What Are the Features of Turnitin? Similarity, Feedback, and AI Writing

Similarity / originality reports

The core feature. Submit a file, get a percentage and a list of matching sources. Filters for quotes and bibliography. This is what most people mean when they say “Turnitin.” Walk through the Turnitin similarity score before you fear the badge.

It is a plagiarism and overlap feature. It is not an AI writing feature, even when both badges appear on one screen.

Feedback Studio

Instructors comment in the margin, apply rubrics, and share the file back. For many staff this is daily work. Plagiarism is the side panel.

Students experience it as the marked paper, not as a detector. If your course never mentions similarity, you may still be inside this suite.

Originality and the archive

New submissions can be compared with older ones from the same school or the wider index. That is the feature free sites cannot buy.

Whether your paper is stored is a setting. Some institutions keep everything. Some allow assignment-level exceptions. Ask if you are writing something you do not want in a corpus.

The AI writing indicator

If enabled, instructors see a percentage for how AI-like the prose looks. Students often cannot see it. It is not the similarity score. What AI detector does Turnitin use is the longer answer: their own classifier, not GPTZero. Inside Higher Ed covered the higher-than-advertised false positive rate when the tool launched. The rest of the submit path is how Turnitin works.

DetectGPT offers a public AI writing score with highlighted lines. Same family of question (does this read like a model), different product, no school login. Not affiliated with Turnitin®.

Do not expect the two percentages to match. Classifiers do not share a scale.

LMS integration

The dropbox lives where the course lives. That is the feature that makes the product feel inevitable: you were already uploading there.

A public website cannot copy that convenience because it does not own the gradebook.

That hook is also why “free Turnitin” pages feel off. They cannot put a mark in the gradebook. They can only paste.

Matching a feature to a job this week

Need comments? Feedback Studio, if your course uses it. Need overlap? Similarity. Need AI tone before Sunday? DetectGPT. Need a publisher’s originality check? That is a different contract, not a student paste box.

Feature lists on marketing sites flatten these into one grid. Your week does not look like a grid. Pick one job and one tool.

What is not a feature, however many ads say so

A free student login. A guarantee of academic honesty. A replacement for reading the paper. A public API that reprints official scores into a Chrome extension. For the student-access question, see can students use Turnitin for free.

If a page promises those, it is describing a fantasy product.

FAQs

What are the features of Turnitin?

Similarity reports, Feedback Studio, an originality archive, LMS hooks, and an optional AI writing indicator. Schools buy a bundle, not always every add-on.

Which feature can I use for free?

None of the campus stack, unless your course already includes it. DetectGPT is a free AI writing checker, not a Turnitin® feature.

Is Draft Coach a feature students can use?

Some schools enable student-facing draft tools. That is still a license setting, not a public website.

Does it check images and code?

Support is limited and file-type dependent. Prose in documents is the main case.

Is peer review part of Turnitin®?

There have been peer-review add-ons. Your course may not have them. Check the assignment, not a marketing grid.

Can DetectGPT replace Feedback Studio?

No. We do not grade, comment, or store an institutional archive. We score AI writing style.