Watch the writing process unfold — play back a Google Doc as if it was a movie
After you install the extension, a Draftback button appears in the toolbar in Google Docs.
Watch your document evolve with full playback controls
Get insights into writing patterns and time spent
Draftback was designed to be as careful as possible about user privacy. No identifiable user data is collected by or sent to any remote service by the extension. All data is stored locally on the user’s own computer, by their Chrome browser, and is only stored there so that future replays of an already-replayed document will go faster.
No one, including the extension’s developer, has access to any document processed by Draftback or to its revision history. Nor does the extension have access to any user’s email address, name, or any other personally identifiable information.
For school district privacy agreements, please contact james@draftback.com
Draftback is a Chrome extension that lets you play back the revision history of a Google Doc as if it were a movie—like traveling through time to look over the author’s shoulder as they write. It’s used by over 500,000 users, primarily teachers checking for plagiarism and AI usage.
No, Draftback doesn’t record anything. Google Docs itself keeps a record of nearly every minor edit that users make, in order to power its realtime collaboration features. (To show user A what user B is typing in real time, Docs needs to collect fine-grained data about each user’s activity.)
All Draftback does is expose this existing data in a more convenient form. Think of it as souped-up version of Google Docs’s own revision history tool.
Only users with Edit permissions on a document can access its Draftback playback. Note that most people who make someone else an editor on their doc don‘t expect that the recipient can see their entire writing process. You should be responsible about whether you have consent or the authority to read someone else’s detailed edit history; don’t assume that this is the case just because you have Edit permissions on their document.
It helps to understand how Draftback works. Draftback doesn’t actually track every literal keystroke, all it does is make use of the updates that Google Docs itself uses under the hood to power its realtime collaboration features. To show user A what user B is typing in real time, Docs needs to collect fine-grained data about each user’s activity. The doc itself ends up being just the sum of all of these incremental updates.
How Docs itself decides to chunk up edits is opaque and may well vary depending on many factors, including whether the doc is being edited offline. (I don’t know for sure.) Concretely, if you type "hello" that might get chunked up by Docs (and therefore by Draftback) as h + e + l + l + o, but it might also get chunked up as he + llo, or just hello.
Draftback does show more of the revision history than Google Docs’s own Revision History tool.
Draftback was made with ♥️ by me, James Somers, an independent software developer. If you like Draftback and want to support a new father, consider paying for a subscription.
You can learn more about how I made Draftback.
Contact support@draftback.com for bug reports and support requests.
If you are dissatisfied in any way with your purchase, and would like your money back, contact support@draftback.com.