Sapling Review: Is It The Worst AI Detector?

🧠 Introduction

Sapling's AI Detector is designed to identify whether text was generated by AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. The company promotes it as a professional-grade solution for teams, writers, and educators. After thorough testing, we found Sapling’s AI Detector to be one of the most unreliable detectors currently available.

This review covers its usability, accuracy, changelog updates, user reviews, and how it performs against major AI detectors like GPTZero and ZeroGPT.

💡 Product Overview

Sapling is primarily a grammar and writing assistant tool that added AI detection as part of its broader feature set.

It advertises:

• Detects GPT-5, Claude 4.5, Gemini 2.5, Qwen3, DeepSeek-V3
• 97%+ detection rate for AI-generated content
• Less than 3% false positive rate for human-written content
• API integration

However, Sapling limits free users to just 2,000 characters per scan, making it difficult to test longer documents. The detection results, as you’ll see below, were even more disappointing.

💻 User Experience

The UI looks unappealing and outdated, and it feels like barely any CSS was used on the site. Navigation is awkward, and several interface elements appear misaligned.

• Limited free access with only short text submissions allowed.
• Slow and inconsistent performance.

Even though Sapling claims to support multiple AI models and document formats, the platform’s design and usability feel neglected and unfinished.

🧪 AI Detection Results

We tested Sapling's AI Detector using multiple text types including AI-generated, human-written, and mixed text.

No matter the input, Sapling flagged everything as AI.

Sapling earns the unfortunate title:
👑 The King of False Positives

This tool cannot distinguish between human writing and AI text, making it useless for any use case.

⚖️ Detector Comparison

We compared Sapling’s results with those from GPTZero and ZeroGPT using the same text samples.

Even when other detectors produced more reasonable results, Sapling flagged everything as AI.

The detector’s accuracy is terrible, making it one of the least reliable tools we’ve tested.

🧾 Changelog Review

Sapling maintains a public changelog showcasing updates, but results suggest that these updates have done little to improve performance.

If this is considered the improved version, the older ones must have been even worse.

🏢 About Sapling.ai

Sapling.ai is a Y Combinator–backed startup from the Winter 2019 batch that builds AI tools for enterprise communication. According to its Y Combinator profile, the company provides an API and SDK to help businesses integrate language models into CRMs and messaging platforms for more efficient writing.

The company was founded by Ziang X., a Stanford graduate and NLP researcher. While Sapling’s grammar checker and writing assistant may justify its early YC success, the AI detector performs poorly compared to other detectors, and lacks the accuracy you’d expect from a company with this level of backing.

Despite having Y Combinator support and years in operation, Sapling’s AI detector is unreliable and delivers a poor user experience.

💬 Trustpilot Reviews

Sapling has a 2.4-star rating on Trustpilot, with users frequently citing false positives and poor performance.

Below are a few examples of user reviews:

Southern Procurement, LLC – ⭐ 1/5

Spent three weeks on the first chapter of a manuscript. Zero AI input other than checking for tense (it's in present tense, and with flashbacks, this can cause brain hemorrhaging). Sent it off to an editor who responded, "If you're going to use AI to write your work, why don't you simply use AI to edit it for you." Asked which program he had used to determine that my work, he replied, "Sapling. It's what I always use." I then plugged my work into six other AI Detector models, and the highest amount of AI I received back from them was 14%. Four of the six were 0%. The fifth was 2%. There will come a day when one of these companies gets sued into oblivion, and I can't wait for it to happen.

Teague – ⭐ 1/5

This is a terrible product. It takes a lot of additional memory, has a clunky interface and pulling teeth is more fun than trying to stop the AI and subscription during the trial.

josh josh – ⭐ 1/5

Not good AI detector. This AI detector is even worse than most AI detectors. I put human without any AI detector and it showed 100 percent AI. I put bad grammar and it showed 0 percent AI. Their AI is rigid af, please don't use it.

Michael Phillips – ⭐ 1/5

Not a good AI detector. Pasted human written text into it and it said the whole thing was AI. In fact, it says every text you paste into it is 100% AI. Their AI tool is ridiculously bad, don't use it.

These reviews reinforce what our own testing found: Sapling’s AI detector is unreliable and constantly mislabels human text as AI.

📊 Scorecard

Overall Rating: ⭐☆☆☆☆ (1/5)

✅ Final Verdict: Avoid at All Costs

Sapling is one of the worst AI detectors we've ever reviewed.

• ❌ Detects nearly all text as AI
• ❌ Constant false positives
• ❌ Small free plan limits
• ❌ Outdated interface with poor accuracy

If you're looking for an AI detector that actually works, avoid Sapling.

If you want to humanize AI text and bypass AI detectors, use TwainGPT.