and a wrong AI flag on a clean human draft is a real cost when your content is written by a globally distributed team. TextSight tuned its detector for ESL and non-native English writing, so that register is part of the training rather than an edge case. We do not claim a precise advantage we cannot measure under controlled conditions, so test it on your own writers' drafts.
Originality.ai has no real ongoing free tier; you subscribe at $14.95 minimum to scan. TextSight's free tier is 3 scans per day at 5,000 characters per scan, no signup and no card. Pro is $19.99 monthly ($14.99 on annual) when you need unlimited scans and the bundled AI rewriter.
The Business tier ships a full audit log of every scan: who scanned what, when, with which confidence score, exported as CSV. For agencies and editorial teams that need to defend a published piece against later AI-content disputes, the log is the evidence. Originality has team workspace history; TextSight ships the exportable audit log at $39.99 monthly (or $29.99 on annual).
The Business REST API exposes detection, AI rewriter, and bulk scanning behind a single key, so a single backend call can score a draft and request a rewritten rewrite in the same workflow. Originality exposes detection via a more mature API; rewriting is a separate product on a separate subscription. For pipelines that publish hundreds of articles a month, the bundled endpoints cut both code and total tool spend.
The clearest way to compare these two is not an accuracy table we cannot fairly measure. It is to picture the desk each one was designed for, because that is what every other difference follows from.
Originality is shaped around an editor managing other people's output at volume. The team workspace, shared scan history, and per-scan credit accounting all serve one job: prove that a batch of agency-written or freelance-written articles is clean before it ships, and keep a record of who scanned what. The plagiarism index runs deep enough to satisfy a publisher worried about lifted copy. If your day is reviewing a queue of drafts you did not write, that desk is the right one.
TextSight is shaped around the person actually drafting. A scan returns a colour-coded sentence map with a reason per flagged line, so the next action is obvious: rewrite those specific sentences in the bundled rewriter, re-scan, move on. There is no credit balance to ration, so you can scan the same paragraph ten times while you revise it without thinking about cost. If your day is producing the writing rather than auditing it, that desk fits better.
Plenty of teams have both kinds of work. A common split: writers use TextSight while drafting because the per-sentence evidence and the no-meter rewrites speed up the work, and the content lead keeps Originality for the final pre-publish audit and its plagiarism depth. That is not a failure to choose; it is two tools doing the two jobs each is built for. If you only want one, decide by which desk you sit at most days.
We do not print a TextSight-versus-Originality accuracy table. A fair one would need both tools run on the same passages under identical, repeatable conditions, and we cannot control Originality's environment that way, so any number we published would be marketing dressed as research. Both are credible detectors on raw AI text, and both can be edited around. Run a handful of your own real drafts through each and trust what you see.
TextSight Pro is $19.99 monthly or $14.99 monthly on annual billing, flat-rate. Originality.ai uses a credit model: Base at $14.95 monthly for 2,000 credits, Pro at $30 monthly for 15,000 credits, where one credit scans 100 words.
Billed $89.88/year. Save $30
Billed $179.88/year. Save $60
Billed $359.88/year. Save $120
Yearly billing saves 25%. Originality.ai Base is $14.95/mo for 2,000 credits, Pro is $30/mo for 15,000 credits at the time of writing. View full pricing →
The biggest practical gap between the two products is the billing model, because the math flips depending on your monthly scan volume.
Originality.ai sells credits. Base at $14.95 monthly buys 2,000 credits, which scans 200,000 words. Pro at $30 monthly buys 15,000 credits, which scans 1.5 million words. If your team writes 500,000 words a month you are paying around $30 to scan all of it, and any unused credits roll into the next month on most plan variants. For spiky-volume teams this is the more honest meter.
TextSight Pro is $19.99 monthly or $14.99 monthly on annual billing for effectively unlimited scans inside a fair-use ceiling. Business is $39.99 monthly (or $29.99 on annual) with 100,000 AI rewriter words per month and REST API access. The trade-off is the inverse of credits: a quiet month does not give money back, but a busy month never bills more.
For a solo writer scanning around 50,000 words a month, Originality Base at $14.95 leaves a lot of credits unused; TextSight Pro on annual at $14.99 is the same money with the AI rewriter included. For a five-seat SEO agency scanning 800,000 words a month, Originality Pro at $30 covers it; TextSight Business at $29.99 covers it as well, with the audit log and REST API bundled. The flat vs credit gap matters most at the extremes: very low volume or very high spiky volume.
Both detectors are good products built by serious teams. The honest answer is workload-specific. Use this picker to find the tool that fits the work you actually do.
If you decide to switch, the migration takes most solo and small-team workflows under an hour. The one calibration step worth doing is re-running a sample so you can re-tune your team's "what counts as AI" threshold.
From the Originality dashboard, open the Scans tab and use the CSV export. You get a list of past scans with their AI and plagiarism scores. Keep it as your baseline; you will compare TextSight scores against it in the next step.
Pick eight to twelve documents from the Originality export that span the range of scores you saw (a few low, a few mid, a few high). Run each one through TextSight's bulk upload. TextSight typically scores a few points lower on the same human-written long-form content because rhythm-based scoring is less punitive on tidy SEO prose. Adjust your team's threshold accordingly, and re-write any SOP that names a fixed Originality score cutoff.
Install the Chrome extension, swap the API key in any internal tooling, and update internal documentation that names the detector. If your freelancer briefs require an Originality screenshot, swap that for a TextSight scan link or PDF export. We have a brief template on the API docs page you can crib from.
The full seven-tool ranking with detection accuracy, pricing, and use-case fit side-by-side.
See the ranking →The classroom head-to-head. Sentence-level highlights, ESL calibration, and student workflows compared.
Read the compare →Other detectors worth a look if the credit meter or agency workflow does not fit your team.
Read the guide →Perplexity, burstiness, and sentence rhythm explained, so the scores make sense.
Read the guide →Full tier breakdown for Free, Starter, Pro, and Business. Annual billing saves 25%.
See pricing →Start with TextSight's free tier. No card, no signup, no commitment. Your first scan in about six seconds.
Honest head-to-heads with other detectors and humanizers.