Pangram vs Turnitin: who can use them, and which catches more AI text
Pangram vs Turnitin starts with a question of access. Turnitin sells only to schools and organizations, so most students and writers can't run it themselves. Pangram has a free plan anyone can sign up for. On accuracy, the one independent study we found that tested both had Pangram catching much more AI-written text.
Our verdict: if you are not covered by a school licence, Turnitin is not an option and Pangram is. For institutions, the 2026 Vrije Universiteit Brussel study found Pangram identified far more AI text than Turnitin with no extra false positives. Turnitin's strengths are its plagiarism checking and its place inside existing grading workflows.
Pangram vs Turnitin at a glance
Details as listed on each company's pages at the time of writing (October 2026). IsThisAiWritten, our own free detector, is in the first column for comparison.
| IsThisAiWritten | Pangram | Turnitin | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who can use it | Anyone, free, no account | Individuals, teams and institutions | Institutions only |
| Free option | Free, no account, no limit | 20 credits a day, about 2,000 words, with an account | None for individuals |
| Text length for AI check | No limit | 50 to 18,725 words per dashboard scan | 300 to 30,000 words (English) |
| Students can check their own work | Yes, no account needed | Yes, with a free account | No, and AI reports are hidden from students |
How the two compare on languages, reports and testing:
| Pangram | Turnitin | |
|---|---|---|
| Languages for AI detection | More than 20 | English plus Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Turkish, Dutch and German |
| Low scores shown | Yes | 1% to 19% shown only as *% |
| Plagiarism checking | Included in paid plans | Core product: compares against its repository, web pages and publications |
| Independent head-to-head result | Ahead in the 2026 Brussels study | Behind in the same study |
Who can actually use each tool
Turnitin's help center is direct about this: it "does not sell individual licenses or single-use subscriptions". Its similarity and grading services go only to schools, universities and organizations. AI writing detection needs one more thing, an active Turnitin Originality licence at the institution. If your school does not have that, neither you nor your teachers will see an AI report. Individuals who need a plagiarism check are pointed to iThenticate, a sister product that sells credits, but that is a similarity checker, not Turnitin's AI detector.
Pangram works the other way round. Anyone can create a free account with 20 credits a day, each credit covering 100 words. Paid plans start at $20 a month ($15 billed yearly) for 300,000 words. Teams pay $20 per seat per month, and schools can get Enterprise contracts with custom integrations. Pangram connects to Canvas, Moodle, Google Classroom and Brightspace, plus a Chrome extension and Google Docs.
Pangram vs Turnitin accuracy: the 2026 Brussels study
Neither tool appears on the public RAID leaderboard, and the University of Chicago and University of Maryland studies that tested Pangram did not include Turnitin. The independent comparison we found is a peer-reviewed paper by Marijke Van Vlasselaer, Filip Van Droogenbroeck and Bram Spruyt of Vrije Universiteit Brussel, published in the International Journal for Educational Integrity in June 2026.
They ran 160 academic papers, 40 in each of four groups, through Pangram, Turnitin, GPTZero and Copyleaks:
- Fully human papers: both Pangram and Turnitin scored every one in the 0 to 20% range. No false positives from either.
- Fully AI papers, written with ChatGPT's Deep Research mode: Turnitin put all 40 in the 0 to 20% band, which the study counts as misses. Pangram placed 65% in the top band and was at least partly right on 97.5%.
- Hybrid papers, human text with AI passages added: Pangram landed in the correct range for 92.5%, Turnitin for 60%.
- Humanized papers, AI text reworded to sound like a student: Pangram 92.5%, Turnitin 50%.
A detail worth knowing: because Turnitin shows *% for anything under 20%, 19 of the 40 fully AI papers came back with an asterisk rather than a number. The authors then applied Pangram alone to 1,163 real master's theses and found 45.5% flagged, mostly for low to moderate amounts of AI text; with no ground truth, that figure is a description, not an accuracy result. Their conclusion applies to both tools: use detectors as a first flag, never as the only evidence.
The limits are real. It is one study, with 40 papers per group, AI text generated in May 2025, and both companies update their models.
