PlagAware utilizes many different sources while carrying out a plagiarism check including the internet, research hubs, already uploaded papers in the system, and the original text. It checks against articles, journals, books, and other content that has been crawled by some search engines. On the contrary, PlagAware is privacy-friendly and avoids entering any private or paid-for content management systems unless the user has plugged those into the tool. Further, users can upload their documents to check for similarities with other documents in the internal database if they would like to.