Turnitin is what your university already runs on every essay you submit. The AI report is locked to instructors and admins by design, and Turnitin does not sell individual subscriptions at any price, so you cannot preview your own score before clicking submit. TextSight is the tool you run on your own draft before that submission happens. Sentence-level highlights show exactly which lines a detector reads as AI, with ESL-aware calibration so formally-taught prose does not get over-flagged, and a free tier that needs no email. This page is the student-side framing: not which one to pick, but how to use both so the Turnitin report does not surprise you.
A short feature table first, from the student perspective. The narrative sections below go deeper on each row, with the parts where Turnitin is genuinely the institutional standard called out clearly.
| Feature | TextSight | Turnitin AI Detection |
|---|---|---|
| Primary product | Student-side AI detector with Authenticity Score and sentence-level evidence | Institutional AI detector bundled inside the Similarity Report for instructors |
| Detection type | DeBERTa plus ELECTRA classifier, sentence-by-sentence rationale, per-line colour map | Document-level AI percentage rendered inside an instructor-facing Similarity Report |
| Free tier | 3 scans per day, 5,000 chars per scan, no signup, no card | Not available to individual students at any price |
| Pricing model | Direct self-serve subscription, monthly or annual | Institutional contract only; not sold to individuals |
| Entry price | $0 free, Starter $9.99/mo, Pro $19.99/mo | Not purchasable individually; bought by institutions under contract |
| Pro annual effective | $14.99/mo on annual billing, billed $179.88/year | n/a, no individual plan exists |
| Sentence-level evidence | Yes, per-sentence colour map and rationale on every scan including free tier | Document-level percentage inside an instructor-facing Similarity Report |
| Non-native English handling | Tuned to read formal ESL prose as Mixed rather than Likely AI more often; shows the lines that drove the score | Reported in higher-ed press to over-flag formally-taught ESL writing; some universities paused or downgraded the AI feature |
| Who sees the result | Only you; scans are private to your account | Your instructor and the integrity office; you cannot preview your own AI score |
| When it runs | Before submission, as many times as you want to edit and re-check | After submission, once, on the way through the LMS |
| Independent testing | You can run your own passages on app.textsight.ai and see the read | Institution-only access blocks any reproducible head-to-head test |
| Bundled AI rewriter | Yes, integrated rewriter; 2 lifetime uses on free, more on paid tiers | No rewriter; Turnitin is enforcement-only by design |
| REST API | Yes on Business at $29.99/mo annual, with audit log and team seats | LTI 1.3 integration into LMS only; no individual or self-serve API |
| Best fit | Students pre-flighting drafts before institutional Turnitin submission | Universities running mandatory checks on submitted essays inside Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, Moodle |
Prices verified 2026-06-03. Verify on each tool's pricing page before subscribing. Win markers reflect the student-side feature gap, not a third-party audit.
Four things Turnitin does for the student record that TextSight does not and will not try to. Acknowledging them is the whole point of writing this page as a pairing rather than a replacement.
When the grade comes back, the Turnitin AI score is the number on the institutional record. Your professor opens the Similarity Report inside the LMS. The integrity office, if it ever gets that far, opens the same report. Whatever TextSight says is private to you; whatever Turnitin says is the document that drives the grading conversation. That is not a feature TextSight can match for the institutional side of the workflow.
If your school uses Turnitin (most US, UK, Canadian, Australian, Indian, and Filipino universities do), every essay you submit through Canvas, Blackboard, Brightspace, or Moodle is automatically scored on the way through. You do not click anything. You do not configure anything. The integration runs whether you remember it or not, which is exactly why pre-flighting on your own side matters.
Turnitin is paid by your university through institutional licensing, baked into your tuition. You do not see a Turnitin charge on your card. For students on tight budgets that is real, and it is the main reason a free TextSight tier exists; the pre-submission draft check should not add a subscription to a workflow you are already in.
Turnitin scans the full submission regardless of length, including dissertations and theses that run 20,000 plus words. TextSight's free tier caps at 5,000 characters per scan, and Pro at 10,000, which means long documents need to be split into sections. For final-year project writers, that is a real workflow tax. The right pattern for very long documents is to split into sections, pre-scan each section in TextSight, then submit the combined document to Turnitin in one piece.
If you are submitting through an institutional LMS and your school already pays for Turnitin, you cannot opt out of that part of the workflow. The rest of this page is about what to do on your side before the institutional report runs.
For students writing four to eight essays a semester across mixed-policy courses, here is where TextSight beats Turnitin on the work that matters to you, the writer, before the institutional report runs.
Turnitin licenses to institutions only. As a student you cannot buy a Turnitin subscription at any price. You cannot run your own essay through Turnitin to preview the AI report before submitting. TextSight sells directly to students: free tier with no signup, Pro at $19.99 monthly or $14.99 on annual billing. No procurement, no waiting, no IT ticket. That is a different market, not a feature delta, and it is the first reason students land on this page.
