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 document data is collected by or sent to any remote service by the extension. All such 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.
(Draftback is a Chrome Extension instead of a standalone app specifically so that it doesn't get access to sensitive document data.)
No one, including the extension’s developer, has access to any document processed by Draftback or to its revision history.
The extension uses Google Analytics; this data is anonymized and doesn't include personally identifiable information.
To manage subscriptions and free trials, the extension does collect the active user’s email address and a unique id identifying their browser, but only after the user has explicitly consented to share their email. Draftback will then “phone home” when it loads to find out if the given email address / id is a subscriber or within a free trial window.
(Note that the extension does not collect the email address of document authors, if these are different from the active user.)
User email addresses are not shared or sold to third parties.
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.
Draftback has become more popular than I ever expected, and keeping the extension running for the hundreds of thousands of users who now depend on it requires a lot of time and effort. I’ve given it away free for about ten years; as the demands on my time increase, that’s gotten harder and harder to justify.
I created Draftback as a labor of love, hoping to help people study the writing process. Imagine if you could look over T. S. Eliot’s shoulder as he wrote “The Waste Land.” It's possible now to show students the ceaseless revision, the many small decisions, that go into a good piece of writing.
Meanwhile, I can’t tell you the number of times someone has offered to slap ads on Draftback. Your subscription supports small, independent, ad-free software development.
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.