Alternatives
Smodin alternatives, sorted by what you used Smodin for
Smodin's site shows a 4.8/5 rating citing Trustpilot. Trustpilot's own page says Smodin's rating “is unavailable due to a breach of our guidelines” and that it has “removed a number of fake reviews for this company.” That's a reasonable moment to rethink a tool whose plans promise to “detect and bypass top AI detectors”.
Smodin is a bundle, so the right replacement depends on the part you used. For paraphrasing, translation and plagiarism checks on your own text, try Paperpal or Trinka. For feedback and a record of how you wrote, Grammarly. For finding and citing papers, Jenni AI or Paperguide. EthiWrite (ours) is for writing the essay itself.
Prices and features checked on October 17, 2026.
What pushes people off Smodin
The plans sell evasion in plain words: “Highest humanization possible to bypass Turnitin-level detection”, and a humanizer page that calls the result “undetectable”. The writer, meanwhile, will “write full essays with simple prompts”. Put a generated essay through the humanizer and submit it, and the essay still isn't yours. Only the evidence has changed.
Then the facts. Smodin says its writer makes facts, data and statistics “100% accurate” without saying how, and it doesn't say where its sources come from. A user on r/WritingWithAI found that its references “need a second look”, and a paying Trustpilot reviewer reported inconsistent results for the same document.
Money comes up most. Users on Trustpilot and Reddit describe being charged for a full year when they expected monthly billing, renewals they couldn't get refunded, and access ending as soon as they cancelled.
The bundle itself is convenient. One subscription covers an AI writer, AI chat, a detector, a humanizer, a plagiarism checker, a rewriter, a summarizer and a translator, and the main tools can be tried without signing up. Positive Trustpilot reviews mostly praise quick summaries and help tidying up wording rather than the essay writer.
What to look for in a Smodin alternative
Tools that work on your text
Summarising a reading, translating a passage and tidying your own phrasing are different jobs from generating the essay, and your course may treat them differently too. Pick tools built for the jobs you actually do.
A detector without a way around it
A company that sells an AI detector alongside a humanizer pitched at beating detectors has an odd incentive. If you want a detector's reading, take it from a tool that doesn't market a way around one.
The billing period, read twice
Smodin's complaints are about annual charges people didn't expect. Before you pay for any tool, check which period the price assumes and whether cancelling ends your access straight away.
The best Smodin alternatives
1. EthiWrite
Full disclosure: this is our tool.
EthiWrite is for the essay, not the side jobs. You write it. Autocomplete offers a sentence of about thirty words at most, which you accept or ignore, and the AI can only cite passages retrieved from your Library, so a claim with no support gets an empty result.
Examiner Mode maps your argument and flags unsupported claims, thin evidence and structural gaps, with no ability to rewrite your text. There's a free plan, and uploading, paper search, citing and export are never metered. What it won't do is what Smodin leads with: write paragraphs from a prompt or rewrite your essay to sound better, so it's the slower option if you want a draft made for you.
EthiWrite editor with the Guide panel open (demo account, email blurred). Best for: Students who want help writing and citing the essay itself.
2. Paperpal
Paperpal takes over several of Smodin's side jobs, built around academic writing. The free plan includes five a day each of paraphrase, trim, translate and AI review, a lite plagiarism report and an AI-detection preview, and its plagiarism checks compare against 99B+ sources. Its grammar and tone advice is trained on scholarly edits, and it works in Word, Google Docs and Overleaf.
Paid prices load by region, with Prime and Pro billed monthly or annually. It drafts too, “with suggestions grounded in your sources”, and commenters on r/research warned that AI editing can blur your meaning. Trustpilot praise, mostly from reviewers Paperpal invited, centres on its AI-detection checks.
Paperpal editor on its built-in sample document, signed in to a free account. Best for: Students who used Smodin to paraphrase, translate and plagiarism-check their own writing.
3. Grammarly
Grammarly sells a Humanizer and an AI Detector too. The difference is in what it says about them: the Humanizer “is not intended to bypass AI detectors.” Around those, Authorship records whether your text was typed, pasted or AI-assisted, and AI Grader estimates a grade from your rubric with feedback.
Docs and most agents are free with daily limits; Pro, at $144 a year or $30 month to month, adds plagiarism and AI-text detection. Students on Reddit report their own writing scoring high on AI detectors after Grammarly edits, which is worth knowing before you accept its rewrites.
Grammarly doc with Grammarly's built-in demo essay, signed in to a free account. Best for: Students who want detector checks and a writing record without a bypass pitch.
4. Trinka
Trinka is a checker for grammar, punctuation and academic style, with style-guide corrections for APA, AMA, ACS, AGU and IEEE on paid plans, and Premium includes all its grammar and paraphrase modes. Plagiarism checks, the AI detector and the citation tools run on credits, and its Citation Checker flags retracted, hallucinated and predatory references.
