EssayGuard vs Grammarly Authorship

The two in one paragraph

Grammarly Authorship was announced in October 2024. It lives inside the Grammarly browser extension and desktop apps, and while a student writes it logs what was typed, what was pasted and what was AI-generated, then produces a report the student can attach to a submission. It is free, included in Grammarly Free and Pro, integrated with Canvas since September 2025 and Blackboard since August 2026, and Grammarly reported more than 5 million Authorship reports by August 2026. EssayGuard approaches the same problem from the other side of the desk. The instructor creates an assignment and shares a link. Students write in a hosted editor in any browser, with nothing to install. Every keystroke, revision, pause and paste is recorded with a server-side timestamp and cross-checked against periodic document snapshots. The record belongs to the course rather than to the student, and it comes with a replay and a printable evidence report.

Source: grammarly.com/authorship and the Grammarly blog, checked 2026-09-08; EssayGuard facts from essayguard.io.

Side by side

Source: grammarly.com/authorship, checked 2026-09-08; plagiarismtoday.com, November 6, 2025; EssayGuard facts from essayguard.io.

Choose Grammarly Authorship if

• You want a zero-cost way for students to show their own work, and you are comfortable that the report exists only when the student chooses to produce it.
• Your students already use Grammarly, so the extension is on their machines and the habit costs them nothing new.
• Your institution has enabled the Canvas or Blackboard integration, and the report can arrive with the submission.
• Your goal is student-facing: giving a student who has been wrongly flagged something to bring to the meeting. Authorship is built for exactly that. Grammarly reports that Rowan-Cabarrus Community College saw integrity violations fall from 27 to 1 in a pilot, a vendor-reported figure worth reading as such.

Choose EssayGuard if

• You need the record to exist for every student, not only for those who remembered to turn a feature on. An EssayGuard assignment records every session by default.
• You need a record you hold, with server-side timestamps, so nobody has to ask whether a report was edited or generated after the fact.
• You want to see the writing, not just the totals. The replay shows pauses, rewrites and the order in which the argument formed.
• You are concerned about the rewrite route. Text produced in another window can only enter EssayGuard’s editor by being pasted, which stays marked, or by being retyped by hand, and a replay of retyping looks different from a replay of composing.
• You want something to hand to a chair or a hearing panel: a printable evidence report with the timeline, the revision count, every paste and its length, and a plain statement of what the record does not establish.
• You are a department or a campus and you need a DPA, a stated FERPA posture and a retention window, not a consumer product’s terms.

What a keystroke record shows

Authorship’s report tells you how much of the text was typed, pasted or generated. A keystroke record tells you what the writing looked like. Typed text arrives at a human rhythm, with pauses where the writer stopped to think and deletions where a sentence did not work. Pasted text arrives in a block and, in EssayGuard, stays marked for the rest of the session. The order matters too: a conclusion written before the introduction, a thesis that changed at the halfway mark, a paragraph moved three times. None of that fits in a category total, and all of it is what an instructor wants to talk about with a student.

What neither does

Neither Grammarly Authorship nor EssayGuard can tell you whether the ideas were the student’s. Authorship sees only the browser or app Grammarly is running in. EssayGuard sees only its own editor. Neither sees a second screen, a phone, or a conversation with a tutor. A record shows how text entered a document. It is evidence for a conversation with the student, not a verdict, and neither tool should be the last word in a hearing.

Neither is an AI detector. Authorship categorizes text by how it entered Grammarly. EssayGuard records how it entered the editor. Neither scores prose for style or reports a probability. If you are replacing a detector because the percentages could not be defended, that is the right instinct, and both of these tools are honest about what they are.