Cognity vs Grammarly Authorship: a student's proof and a teacher's view
Grammarly Authorship and Cognity are often mentioned in the same breath because both replace the question "was this written by AI?" with a record of how the text was actually produced. They are built for different people, though, and they answer to different owners. This is an attempt at a fair comparison from the team that builds one of them, so read it with that in mind. Where we describe Authorship, we rely on Grammarly's own product page, support documentation and launch announcement as of September 2026, and we link them at the end.
What Grammarly Authorship is
Authorship is a feature inside Grammarly. Once a student turns it on in Google Docs, Microsoft Word or Grammarly's own editor, it tracks how the text in the document came to be and sorts it into categories: text typed by a human, text copied from a known source, text copied from an unknown source, text generated by AI, and text a student modified with generative AI. When the work is done, the student can generate an Authorship report that color-codes the document by source and includes a replay of the writing from first keystroke to last. The student then shares a link to that report with whoever they choose. It is available on Grammarly Free and Grammarly Pro, so cost is not the barrier.
Two design choices define the tool. It lives inside the student's own account, and the student decides whether to create and share a report. Grammarly is explicit about this on its product page: the report is not sent automatically to the teacher. And it tracks a document, not a task. It begins tracking when it is switched on for that document, it needs clipboard access to attribute pasted text, and Grammarly notes that text from a private browsing window on Word desktop will not be attributed.
That is the right shape for what Authorship is meant to be: a way for a student to prove their own work. The tagline on Grammarly's page says exactly that. If you are a student who has been wrongly flagged by a detector, an Authorship report is a strong piece of evidence in your favor, and it costs nothing.
What Cognity is
Cognity starts from the teacher's side of the desk. A teacher describes a task in a sentence, Cognity drafts the title, rubric, AI tutor instructions and student-facing AI rules, and the teacher edits and publishes. Students join by link without creating an account. They work in one workspace with an AI assistant, Jello, that follows the teacher's rules for that task. Every prompt, every AI response and every revision is recorded in order, and the teacher can watch the class live during the lesson or read each student's process alongside the submission afterwards, with a breakdown of how much of the text came from the student and how much from the AI.
Because the AI is inside the workspace, the record is not a category label on a sentence. It is the actual conversation: what the student asked, what the AI said, what the student kept or rejected. If a student asks Jello to write the essay, it declines and coaches instead, and that refusal is in the record too.
Cognity is free for individual teachers, with 100 sparks a month and two active assignments. Pro is 12 dollars a month on an annual plan, and there are School and Enterprise plans with SSO and admin dashboards.
Where they differ
Who holds the record. In Authorship, the student generates and shares it. In Cognity, the teacher set the task, so the record belongs to the class from the moment work begins. Neither is wrong. One is a student's proof; the other is a teacher's view.
What the record contains. Authorship tells you the source category of each sentence and lets you replay the typing. It cannot show you what was said in the ChatGPT tab that produced a pasted paragraph, only that the paragraph was pasted. Cognity's record includes the AI conversation itself, because the AI is part of the workspace. For a teacher trying to understand how a student thinks, the questions the student asked are usually more informative than the sentence labels.
Whether the AI follows rules. Authorship observes; it does not constrain what a student's AI may do. Cognity lets the teacher decide, per assignment, what the AI is allowed to do and not do, and the AI enforces it.
Where the assignment lives. Authorship works on any document, which is a real strength when students write in many places. Cognity is a workspace with the task, rubric and AI in one place, which is the trade for a complete record.
What happens outside the tool. Both have the same honest limit: work done somewhere else is invisible. Authorship marks it as pasted from an unknown source. Cognity shows it as text that arrived without a corresponding AI exchange or drafting history. In both cases the teacher still has to have a conversation.
Which one should you use?
If you are a student, or a teacher who wants students to be able to defend their own work in a document they already use, turn on Authorship. It is free, it is simple, and it works today.
If you are a teacher who wants to set the terms of AI use for a specific assignment and then read the process, not just the sources, try Cognity. The two are not exclusive. A school could reasonably let students keep Authorship on for everything and run assessed writing tasks in Cognity.
The larger point is the one both tools share. A probability score about a finished text is not evidence of anything. A record of how the work was done is. Whichever tool gets a teacher to that record, the classroom is better for it.
Sources: Grammarly, "Grammarly Authorship: Prove Your Writing Is Yours" (grammarly.com/authorship); Grammarly Support, "About Authorship"; Grammarly blog, "Grammarly Launches Grammarly Authorship to Enable Transparency in Writing Assignments for the AI Age," August 2024.