Basic is free with 5,000 words of writing help, 5 AI writing requests and 4 credits a month. Premium is $48 a year, billed yearly, and there's a monthly option without a shown price. In one test it missed several basic misspellings, so don't treat it as a full proofread.
Trinka editor on its built-in demo file, signed in to a free account. Best for: Academic grammar, paraphrasing and reference checks for $48 a year.
5. Jenni AI
Jenni AI handles the research side of Smodin's AI Writer in a way you can check. Smodin doesn't say where its sources come from; Jenni takes your PDFs, a Zotero or Mendeley library, or papers from its 200M+ search, and links each AI-suggested sentence to the place in the PDF it came from.
Autocomplete suggests sentences one after another and can write whole passages if you keep accepting, so limit it to your library. Free is 10 autocompletes a day; Plus is $12 a month and Pro $29. Its Trustpilot complaints are about billing too: renewals without notice and refused refunds.
Jenni AI editor, signed in to a free account. Best for: Students who want citations they can trace back to the PDF.
6. Paperguide
Paperguide is the research tool for bigger papers. Its search runs across 200M+ papers from PubMed, arXiv, OpenAlex and Semantic Scholar plus your library; it links every claim to its sentence, and its Extract Data feature builds a table from many papers with each value linked to the statement it came from.
Free gives 2,000 AI credits a month; Plus is $12 a month per seat, billed annually. Its AI Writer generates a citation-grounded draft from a research question, and its workflows suit researchers and labs more than coursework. One doctoral student on Trustpilot reports frequent errors and crashes on an annual plan.
Paperguide dashboard, signed in to a free account (the account name is removed). Best for: Literature reviews where every claim has to be tied to a source.
7. Writefull
Writefull is a language checker trained on published papers, with a paraphraser and title and abstract generators. It works inside Word and Overleaf, where it checks LaTeX source directly, and it says it never stores your text or uses it to train its AI.
It doesn't find or format sources. The free plan is a limited quota of each tool, which some r/academia users hit quickly; Premium is US$21 a month or US$150 a year. LaTeX users in the same thread value how it handles Overleaf source.
Writefull Academizer run on its own example sentence, signed out (the Word and Overleaf tools need an account). Best for: Researchers who want rewording help on their own LaTeX or Word drafts.
At a glance
Every tool above, with Smodin on the last row for reference. Writing assistants help you write; essay generators write the essay for you.
| Product | Type | Paid from | Free tier | Citations | Ghostwriting |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EthiWrite | Writing assistant | $9 (billed every week) or $10/month ($120 billed annually) | Yes | Only from sources you added | Guides; you write |
| Paperpal | Writing assistant | See pricing page | Yes | Your sources, or papers it finds for you | Drafts text when asked |
| Grammarly | Writing assistant | $12/month | Yes | Your sources, or papers it finds for you | Drafts text when asked |
| Trinka | Writing assistant | $48/year | Yes | Does not cite | Drafts text when asked |
| Jenni AI | Writing assistant | $12/month | Yes | Your sources, or papers it finds for you | Drafts text when asked |
| Paperguide | Writing assistant | $12/month | Yes | Your sources, or papers it finds for you | Drafts text when asked |
| Writefull | Writing assistant | US$21/month | Yes | Does not cite | Drafts text when asked |
| Smodin | Essay generator | $12.99/month | Yes | Not verified | Writes the essay |
The bottom line
Smodin wraps some handy tools around a pitch to beat detectors. Split the bundle: Paperpal or Trinka for rewording and plagiarism checks, Grammarly for feedback and a record of your writing, and Jenni AI when you need sources you can trace.
FAQ
- Is Smodin free?
- You can try its tools without signing up, but the pricing page lists only Starter and Premium and doesn't publish free limits. Starter is $12.99 a month billed monthly or $10 a month billed annually; Premium, with unlimited writing output, is $19.99 or $16.
- Is using Smodin's humanizer against the rules?
- Smodin's own writer FAQ says “Always follow your institution's academic integrity policies when using AI writing tools.” A humanizer sold to bypass Turnitin-level detection is built to hide AI use from the checks those policies lean on, so that's the question to put to your course handbook.
- Which alternatives include plagiarism checks?
- Paperpal's free plan includes a lite plagiarism report, and its checks compare your text against 99B+ sources. Trinka runs plagiarism checks on credits, and Premium Plus includes 240 pages a year. Grammarly adds plagiarism detection on Pro, and Paperguide's free plan checks up to 4,000 words a month.
- Does Smodin work in other languages?
- It generates text in more than twelve languages and includes a translator. For translating your own text, Paperpal's free plan has five translations a day, and Trinka Premium Plus translates whole files.