The single biggest gap in the student-side Turnitin experience is that you cannot see the AI report before submitting. TextSight closes that gap. You see what a sentence-level detector will likely flag, before clicking Submit. Turnitin runs once on submission; TextSight runs as many times as you want (3 a day on free, unlimited on Pro). Edit, re-scan, edit again. The loop is the actual product, and Turnitin's enforcement role means it cannot ship one.
Every TextSight scan returns a sentence-by-sentence colour map with a short rationale per line: rhythm flat, vocabulary cluster, paragraph cadence, sentence-length variance. You see the exact sentences that drove the score and you edit those lines, not the whole essay. Turnitin's report shows a document-level percentage with limited highlights inside an instructor-facing view; as a student you usually do not see the per-line evidence used to render the number.
AI detectors have been challenged in higher-ed press and by university policy offices for over-flagging formally-taught ESL writing, and some institutions have paused or downgraded the AI feature in their integrity tools over that concern. TextSight is tuned to read that register as Mixed rather than Likely AI more often, and crucially it shows you the per-sentence evidence so you can judge each flagged line before submission. No detector is reliable enough to settle an ESL case on its own, so the value for a worried student is seeing exactly which lines look risky while you can still edit them.
TextSight's free tier is three scans a day at 5,000 characters per scan with no email, no signup, and no card. Pro is $19.99 monthly or $14.99 monthly on annual billing with unlimited scans. Many students subscribe to Pro only during midterm and finals weeks and drop back to free between them. Turnitin has nothing at this price point because Turnitin is not for individual purchase.
The honest workflow is not Turnitin versus TextSight. It is TextSight, then Turnitin. Two tools serving two stages of the same submission flow.
Write the essay in whatever editor you already use: Google Docs, Word, Notion, your LMS. Using ChatGPT for an outline or to break writer's block is the realistic 2026 default and not the issue you are pre-flighting against. Write the prose itself in your own voice from your own notes.
Open app.textsight.ai, paste the final draft, and scan. Free tier handles 5,000 characters in one paste; Pro handles 10,000. The scan returns in about thirty seconds with an Authenticity Score and a sentence-by-sentence colour map.
Above 75, submit as is. Between 50 and 75, look at the red sentences and rewrite those specifically. Below 50, the essay needs more substantial editing. Use the integrated AI rewriter on the hardest sentences if you have free uses left. The point is to fix the lines that are genuinely AI-shaped, not to game the score on prose you wrote yourself.
Submit through your institution's LMS as required. Because you pre-scanned and edited, you have already removed the lines most likely to read as AI, which is the most you can do from the student side. No self-check predicts Turnitin's exact number, so if a flag does come back, the TextSight scan history (90 days on Pro) and your own drafts are useful documentation if you need to contest the result.
Three things. First, you catch the obvious AI-flag-bait sentences before they reach your professor. Second, if you do get flagged, you arrive at the appeal with a sentence-level TextSight report and a documented authoring trail; multiple data points are harder to dismiss than one challenged score. Third, you avoid the second-guessing that happens when the verdict shows up cold after submission.
TextSight Pro is $19.99 monthly or $14.99 monthly on annual billing. Turnitin is institutional contract only; your school pays for it and seats are not available for individual purchase, so there is no Turnitin price for a student to compare against.
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Four common student situations and the realistic Turnitin plus TextSight setup for each. Pick whichever matches your next deadline.
Free tier is enough. Three scans a day at 5,000 characters covers a typical 800-word undergrad essay with room for two re-scans after editing. Turnitin runs automatically on your school's submission portal. No subscription required.
Setup: TextSight Free + your school's Turnitin.
Four to eight essays across two weeks. Pro pays back on the first week: unlimited scans, 10,000 character pastes for longer essays, 90-day history for documentation if any one of them gets flagged. Cancel back to free after finals.
Setup: TextSight Pro + your school's Turnitin.
Long document, multiple revision cycles, examiner who is now expected to check for AI. Pro for 10,000 character pastes, file upload for chapters, 90-day history matters when an examiner asks about a draft you sent in three weeks ago. Run the final submission through your university's Turnitin workflow in one piece.
Setup: TextSight Pro + your university's Turnitin.
Use TextSight specifically for the ESL calibration. Pre-scan a draft, expect scattered yellows on formally-taught structured prose, focus edits on clusters of red. The 90-day Pro history and PDF export give you specific evidence if a Turnitin false positive ever needs to be contested.
Setup: TextSight Pro (ESL calibration) + your school's Turnitin.
The college-student landing page with perplexity, burstiness, and the free tier.
For college →The four-step pre-scan workflow that catches Turnitin flags before your professor does.
Read the guide →Seven-tool ranking with Turnitin correlation and false-positive rates side by side.
See the ranking →The general head-to-head, including the institutional and procurement angle.
Read the compare →Free to try. No card.
Honest head-to-heads with other detectors and humanizers.