A Draftback alternative now that Draftback is a paid service

Why people are searching for a Draftback alternative

Draftback is a Chrome extension by James Somers that replays a Google Doc’s revision history keystroke by keystroke. For years it was the free tool English teachers passed around, and it is still widely installed: the Chrome Web Store lists about 400,000 users, a 3.6 star rating, and version 0.0.30 last updated on June 19, 2026. Claims that the Manifest V2 retirement killed Draftback are contradicted by that listing. It is not dead.

Source: draftback.com and the Chrome Web Store listing, checked 2026-09-08.

What changed is the price. In early 2025 Draftback became a paid service: $40 per year for teachers, $100 per year otherwise, with a 30-day trial. The r/Teachers thread from January 2025 is titled “Draftback is charging now,” and r/Professors followed in February with “Draftback is becoming a paid service.” Most searches for an alternative start there.

Source: draftback.com; r/Teachers, January 2025; r/Professors, February 2025; checked 2026-09-08.

Price is the trigger. Three structural limits matter more.

• Docs only. Draftback reads Google’s revision log. A paper written in Word, Pages, a phone app or a plain text editor has nothing to replay.
• After the fact, with edit access. The teacher has to be an editor on the document. Students who share a copy, export a PDF, or submit through an LMS dropbox break the chain, and by the time the teacher asks, the original may have been changed or deleted.
• The history belongs to the student. Google Docs version history records document states, not keystrokes, and does not distinguish typed text from pasted text. Human auto typer tools (Phrasly Human Auto Typer, Undetectable.ai, TypeX, naturaltypist.com) replay pasted text as keystrokes into Docs or Word to fabricate a natural-looking history. A Draftback replay of that history looks like a student writing.

Source: learn.microsoft.com Q&A on Word version history; phrasly.ai/human-auto-typer; r/Professors, May 2026, comments naming naturaltypist.com; checked 2026-09-08.

What Draftback does well

It is the original, and it is still good at what it does. The replay is immediate and vivid: a teacher watches the sentences appear and can see where the writing stalled. It runs on documents already in the class workflow, so there is no assignment to set up in advance, and the 30-day trial costs nothing. For a teacher in a Google Workspace district whose students draft in Docs, and who only needs to look at the occasional paper, $40 per year is not much and Draftback may still be the right answer.

The other Docs replay tools

Several free tools now replay Docs history. They share Draftback’s structural limits, because they read the same log, but they differ in price and audience.

• Revision History (TabWrite LLC) replays Google Docs and Slides for teachers and claims more than 200,000 teachers. Free tier of 150 documents per month; Plus at $32 per year; district pricing by quote. Its own copy disclaims being proof of authorship. The Revision History alternative page goes deeper.
• Process Feedback is a nonprofit-style free tool: a hosted editor at write.processfeedback.org with no install, plus a Google Docs extension, producing a process report with a paste-source breakdown. It was the top recommendation in an r/Professors thread in July 2026. Its pricing page returned an error when we checked, so any paid tiers are unverified.
• Brisk Teaching, Inspect Writing is a Docs replay inside the Brisk Chrome extension. Free tier; Brisk Pro at $99.99 per year adds AI detection. K-12 focus.
• GPTZero Writing Replay is a Docs extension from GPTZero, a detector company, with a free tier. GPTZero’s own November 2025 list of writing replay tools names itself, Draftback, Grammarly Authorship and Turnitin Clarity.

Source: revisionhistory.com; processfeedback.org; briskteaching.com/inspect-writing; gptzero.me; r/Professors, July 2026; all checked 2026-09-08.

What to want in a replacement

• A record created while the student writes, not reconstructed later from a log the student can edit, disable or delete.
• A record that works wherever the student writes, or that brings the student to a place where it works.
• A record that keeps typed text and pasted text apart, and that an auto-typer cannot fake.
• A price a single teacher can pay, and a path for a department to buy without starting over.

Side by side

Source: draftback.com; revisionhistory.com; processfeedback.org; phrasly.ai; all checked 2026-09-08; EssayGuard pricing at /pricing.

How EssayGuard fits

EssayGuard is a different kind of tool from the ones above. It does not replay a history that Google kept. It records the session itself. The instructor creates an assignment, sets a retention window, and shares one link. Students open the link in any browser and write; nothing is installed and no account is created. While they write, EssayGuard records every keystroke, revision, pause and paste with a server-side timestamp, and takes periodic snapshots of the document that are checked against the event stream. When the student submits, the replay is in the instructor’s account, and a printable evidence report can be produced if the paper is questioned. Classes that already draft in Docs can use the EssayGuard extension, which records the document the assignment points at and nothing else.

A keystroke-level record, made at the time, shows what a replayed log cannot establish. It shows whether a paragraph was typed or arrived in one paste, and the paste stays marked through every later edit. It shows the pause before a hard sentence, the thesis attempted three times, and the order in which the argument formed. An auto-typer produces keystrokes; it does not produce the pattern of snapshots that writing produces, so a fabricated session reads as unrecorded rather than as writing.

The record has limits, and the report says so. It shows how text entered the editor, not whether the ideas were the student’s own or what happened in another window. EssayGuard does no stylistic analysis and issues no verdict. It is evidence for a conversation, not a finding. The rest of this semester is free for every course you teach with unlimited students; after that the Educator plan is $99 per year.

Who should still use Draftback

Keep Draftback if your students already write in Docs you can edit, if you want to look at a paper after the fact without having set anything up, and if the question you are asking is about how a student worked rather than whether the history is genuine. At $40 a year it is a fair tool for that job. Move to a session recorder when the record has to exist for every student, has to hold up when a student disputes it, or has to cover work written outside Google Docs.