Chegg Plagiarism Checker Review for 2025

Chegg Plagiarism Checker is part of Chegg – a big name in the education world, providing a variety of student services including homework help, digital and physical textbook rentals, textbooks, and online tutoring. It’s this well-known name that draws a lot of people, particularly in academia, towards the plagiarism checker tool - and Chegg claims to have completed more than 7 million assignments checks and over 4 million plagiarism scans.

Here, we take a look at how Chegg’s Plagiarism Checker performs when put to the test.  

How Does Chegg’s Plagiarism Checker Work?

Chegg doesn’t provide much information about the methodology behind its plagiarism checker, but like similar tools, it essentially takes the text you submit and compares against its database of online sources. 

Through this comparison, it identifies similarities and potential plagiarism, using AI and advanced algorithms. This check gives a similarity score, revealing the percentage of content in the document matching other sources – and areas that are similar to sources that it has found elsewhere. 

Importantly, while you can explore the tool without having to pay for anything and use features such as its Expert Check, there is no free version to perform a full plagiarism detection – you are asked to upgrade before it will run a plagiarism detection scan. 

Key Features and Limitations of Chegg’s Plagiarism Checker

The most crucial element of an effective plagiarism detector is the quality and recency of the content database that the submitted text is being compared against. Without this, the tool cannot really do what it is meant to do. Chegg claims to do this by leveraging its massive search database, which includes millions of websites, online sources, academic research, and other student papers. This is a key feature that is meant to differentiate it from other similar tools. 

However, it doesn’t matter how broad your database is if it slows down the speed of the search. This is where Chegg’s tool doesn’t quite live up to expectations, as the speed leaves a lot to be desired. Waiting for Chegg’s results, even with the paid version, seemed painfully slow – with the tool openly flagging that the scan could take up to ten minutes. This can be a huge drawback for students and professionals with tight deadlines, as the slowness of the tool has a negative impact on productivity and workflow.

In the free version, there are also a lot of ads, which disrupts the user experience as it doesn’t help with focus at all.

 Another hurdle is the interface itself. If you accidentally click away or try to return to the home screen, it doesn’t take you back to the plagiarism checker itself – it takes you to Chegg’s main dashboard. 

There are no clear buttons or paths to quickly return to the tool, which means you have to dig through your own browser history to reorient yourself.  

Other things we noted is that it offers multiple file formats, but not that many – you can only submit your work as plain text, as a PDF, doc, docx or Google Doc. Also, besides detecting plagiarism, it also gives writing feedback, through presenting suggestions for stronger phrasing or citations, as well as giving writing and grammar pointers. 

Testing Chegg Plagiarism Checker versus AI Detection

Modern day plagiarism often comes from AI Plagiarism. To test the effectiveness of Chegg Plagiarism Checker on AI-generated text, we asked ChatGPT to write an essay on deforestation in the Amazon. This is what it came up with:

We ran it through GPTZero’s advanced AI Detector, which detects AI with 99%+ accuracy. After the Quick AI Scan, the result correctly labeled this as 100% likely to be AI-generated.

We then put the paragraph through Chegg Plagiarism Checker’s AI detector. It flagged the text as 4% match for Plagiarism – and then gave a Plagiarism score of 96/100. 

However, you can see that the Overall Score was 89% and that it also scored 81/100 for grammar. This makes it much harder to see the score you are looking for – and even when you do see it, it’s not immediately clear what it means. 

GPTZero has a much higher accuracy rate in detecting AI-generated text, making it a way more reliable tool for spotting potential AI plagiarism. It also has much faster scanning speeds, allowing users to quickly analyze their work, and accelerating their workflow as opposed to slowing them down. GPTZero's user interface is also far more intuitive and user-friendly, with clear results and easy-to-understand explanations.

Pricing: How much does Chegg’s Plagiarism Checker cost in 2025?

To do a plagiarism scan requires joining Chegg’s premium subscription package, which costs $9.95 per month. 

Along with the plagiarism checker, you also get access to services like tutoring and textbook solutions. While there isn’t a completely free version of plagiarism checker, there is a three-day free trial to explore all of Chegg’s premium features before you have to commit to a subscription.

GPTZero, on the other hand, has a basic scan that is free and easily available for use – and much, much quicker than Chegg’s detector. 

It’s also a much more user-friendly dashboard with an extremely clear set of results that are easy to immediately interpret. 

Final Verdict: Is Chegg Plagiarism Checker worth it?

Due to the clunky user interface, the slowness of the search speed, and the confusing nature of the results, we can’t say that it is. It seems like an afterthought to a broader range of other services that Chegg is providing to students as opposed to a truly excellent plagiarism detector.

Investing in Chegg’s premium level might appeal to those users who are looking for the other services it offers. However, for those who are looking for a plagiarism detection service, it just doesn’t have the strength and speed to compete with leading tools like GPTZero. 

Students who are thinking about Chegg’s premium subscription should consider whether or not they are going to use the bundled services and if that justifies the cost. Otherwise, if the main goal is plagiarism detection and AI detection, GPTZero is a more effective and user-friendly option.