Grammarly still follows you into more places you type than anything else. But its parent company renamed itself Superhuman, and on free and individual paid plans your text trains their models by default.
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Stay on Grammarly if you live in Word and Outlook, because the first-party add-ins and the tone check are the two things nothing on this list has matched.
checked 2026-10-13 · Grammarly is Free tier; Pro is $30/mo billed monthly, or $12/mo billed annually ($144 up front). · by dan scutaru
better: Runs entirely on your machine. No account, no telemetry, no model call, no round trip. Answers in under ten milliseconds and uses a fraction of the memory LanguageTool does. Apache licensed, built by Automattic.
you give up: English only. It is rule-based, so no rewriting, no tone coaching, no paraphrase, no plagiarism check. No Word or Outlook add-in. It will miss things an LLM would catch.
better: The desktop app is a one-time purchase, works with no internet connection, and says outright that it does not include the AI features. That sentence is the whole reason to buy it.
you give up: It is a readability analyser more than a grammar checker. Grade level, adverbs, passive voice, hard sentences. No browser extension, so it does not follow you anywhere. The free web version's privacy is undocumented, so use the desktop one.
better: Nothing leaves the machine and there is no account. Parses Markdown and AsciiDoc properly instead of guessing, lints docstrings inside source code, and enforces the Microsoft or Google style guide in CI.
you give up: A style linter, not a grammar checker. It will not catch subject-verb agreement. Command line first, no extension, no Word. You have to install or write the rule packages yourself.
better: The core engine is open source with a mature Docker image, covers thirty-plus languages, and has add-ins for Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice and every browser.
you give up: Self-hosting gets you the core rules only. Their own docs say the AI-based rules are cloud exclusive, and the browser extensions have been closed source for years. Also owned by Learneo, same parent as QuillBot.
better: Bundles LanguageTool and Java, so your editor checks offline with nothing to install and nothing uploaded. Understands LaTeX and Markdown properly. The maintained fork of LTeX, whose own last release was in March 2023.
you give up: Editors only, so no browser, no Word, no email. Stable releases come about twice a year, with nightly builds in between.
better: The best French correction available, and it handles French and English in the same document without you switching anything. A perpetual licence still exists alongside the subscription.
you give up: Druide states the reformulation features run on their servers, so the perpetual licence excludes them. They never say plainly that the desktop corrector is fully local. Two languages, not thirty.
better: Already on the device and costs nothing. Proofreads and rewrites system-wide across Mail, Notes, Pages, Safari and most third-party apps.
you give up: Recent Apple hardware only, nothing on Windows, Android or Linux. Apple runs small requests on-device and routes larger ones to Private Cloud Compute, so it is not a guarantee your text stays put. No style reports.
better: A lifetime licence exists, which Grammarly has never offered. Around twenty-five depth reports built for manuscripts: pacing, echoes, sticky sentences, dialogue tags.
you give up: It is a cloud AI product now, with rephrasing and a virtual beta reader, so it is no answer at all on privacy. The reports are a lot of reading for a short email.
better: The grammar check is free and needs no sign-up.
you give up: It is a paraphraser first and a checker second. Cloud based, heavily AI, and owned by the same company as LanguageTool, so it is not the independent second opinion it looks like.
If you write in English, Harper. It is free with no account, checks on your machine, and now has extensions for Chrome, Edge and Firefox plus a macOS app that works in every text field. If you write in another language, LanguageTool's free plan, which works in Word, Google Docs and most browsers but stops at 2,000 characters per text field and gives you 3 AI rephrasings a day.
Grammarly Free itself still fixes spelling and grammar, shows your tone and gives 100 AI prompts a month. ProWritingAid's free plan checks 500 words at a time: enough for an email, too little for a chapter.
Most apps like Grammarly are websites you paste into, and pasting is the habit you stop keeping. Grammarly runs in Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge, as desktop apps for Windows and Mac, inside Word, Outlook, PowerPoint and Teams, and on iPhone and Android. LanguageTool is the only one that comes close: browser extensions, add-ins for Word, Google Docs, Pages and LibreOffice, Gmail, Apple Mail and Thunderbird, Outlook in beta, and apps for macOS, Windows and iOS.
ProWritingAid covers three browsers and Windows and Mac, with no phone app listed. Hemingway is paste-in only.
ProWritingAid for a book, Grammarly for everything you write in short bursts across apps. ProWritingAid's 25-plus reports (pacing, echoes, sticky sentences, dialogue tags) are built to run over a whole manuscript, and Grammarly has nothing like them. Grammarly follows you into more places, including your phone.
Both charge $30 a month for the main plan billed monthly. Billed yearly, ProWritingAid Premium is $120 against $144 for Grammarly Pro. ProWritingAid also sells Premium for life at $399, or Premium Pro at $699. Its Virtual Beta Reader is paid separately in Story Credits on every plan.
Grammarly is not English only any more. It checks spelling and basic grammar in more than 20 languages, but the clarity and tone suggestions cover only English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian, free users can accept 3 of those a day, and it does not tell regional variants apart.
LanguageTool covers 30-plus languages and is the one you can run on your own server, though the self-hosted version drops the AI rules. If one of your languages is French, Antidote above is still the stronger corrector.
Yes. Harper is rule-based, with no language model in the loop, and checks on your machine. Hemingway's $19.99 desktop app says it does not include the new AI features, and Vale is a style linter with no model at all. A self-hosted LanguageTool server also runs without the AI rules.
For rewording a paragraph, QuillBot is the one built for it: the paraphraser is the product and the grammar check is the free extra. For catching mistakes everywhere you type, Grammarly does more. QuillBot belongs to Learneo, which also owns LanguageTool, so trying both is not two independent opinions.
For reworking a draft, yes, and it will argue with the structure in a way Grammarly does not. For catching mistakes, only if you paste every text into it. Our Grammarly vs ChatGPT page has the rest.
Not as a desktop app. Grammarly lists desktop apps for Windows and Mac only, and browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge. On Linux, LanguageTool has a LibreOffice add-in, Harper and LTeX+ run in editors such as VS Code, and Vale runs on the command line.