What Pangram and Turnitin say about false positives
Turnitin's chief product officer wrote in May 2023 that, for documents with more than 20% AI writing, its document-level false positive rate is below 1%, based on a test of 800,000 papers written before ChatGPT. The same post said false positives were more common below 20%, which is why the asterisk exists. Pangram says it targets 1 in 10,000, and reported an observed rate of 0.0041% on more than two million human documents in an October 2026 post. Both figures are the vendors' own.
Limits, languages and reports
Turnitin's AI check needs 300 to 30,000 words of long-form prose in English, in a .docx, .pdf, .txt or .rtf file under 100 MB. It also covers Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Turkish, Dutch and German, but its detection of AI paraphrasing and bypass tools works on English only. Students do not see the AI report unless their instructor downloads and shares it.
Pangram scans from 50 words up to 18,725 per dashboard scan, accepts PDF, DOCX and RTF uploads of up to 100 files at a time, and works in more than 20 languages. It labels passages as human, AI-assisted or AI, so a teacher can see which parts look edited by AI rather than fully generated.
Privacy and storage
With Turnitin, storage is an assignment setting. Submissions can go into the general Turnitin repository, where they are compared with papers from other institutions, into a private institutional repository, or not be stored at all. Which options appear depends on the institution's account. Pangram keeps scans while your account is active, lets you delete them from your history, says it never trains on user content, and offers zero data retention on Enterprise plans.
Which should you choose?
- Students and independent writers: Turnitin is not sold to you. Pangram's free plan is the realistic option of the two.
- Teachers at a Turnitin school: you already have the similarity report. If AI scores matter in your course, the Brussels results suggest Pangram as a second opinion, especially for low or asterisked scores.
- Institutions choosing a vendor: run your own pilot on known human and AI papers from your courses before relying on either.
A free check before you submit: IsThisAiWritten
Students can't run Turnitin on their own work, and Pangram asks for an account. IsThisAiWritten needs neither, takes a full dissertation in one paste and checks it in your browser, so no draft ends up in anyone's repository. Every word is scanned, never sampled. It is not a Turnitin predictor: use it to see which passages read most like AI, not to guess your score. The methodology page explains how it is tested.
Where Pangram and Turnitin are better than us: Pangram works in more than 20 languages, labels AI-assisted passages and plugs into Canvas, Moodle, Google Classroom and Brightspace. Turnitin has a plagiarism database we don't have and is built into school grading systems. For academic decisions, use the tool your institution relies on, and treat every score, ours included, as a reason to ask questions.
Sources
- Van Vlasselaer, Van Droogenbroeck and Spruyt, Who wrote this? Evaluating the reliability of AI detection tools in higher education, checked October 2026
- Correction to the Vrije Universiteit Brussel study (model naming), checked October 2026
- Turnitin: Can I purchase an individual Turnitin license?, checked October 2026
- Turnitin: Why can't I see the AI writing detection report?, checked October 2026
- Turnitin: Why is the AI writing detection score showing as *%?, checked October 2026
- Turnitin: AI writing detection update from Turnitin's Chief Product Officer, checked October 2026
- Turnitin Guides: Standard assignment settings, checked October 2026
- Pangram homepage, checked October 2026
- Pangram: What do I get with a free account?, checked October 2026
- Pangram: Minimum and maximum input sizes, checked October 2026
- Pangram: Subscription tiers, checked October 2026
- Pangram pricing, checked October 2026
- Pangram data privacy FAQ, checked October 2026
- Pangram: Is Pangram accurate?, checked October 2026
- RAID benchmark leaderboard, checked October 2026
Questions
Why does Turnitin show an asterisk instead of a percentage?
Turnitin does not display a number or highlights when it estimates that between 1% and 19% of a document is AI-written. It shows *% instead, to reduce the risk of false positives.
Is this AI written? Check it now.
Free, no sign-up, no word limit. The check runs in your browser, so your text never leaves your device.
Check text freeIsThisAiWritten is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any company named on this page. Product names belong to their owners. Facts about other products come from their public pages on the date shown and may have changed since.