Both of these detect AI-written text. Both advertise exactly the same 45% discount for paying yearly. And only one of them will tell you the price before you start clicking. This page compares what each vendor published on 16 August 2026, marks clearly where a vendor does not publish, and tells you which of the two matches which kind of work.
Paste some text or load the example to estimate AI likelihood.
Winston AI publishes everything, on one page, in a table. Read on 16 August 2026:
| Tier | Monthly | Billed annually | Credits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0 | 2,000 credits, 14-day trial |
| Essential | $18/mo | $10/mo ($120/yr) | 100,000 credits/month |
| Advanced | $29/mo | $16/mo ($192/yr) | 200,000 credits/month, up to 5 team members |
| Elite | $49/mo | $26/mo ($312/yr) | 500,000 credits/month, unlimited team members |
GPTZero publishes the shape but not the numbers. Its pricing page, read the same day, presents a "Professional Plan" with a monthly/annual toggle and a seat selector, plus Enterprise and Team plans described as "everything you get with a Professional plan, for everyone" with shared team credits and unified billing. The prices themselves are loaded by the page after it opens rather than served with it, so they did not appear in the version our tooling retrieved. Every price figure attributed to GPTZero on a third-party page — this one included, which is why there is none — is somebody's recollection until you check it on gptzero.me.
What both vendors do publish, identically, is the annual discount: each advertises "Save 45%" for paying yearly. If you have decided on either, the yearly route is the vendor's own recommended saving, not a negotiation.
This is the actual decision and it is buried under the pricing tables.
Winston meters words. You buy 100,000, 200,000 or 500,000 credits a month, and credits pool across team members on a subscribed plan. Your bill is a function of how much you scan. Predictable volume makes this cheap; a spike makes it expensive, and top-up credits are the mechanism for the gap.
GPTZero meters people. The Professional Plan is sold by seats, and the team offering is framed around shared credits with unified billing. Your bill is a function of how many of you there are.
That difference decides more than any accuracy claim. One person scanning heavily is cheap on seats and expensive on credits. Five people scanning lightly is the reverse. Work out which sentence describes you before you read another comparison table, because it settles the question faster than anything else on this page.
There is one asymmetry worth naming: on Winston, adding people is a tier change, not a per-seat charge. Up to 5 team members appears on Advanced, unlimited on Elite. So a growing team on Winston moves up a ladder in steps, while a growing team on a per-seat plan moves up smoothly. Neither is better in the abstract; they just fail differently at the moment you add a sixth person.
Winston's free tier is a trial. 2,000 credits, 14 days. It is designed to let you evaluate the product, and it expires. That is a perfectly reasonable model but it is not something you can rely on next month.
GPTZero offers a free entry point — its site's primary call to action is "Get started for free" — and the specific allowance attached to it is part of the pricing detail that loads client-side, so we are not going to characterise it from memory.
The practical consequence: if your requirement is "I need to check something occasionally and never pay", start by reading the current free-tier terms on each vendor's own site, because this is exactly the detail that changes most often and that stale comparison posts get wrong most reliably.
Winston's detector page describes the product as "The Most Accurate AI Detector", claims "best-in-class" and "unmatched" accuracy, and states it is "tuned to eliminate false positives". Checked on 16 August 2026, that page carries no accuracy percentage and no false-positive rate — the superlatives are not attached to a figure you can test them against.
GPTZero leads instead on adoption and endorsement: its pricing page states it is trusted by over 10 million teachers and students, used in over 100 countries, and is the official AI detector partner of the American Federation of Teachers. It also displays a 4.7-star rating from 707 reviews on its own site. Those are claims about reach and standing rather than about measured accuracy, and they are the right claims for its market — but reach is not a false-positive rate either.
We sell a detector, so take the following as a statement against our own interest: no AI detector should be treated as proof. Ours runs on DeBERTa, RoBERTa and ELECTRA, it is English-only, and like every detector in this category it produces false positives that fall hardest on writers whose first language is not English. A vendor promising certainty is promising something the technology does not do.
The test that actually settles it. Collect five documents you know are human-written and five you know are AI-written, all in the subject area you really work in. Run them through each finalist. Count the false positives, and look at whether the tool shows you *which sentences* it objected to. A detector that highlights sentences gives you something to examine; a detector that returns one number gives you something to either believe or not.
Choose Winston AI if you want published, self-serve pricing you can act on immediately; your monthly volume is steady and you can estimate it; you want AI detection, plagiarism checking and image detection from one vendor; or you would rather buy words than seats.
Choose GPTZero if you are in education, where institutional recognition is doing real work — an AFT partnership and a ten-million-user claim mean something to a department head that a feature table does not; or you want its wider toolset, which spans a hallucination detector, plagiarism check, authorship and writing-replay features, a grammar checker, a Chrome extension and AI vision; or you are buying for a small team and per-seat pricing fits better than a credit meter.
Choose neither if what you actually need is to *fix* the flagged text. Both are detection-side products. Detection tells you there is a problem at the exact moment you now have a second job.
TextSight prices flat, by tier, with no credit meter and no per-seat maths:
The AI rewriter is included in the paid tiers rather than sold separately, so the detect-then-fix workflow is one subscription. The free tier renews daily rather than expiring after a fortnight, which makes it usable for occasional checking rather than only for evaluation.
Where we are not the right answer: we do not offer plagiarism detection or image detection, so if you need originality-against-a-corpus or AI image checking in the same platform, Winston covers ground we do not. And we have no equivalent of GPTZero's standing in education — if an institution has already standardised on it, that is a real reason we are not going to argue away.
Everything here was read from the vendors' own sites on the dates given.
Prices change without notice. Verify anything you are about to pay for on the vendor's own site.
The deeper head-to-head: feature table, where GPTZero wins, where TextSight wins, and migration steps.
Read the comparePerplexity, burstiness, and transformer scoring explained, so you can read any detector's verdict critically.
Read the guideWhy detectors over-flag ESL and formal writing, and how sentence-level evidence helps you defend real work.
Read the guideThe full ranking with detection approach, pricing, and use-case fit side by side.
See the rankingStart with TextSight's free tier. No card, no signup, no commitment. Your first scan in about six seconds, with the evidence shown line by line.
Honest comparisons vs other tools.