Grammarly at a glance
| What it is | Grammar, spelling, clarity and tone checker with generative rewriting |
| Where it runs | Browser extension, Windows and macOS desktop app, iOS and Android keyboard, MS Office add-in |
| Free tier | Yes, permanent — spelling, grammar, punctuation and basic tone |
| What payment unlocks | Clarity rewrites, full tone suggestions, plagiarism check, generative drafting, style guide on Business plans |
| Text handling | Text is sent to Grammarly’s servers for analysis; it is not a local checker |
| Team features | Shared style guide, brand tones, analytics on Business and Enterprise tiers |
| English variants | American, British, Canadian, Australian |
| Poor fit for | Fiction manuscripts, offline work, organisations that cannot send text off-site |
The four things it checks, in descending order of reliability
Spelling and mechanics are effectively solved. Typos, doubled words, missing punctuation and simple agreement errors are caught consistently, and this is what the free tier covers.
Grammar is strong on the rules that are genuinely rules — subject-verb agreement, tense consistency, pronoun case — and weaker on constructions that are unusual rather than wrong.
Clarity is where it starts making judgement calls: passive voice, wordiness, hedging, sentences it considers hard to read. These suggestions are often right and sometimes flatten deliberate emphasis.
Tone is the least reliable, because tone depends on a relationship the software cannot see. It will read a short sentence to a close colleague as curt when it is simply efficient.
Why the free tier is more useful than the comparison charts suggest
Grammarly’s marketing draws the line so that Premium looks essential. In practice the free tier catches the errors that actually embarrass people — the typo in a client email, the wrong homophone in a headline — and those are the ones with real consequences.
What Premium adds is largely stylistic: rewriting for concision, vocabulary variation, full-sentence rewrites, and the plagiarism check. Valuable if writing is your job. Not required if writing is something your job involves.
The honest test is whether you routinely dismiss the clarity suggestions. If you do, you are paying for advice you disagree with.
What sending your text to a server means in practice
Grammarly analyses text in the cloud. Every document it checks passes through infrastructure you do not control, and this is the single question that decides whether an organisation can adopt it.
For most writing it is a non-issue. For legal drafts under privilege, unpublished financial results, patient information or anything under NDA, it is a policy decision that belongs with your security team rather than with the individual writer.
Grammarly publishes SOC 2 compliance and offers administrative controls on Business and Enterprise plans, including the ability to restrict where the extension activates. Those controls exist because the concern is real and common.
Grammarly vs ProWritingAid vs Wordtune — which problem each one solves
These three get compared constantly and they are not really competing, because each is built around a different unit of work.
Grammarly works at the sentence, everywhere you type. Best for correctness across a working day of mixed writing.
ProWritingAid works at the manuscript. Its reports look at pacing, repetition and dialogue across a whole book, which Grammarly does not attempt.
Wordtune works at the alternative. It does not tell you a sentence is wrong; it offers several other ways to say it, which suits writers working in a second language.
Running Grammarly plus one of the other two is a common and sensible arrangement. Running all three produces contradictory advice on the same sentence.
Where it actively gets in the way
- Fiction. Dialogue is meant to break rules. Fragments, dialect and deliberate repetition are flagged relentlessly, and accepting the suggestions sands the voice off the page.
- Technical and academic prose. Domain terminology reads as error, and the passive voice it dislikes is required by many journals.
- Very long documents. The browser extension slows noticeably in large Google Docs.
- Any offline requirement. No connection, no checking.
Getting your writing out again
There is nothing to extract, which is a genuine advantage. Grammarly never owns the document — it comments on text that lives in Gmail, Word or wherever you wrote it. Cancel the subscription and every file you have written remains exactly where it was, untouched.
The exception is Grammarly’s own editor, where documents you paste in are stored in your account. Anything you care about there should be copied out before a plan lapses.
Who should use it, plainly
Professionals whose writing is read by clients, managers or customers, and who would rather not be judged on a typo. Non-native English speakers, for whom the free tier alone removes a category of error that is hard to self-check. Students, for coursework where correctness is marked.
Not novelists, not people who write only in one application that already has a good checker, and not anyone whose employer prohibits sending text to third-party services.
If Grammarly is not the right fit
- ProWritingAid — deeper reports, built for long manuscripts.
- Wordtune — rewrites rather than corrections.
- QuillBot — paraphrasing first, with a grammar checker attached.
- Writer — the enterprise answer when a style guide has to be enforced across a company.
Compiled from Grammarly’s documentation and public sources. We have not hands-on tested this tool. Last reviewed 17 August 2026.
