AI Content Detector Comparison (2026)
Compare 8 major AI-text detectors on accuracy, false-positive rate, free limits and price — then filter by your budget and use case for a ranked shortlist. Every figure is cited and dated; no text is ever scanned.
AI detection is probabilistic. No detector is a definitive verdict on whether text is AI-written. Every tool here produces false positives on genuine human writing, and accuracy collapses on paraphrased text. Use these scores as guidance, never as proof — especially before accusing a student or writer.
How it works
This page has two parts: a static, fully-cited comparison table of 8AI-text detectors, and a rule-based recommender that turns your constraints into a ranked shortlist. It is not a live detector — no text is sent anywhere. Every price, free-tier limit and language count is copied by hand from the vendor's own pricing page and dated with a LAST_VERIFIED constant (2026-07-08); nothing is scraped at runtime.
Accuracy and false-positive figures are the numbers people most often get wrong, so each cell is tagged with its origin. RAID means the value comes from the peer-reviewed RAID benchmark (Dugan et al., ACL 2024) — an independent test set of human and machine text across many generators. Vendormeans the figure is the tool's own published methodology, used only where no independent number exists and labelled as such so you can weight it accordingly.
The recommender scores each detector transparently — no black box. Weights are fixed constants defined in the data file and shown here in full:
- Budget gate.If you pick “Free only,” detectors without a real free tier are excluded. Under a paid budget, a detector qualifies if its cheapest plan fits your ceiling (or it still has a usable free tier). Turnitin is sold to institutions only, so it never enters the shortlist — but it stays in the comparison table for reference.
- Base score = accuracy(0–100 from RAID or vendor).
- Volume fit (+15).Added when the usable tier's monthly word cap covers your volume band, or — for the API option — when the detector offers a detection API.
- Use-case fit (+10). Added when the detector is purpose-built for your selected use case (for example Turnitin for educators, Originality.ai for content agencies).
- Feature fit (+8 each). Added when you need a plagiarism check and the detector bundles one, and when you need non-English support and the detector clears 50+ languages.
- Tie-break. Equal scores are broken in favour of the lower false-positive rate — protecting honest writers from being wrongly flagged — then the lower price.
The top three by score become your shortlist. Because the weights are simple and public, you can reproduce any ranking by hand, which is exactly what the worked examples below do.
Worked examples
Both examples are generated live from the same scoring function that powers the tool above, and each detector's points are re-summed independently as a cross-check — so the numbers on this page always match the shortlist.
Frequently asked questions
Sources & references
- RAID benchmark — Dugan et al., ACL 2024 (independent accuracy & adversarial evaluation)
- GPTZero — pricing & free tier
- Turnitin — AI writing detection
- Originality.ai — pricing
- Copyleaks — pricing & false-positive rate
- Winston AI — pricing
- QuillBot — AI content detector
- Scribbr — AI detector
Pricing, free-tier limits and language counts were last cross-checked against the vendors' own pages on 2026-07-08. Detector pricing changes often — if a figure looks out of date, email me and I'll re-verify. This page is not affiliated with or endorsed by any listed vendor.
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Comments & feedback
Spotted a bug or want an improvement? Tell us — our team reviews every comment, and good ideas get built. Comments are public and anonymous.
Spotted a price change, a new detector worth adding, or a stale figure?
Email me at [email protected] — I re-verify within 24 hours.