It’s always good to see new plagiarism scanners appearing on the market. For a long time, Turnitin has closed its doors to allowing students to scan their own work, leaving them to worry about whether they have accidentally plagiarised in their work (and the grim consequences that would follow if they have).

Now Turnitin has a student service, but unsurprisingly, it costs money. So what are the alternatives?

UK website Scan My Essay offers two plagiarism scanners that seem to be a good alternative to Turnitin. Let’s have a look at each one.

Viper

VIPER is downloadable plagiarism software and isn’t VISTA compatible. The advantage of it being downloadable software is that it uses your connection to do the scan rather than a server connection. So if the website is busy, it doesn’t matter – you won’t be affected.

VIPER checks against all previous scans – and that’s a lot as VIPER’s been around a while. It also checks against the internet and against anything you ask it to check – an archive of files or a folder on your PC for example.

The plagiarism software has good settings control – so you can adjust it to be more or less sensitive depending on your preferences.

The slightly annoying thing is that you do have to sit next to your computer to watch the scan – sometimes you have to type in a Google captcha code to keep it running. But as the scans usually don’t take very long, that’s not a huge issue.

You can scan as many documents as you like at once, which is a benefit, although hundreds of documents logically take a lot longer.

VIPER doesn’t check against archives of digital books or journals, although it will detect any that Google has listed (quite a lot) so you’re covered pretty much as well as you would be with a Turnitin scan.

Overall this is a great piece of free plagiarism software, although if you’ve got VISTA you can’t use it unfortunately.

Raptor

Raptor plagiarism software is listed as VIPER’s alternative. It’s a purely online scanner so the benefit of this is that you can use it anywhere in the world, as long as you can remember your access details!

The scans are run through their servers, so if you have a slow connection speed, this is probably a better option for you.

As it’s online, VISTA or MAC compatibility is not an issue.

RAPTOR does scan against a library of digital books and journals, unlike VIPER – and it also scans the internet, archives of documents you upload, and against all past scans.

Users of plagiarism software will have different needs and RAPTOR and VIPER between them cover the great majority of those needs. Both are totally free and both offer free support. I’d like to see some additional features adding to Raptor as I think it could be improved – for example, scanning against your own library of documents is possible but a bit clumsy. But since both are free, and both work well, they are possibly the best free plagiarism software you’ll find. Your comments are welcome below!