IsThisAiWritten vs Pangram: no account, no word limit, no upload

IsThisAiWritten vs Pangram comes down to access. IsThisAiWritten is free, needs no account, has no word or character limit and runs in your browser, so the text you check is never uploaded. Pangram asks you to log in, caps free use at about 2,000 words a day and 18,725 words per scan, and keeps scans on its servers while your account is active.

IsThisAiWritten vs Pangram, side by side

Pangram details are as listed on its site at the time of writing (October 2026).

Where IsThisAiWritten is the better choice

No account and no limit

Pangram's free plan gives 20 credits a day at 100 words each, and its help center says you need to log in to scan. A 90,000-word manuscript would use up about 45 days of free credits, and even on a paid plan it has to be split, because a dashboard scan stops at 18,725 words. With IsThisAiWritten you open the page, paste the text or open a .docx file, and the whole thing is analysed in one pass. There is no word or character limit at all.

Built for long documents

Every word is scanned, never sampled, and a 208,000-word novel has gone through in one go. Text files and Word documents are read locally, so a manuscript never has to be cut up and pasted into a web form piece by piece. Above 30,000 words the text is shown in pages of 5,000 words with a chapter jump menu, which makes it easy to go straight to the part of a book you want to look at.

Your text never leaves your device

Our detector runs on your own machine, so the text you check never reaches us or anyone else, and nothing is stored. Pangram is careful with data: its privacy FAQ says scans are encrypted, never used for training and can be deleted, and Enterprise plans offer zero data retention. But by default a scan is kept for as long as your account is active. For an unpublished novel, a legal draft or a student's personal essay, "never uploaded" is a simpler promise than "stored until you delete it".

A report you can read

Instead of a single percentage, you get an outcome (Human, Mixed, AI or Inconclusive) with a confidence word, an AI-likeness score that says how the text compares with human writing we tested, and a sentence map showing which parts lean AI relative to the rest. Style notes point out common AI habits and offer plainer wording in one click; they explain, and never change the verdict. Two extras are built in: an invisible-character cleaner for zero-width characters and look-alike letters, and a narrative fingerprint for fiction based on the StoryScope research (Russell et al., COLM 2026). How the detector is built and tested is set out on the methodology page. Like any detector, it can be wrong in both directions, so treat a result as a reason to look closer, not as proof.

When to use both

The two tools work well in sequence. A practical pattern:

1. Run the full text through IsThisAiWritten first, in one piece.
2. Use the sentence map, and the chapter view for a book, to find the passages worth a closer look.
3. If you want a second opinion, send those passages to Pangram. Sending excerpts rather than the whole manuscript also keeps you within its 18,725-word scan limit and your daily credits.
4. Before acting on any score, talk to the writer. Neither tool should be the only evidence against someone.

Editors with long manuscripts, teachers with a pile of essays and SEO teams screening freelance copy all fit this pattern: a private, unlimited first pass, then a second opinion on the passages that matter. If you are weighing Pangram against another paid tool, see Pangram vs GPTZero.

Sources

1. Pangram homepage, checked October 2026
2. Pangram: What do I get with a free account?, checked October 2026
3. Pangram: How to scan a text for AI, checked October 2026
4. Pangram: Minimum and maximum input sizes, checked October 2026
5. Pangram: Subscription tiers, checked October 2026
6. Pangram pricing, checked October 2026
7. Pangram data privacy FAQ, checked October 2026
8. Russell et al., StoryScope (COLM 2026), checked October 2026