Which is better: Pangram or Turnitin?

Comparing the two leading AI detectors

I regularly get asked the question "How is Pangram different from Turnitin's AI writing detector?" After all, many schools use Turnitin's traditional plagiarism detector. The Turnitin AI writing detector is simple to use, but many educators opt for Pangram instead. Why is that? In my mind, the two major factors are accuracy and availability.

Pangram Accuracy vs. Turnitin Accuracy

How accurate is Pangram and how accurate is Turnitin? Each company has released their own technical reports detailing accuracy, and both have been measured for accuracy in different academic studies.

	Pangram	TurnItIn
GPT-4 detection rate	>99.9%	76.8%
False Positive Rate	1 in 10,000	1 in 200

In Turnitin's September 2024 technical report, they report a 76.8% recall on GPT-4 generated text. This means Turnitin detects roughly 77% of the AI-generated text from GPT-4 that it sees.

By contrast, Pangram's technical report demonstrates 99.9% recall overall on AI-generated text as well as GPT-4 text specifically. These numbers are supported by third party academic research, where three independent studies all found Pangram to be over 99% accurate.

False positive rate

False positive rate is an important component of accuracy, and arguably the most important in a classroom setting. If you can't trust the results from your detector, then how useful is it really?

Turnitin's technical report measures a false positive rate of 0.51%, or roughly 1 in 200.

Turnitin's reported false positive rate on their website

Pangram, on the other hand, has a well-documented overall false positive rate of 0.01%, 1 in 10,000. On a similar academic essay dataset to Turnitin's evaluation, Pangram demonstrates a false positive rate of 1 in 25,000.

	Pangram
Overall False Positive Rate	1 in 10,000
Academic Essay False Positive Rate	1 in 25,000

ESL Bias

Both Pangram and Turnitin claim to be unbiased against nonnative English speakers.

Pangram measured a false positive rate of 0.032% across four held-out ESL datasets.

Turnitin has studied their performance on ESL writing and measured a false positive rate of 1.4% on ESL writing, compared to 1.3% FPR on non-ESL writing.

Pangram was able to measure the same dataset for a head-to-head comparison, demonstrating a significantly lower 0.02% FPR on ESL and 0.0% on non-ESL writing.

Dataset	Pangram FPR	TurnItIn FPR
ESL English 300+ words	0.02%	1.4%
Non-ESL English 300+ words	0.00%	1.3%

Availability

Pangram is available to all teachers, regardless of whether their school has an institutional license. Teachers can get five checks a day for free, but they can subscribe to use Pangram in high volumes. If a school purchases an institutional license, all teachers and faculty will have unlimited access to Pangram.

Turnitin is only available via institutional license. There is no way to test Turnitin's AI detection product for free without subscribing to their institutional license.

How can I use Pangram?

There are three primary ways to use Pangram:

1. Dashboard: You can use Pangram's free dashboard to paste text or upload documents and check them for AI content. From the dashboard, you can see a detailed report of AI writing including a chart of where AI was found and highlights of common AI phrases.
2. Chrome extension: You can use the Pangram Chrome extension to check any text for AI content by selecting it and choosing "Check for AI Content" from the right click menu. This works anywhere on the internet, including Canvas Speedgrader and discussion boards. The extension also adds a button in Google Docs to instantly check the document for AI.
3. LMS Integration: Pangram has a variety of integrations, including Canvas and Google Classroom integrations. These are only available via institutional license. Click here for an up-to-date list of our integrations.

What languages are supported?

Pangram supports 24 languages, including English, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Czech, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, and Vietnamese.

Turnitin supports three languages: English, Japanese, and Spanish.

Pangram vs. Turnitin Summary

Overall, both Pangram and Turnitin have produced substantial evidence to support their claims around accuracy, but Pangram is two orders of magnitude more accurate than Turnitin. Pangram supports 24 languages, compared to Turnitin's three supported languages. Pangram has a free dashboard, Chrome extension, and individual or institutional licenses, while Turnitin only offers institutional licenses.

While accuracy and availability both favor Pangram, there may be some reasons to choose Turnitin. If your institution already has a Turnitin license that includes AI detection, then it may not be worth it to pay for a Pangram license, especially if false positive rate is not a concern. Similarly, if you use a niche LMS that isn't supported by Pangram, then the added convenience of Turnitin may be enough to make it worth it to use. With that said, we are always working to improve our offerings. If you're interested in learning more about the switch from Turnitin to Pangram, please reach out. We'd love to hear from you!

Sign up today to try Pangram for free with five credits a day. If you currently use Turnitin and are interested in other options, please reach out!