EssayGuard vs Draftback

The two in one paragraph

Draftback is a Chrome extension by James Somers. Give it a Google Doc you can edit and it replays that document’s revision history keystroke by keystroke, so you can watch a paper come together in a few minutes instead of paging through version history. It has about 400,000 users on the Chrome Web Store, a 3.6 star rating, and its current version, 0.0.30, was updated on June 19, 2026. It went paid in early 2025: $40 a year for teachers, $100 a year otherwise, with a 30-day trial. EssayGuard moves the recording out of the student’s document and into an editor the instructor controls. Students open a link and write. Every keystroke, revision, pause and paste is stored with a server-side timestamp, and periodic snapshots of the document cross-check the event stream. The instructor gets a replay, pasted text stays marked, and a printable evidence report is one click away.

Source: draftback.com and the Chrome Web Store listing, checked 2026-09-08; r/Professors and r/Teachers threads on Draftback going paid, January and February 2025; EssayGuard facts from essayguard.io.

Side by side

Source: draftback.com and Chrome Web Store, checked 2026-09-08; phrasly.ai/human-auto-typer and r/Professors, May 2026, on auto typers; EssayGuard facts from essayguard.io.

Choose Draftback if

• Your class already writes in Google Docs and you are not going to change that this term.
• You want to look back at a paper that was written before you set anything up. Draftback works on any Doc you can edit, after the fact, and nothing else on this page can do that.
• You have a handful of papers a semester to check, and $40 a year is easier than introducing a new tool to a class.
• You want to watch a student’s process for feedback rather than for evidence, so the possibility of a fabricated history does not change what you do with the replay.

Choose EssayGuard if

• You need a record that was made at the time, with timestamps set by the server rather than by the student’s machine or by Google.
• Auto typers worry you. A history that was replayed into the editor rather than written there reads as unrecorded in EssayGuard, because the snapshots and the event stream do not agree.
• You would rather not ask students for edit access to their own documents, or depend on a share setting staying in place until the case is closed.
• Your students do not all write in Google Docs, or your campus policy keeps student work off consumer accounts.
• You need something to hand to a chair or a panel. The evidence report carries the timeline, the revision count, every paste with its length, and a plain statement of what the record does not establish.
• You want to try it without a purchase. The rest of this semester is free for every course you teach and unlimited students.

What a live record shows that a history cannot

Google Docs version history records document states, not keystrokes, and does not distinguish typed text from pasted text. Draftback gets far more out of a Doc than the version history panel does, which is why teachers have paid for it. But the underlying record is still the student’s document, made on the student’s machine, and it can be edited, shared late, or manufactured. A live record shows how text entered the editor as it happened: typed at a human rhythm, with pauses where the writer stopped to think, or pasted in a block that stays marked. It shows the order in which the argument formed, which paragraph was rebuilt, and where the thesis changed. That is what a conversation with a student is built on.

Source: learn.microsoft.com Q&A on Word version history, checked 2026-09-08. Google Docs and Word version history both record document states rather than keystrokes, and neither distinguishes typed text from pasted text.

What neither does

Neither Draftback nor EssayGuard can tell you whether the ideas were the student’s. A replay shows how text entered a document, in what order and over how long. It does not show what was on a second screen, what a tutor said, or whether an outline was generated elsewhere and retyped by hand. A record is evidence for a conversation with the student, not a verdict, and it should not be the last word in a hearing. Neither tool is an AI detector: Draftback replays a history, EssayGuard records a session, and neither scores prose or reports a probability.