TechRadar Verdict
Grammarly stands as a user-friendly writing companion, offering a wealth of features to enhance your content. Perfect for students, professionals, and writers. But after using Grammarly to review its own review, we think you’ll need a subscription to get the most out of it.
Pros
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Free tier
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Integration with web browsers
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Detailed explanations of mistakes
Cons
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Limited features in the Free version
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No direct phone line
Why you can trust TechRadar
The growing demand for writing tools underscores the need for efficient and reliable solutions. Enter Grammarly, a long-standing player in the market, designed to elevate written communication. It offers a suite of powerful features including grammar and spell-checking, style suggestions, tone adjustments, and clarity enhancements. We recommend the tool to anyone who is seeking an extra hand in their writing journey. We found the interface of Grammarly intuitive and user-friendly. Grammarly ensures that your writing is error-free, clear, and engaging.
- You can try out Grammarly by clicking here
Grammarly: Plans and Pricing
Grammarly offers three main plans- Free, Premium, and Business.
The Free Grammarly plan is a great starting point if you want to enhance your content's quality. This plan provides essential grammar and spelling checks and helps the user write without mistakes. The plan is ideal for anyone looking to strengthen their writing skills with one of the best free writing tools out there. With the Free plan, you can also access the Grammarly AI generator tool, which allows you to use 100 AI prompts per month. However, it is worth noting that the Free plan covers basic writing errors and, in our experience, offers limited style suggestions.
The Premium plan is $12 per month when billed annually and $31 when billed monthly. This plan unlocks advanced features Grammarly has to offer. We recommend this plan to writers, academics, and professionals as it helps to enhance the vocabulary, provides style suggestions for clarity and conciseness, and helps to set the tone of the content. This plan also comes with a plagiarism checker helping users ensure originality in their writing. We discuss the plagiarism checker tool more in-depth in the feature section. Users also benefit from the AI generator tool getting 1000 AI prompts per month.
While the Premium plan is made for individuals to help level up their communication at work and school, the Business plan is designed for teams and organizations. The Business plan is $15 when billed annually and $25 when billed monthly. With the Business plan, the app becomes a more focused content marketing tool, with the ability to create style guides and set the brand tone. This can then be shared with the team to use whenever they have a writing project. The plan also has extra added security features such as data privacy and login authentication.
Grammarly: Features
Apart from fixing errors in text, Grammarly has introduced a robust set of features, tailored to the users' needs. The Free version allows the users to write mistake-free, giving suggestions for polished writing. The tool helps to set the tone of voice for the content piece making sure that the writing is clear and concise. However, the tone and rewrite feature is not part of the Free plan. You will have to upgrade to the Premium plan to use these features.
You can copy-paste the text to check for plagiarism. After using the plagiarism checker in Grammarly's free version, we found that the tool offers limited functionality, providing only a binary indication of whether text is duplicated, without specifying which sections are plagiarized. This lack of detailed feedback is challenging if you are looking for a quick fix.
However, the Premium version highlights the paragraphs that need citation. The tool also provides an originality score and writing feedback. This feature is particularly great for students buried under writing assignments. There is also a citation generator feature that can produce citations in a few seconds.
Like many other businesses incorporating AI tools, Grammarly too has created its version. The Grammarly AI generator tool is simple and easy to use. All you need to do is create prompts and Grammarly will create a draft or assist in writing. The website explains the feature in detail providing a list of article types including cover letters, job descriptions, summarizing, brainstorming, blog posts, and case studies to name a few. However, the generative AI tool can impose constraints on the writer’s creative freedom. The suggestions could be misleading, hindering the natural progression of the writer’s thoughts.
We specifically were impressed by the Grammarly Business plan. The Business plan is inclusive to all teams including sales, marketing, IT, and HR. Grammarly’s formula is to use ‘Less word count, more words that count’. With this in mind, they have developed the Business plan where you can upload a style guide specifically for your business which can then be shared with the rest of the team. This version also allows you to customize the brand tone so all stakeholders are on the same page and create unified content.
Grammarly: Interface and In Use
Grammarly’s user interface is pretty straightforward. Upon logging in, users are greeted with an intuitive dashboard, where they can easily access their writing projects. Users can either type directly within the Grammarly editor or upload documents for instant suggestions.
Grammarly can be integrated into various writing platforms, including web browsers, MS Word, Google Docs, and more. In fact, this is a more popular choice as Grammarly provides real-time feedback on documents. Once integrated as an extension, you can use Grammarly to edit pretty much anything you write. But, it is worth noting that the Free version of the extension is quite limited and only provides suggestions for grammar.
Grammarly is also available as a mobile app for both iOS and Android devices and is free to download. The Grammarly keyboard integrates with mobile apps including Outlook, Gmail, and Instagram to name a few, and allows users to access the Grammarly writing assistance on the go.
Grammarly: Support
Grammarly primarily offers customer support through email and live chat. Grammarly’s support center is packed with an extensive knowledge base including questions regarding account management, technical issues, and specific features. The writing tool also updates its support center quite regularly with FAQs and additional tutorials. While there isn’t a direct phone line for customer support, Grammarly’s email and live chat support channels are typically sufficient for addressing users’ questions and concerns.
Grammarly: Alternatives
ProWritingAid is a direct competitor to Grammarly. It offers similar features as Grammarly including grammar checking, style improvement, and readability analysis. With its focus on comprehensive writing assistance, ProWritingAid caters to the needs of writers, students, and professionals. While both tools have free versions, ProWritingAid's premium pro plan is cheaper than Grammarly’s Business plan.
HemmingWay app is another writing tool in the market, focusing on enhancing writing clarity and conciseness. While Grammarly offers comprehensive grammar checking and style suggestions, Hemingway emphasizes simplicity and readability. Grammarly provides advanced features like the plagiarism checker, which Hemingway lacks.
Grammarly: Final Verdict
We’ve tested Grammarly to edit this very review. It instantly provided grammatical suggestions and we found the suggestions to be accurate. Grammarly caters to all writing needs including grammar checking, style suggestions, and readability analysis. However, if you want to get the most out of the tool, you will have to upgrade to Premium or Business version of the tool as the Free version is quite limited and only tracks grammar errors. Overall, our experience using Grammarly was positive and we found the interface to be user-friendly plus the real-time feedback was an added bonus.
Udita Choudhary is Tech Radar Pro's editorial assistant where she assists other SMEs in enhancing and streamlining content across our site. She specializes in curating reviews and crafting engaging deals. She also works on the affiliate side, managing the editorial needs of our diverse clientele. Her background is in Fashion Media where she has worked for publications such as Vogue Business, Marie Claire, and Grazia. She has an MA degree in Business and Economics from the University of Glasgow.