Turnitin Competitive Analysis

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turnitin.com is a which provides different services for the use of either students or teachers and instructors in paper works. By the words of the company “Turnitin is the global leader in evaluating and improving student writing. The company’s cloud-based service originality checking, online grading and peer review saves instructors time and provides rich feedback to students.”^[1]

Main target group of turnitin is instructors. For instructors website offers two different services; OriginalityCheck and GradeMark. OriginalityCheck helps instructors to check students’ works against plagiarism. It also checks the use of citation if it is proper or improper. GradeMark allows teachers to give grades to students work easily. They decides to rules of grades and GradeMark handles rest.

Indirectly Turnitin targets students also. For students, Turnitin has a service which is called PeerMark that allows students to learn from each other. Thanks to PeerMark, students can review, and evaluate each other’s project. This service also makes the process for teachers easier because they don’t have to deal with hard copies and distributing papers to students.

When we look the business model of the company they work on subscription model. Colleges or instructors buy license for time interval which is generally a year to use Turnitin services.

Company generally tries to affect its potential customers by using experiences of existing clients. It is possible to see videos of instructors from different colleges who are using Turnitin.

Turnitin don’t have too much competitors relatively to general structure of the internet. There are almost 20 different services which gives similar services to Turnitin and approximately half of them are free. The ones which are commercial like Turnitin are; Attributor, Copyscape, Plagtracker, PlagiarismDetect, PlagScan, and VeriGuide.

Most of the competitors are not at the level of Turnitin by now. Main competitor of the company is Plagscan.

Probably the most important advantage of Turnitin against PlagScan and other competitors is company’s database. Turnitin’s database contains 40+ billion web pages, 300+ million student papers, and 130+ million academic books and publications.^[2] 

Turnitin is targeting to schools and colleges, however PlagScan tries to reach authors, copywriters, and publishing houses in addition to students and instructors.