Why people leave Grammarly

Price against use. Grammarly Pro is $12 a month, or $144 a year, and a great many subscribers are using it to catch typos and the occasional comma splice.

The free tier has also tightened. It now caps AI prompts at 100 a month, which is the feature people upgraded for in the first place.

The third reason is style. Grammarly is opinionated about tone and clarity, and its suggestions can flatten a distinctive voice into corporate prose. Writers with a style of their own tend to notice.

Grammarly alternatives compared

Cheapest paid plan and what the free tier allows, checked against each vendor’s own page on 5 September 2026. Several prices below are promotional.

The best Grammarly alternatives, reviewed

1. LanguageTool

LanguageTool is the closest all-round substitute and it costs a fraction of Grammarly. It checks grammar, style and tone across more than 30 languages, including regional variants that Grammarly does not cover at all.

Premium is currently $34.95 a year, half the regular $69.90, which works out at $2.91 a month against Grammarly Pro at $12. Monthly billing is $12.45, and a two-year plan drops to $2.50 a month.

The free tier is genuinely useful for basic checking. Style suggestions are less opinionated than Grammarly’s, which some writers prefer and others find thin.

2. QuillBot

QuillBot approaches the same problem from the other end. Rather than flagging errors in what you wrote, it rewrites the sentence for you, with modes for formality, fluency and concision.

Free paraphrases up to 125 words at a time in two modes. Premium is $4.17 a month billed annually, currently $2.50 with a 40% discount, and adds unlimited paraphrasing, all modes, the plagiarism checker and AI detection.

For non-native English writers in particular it does more useful work per pound than Grammarly does.

3. Wordtune

Wordtune sits between the two. It suggests alternative phrasings for whole sentences while you write, and summarises long documents you have been sent.

Basic is free with 10 rewrites a day and three summaries a month. Advanced is $6.99 monthly or $4.89 billed annually with 30 rewrites a day. Unlimited is $9.99 monthly or $6.99 annually.

It is weaker than Grammarly on pure grammar checking. Where it wins is making a clumsy paragraph read naturally, which is the harder problem.

4. ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid is built for long manuscripts rather than emails. Twenty-five-plus reports cover pacing, sticky sentences, repeated phrasing, dialogue tags and readability across a whole book.

Premium is $30 a month, $90 a year on the current 25% sale against a regular $120, or $399 as a lifetime licence. Premium Pro is $36 monthly, $108 yearly or $699 lifetime and adds workshops and chapter critiques.

That lifetime option is the interesting one. At $399 it beats Grammarly Pro after about thirty-three months and then costs nothing.

5. Hemingway Editor

Hemingway does one thing: it makes prose simpler. It highlights long sentences in yellow, worse ones in red, flags passive voice and adverbs, and gives a reading grade.

The web editor is free. The Classic desktop app for Mac and Windows is $19.99 as a one-off purchase. Editor Plus adds AI rewriting on a subscription with a two-week trial.

It has no grammar checking worth the name. Use it after a draft is written, alongside something else, rather than instead of Grammarly.

Watch the discounts

Three of the five are running sales, and renewal is what you actually pay long term.

LanguageTool is 50% off, so $34.95 a year becomes $69.90. QuillBot is 40% off, so $2.50 a month becomes $4.17. ProWritingAid is 25% off, so $90 a year becomes $120.

Even at full price all three undercut Grammarly Pro at $144 a year, but the gap narrows considerably. ProWritingAid’s $399 lifetime licence is the only price here that cannot rise.

Checking, rewriting and simplifying are three jobs

Grammarly bundles them, which is why it feels expensive to anyone who only needs one.

Checking is LanguageTool. Rewriting is QuillBot or Wordtune. Simplifying is Hemingway. Manuscript analysis is ProWritingAid.

Two of these together still cost less than Grammarly Pro. LanguageTool plus QuillBot is about $6 a month and covers more ground than Grammarly does alone.

How to choose

If you write in more than one language, LanguageTool wins on coverage alone. If English is not your first language, QuillBot does more useful work.

If you are writing a book, ProWritingAid. If you write clearly already and just want to be told when you have not, the free Hemingway web editor costs nothing.

For the wider category, see our productivity alternatives hub.

Check what you already have first

Grammarly’s biggest competitor in 2026 is not another app. It is the checker already built into the thing you write in.

Microsoft Editor is inside Word and Outlook, and a free Microsoft account gets you spelling, grammar and basic clarity suggestions. Google Docs has spelling and grammar plus rewrite suggestions at no cost. Apple’s Writing Tools, in recent versions of macOS and iOS, proofread and rewrite anywhere you can type, and much of that runs on the device rather than in the cloud.

None of these matches Grammarly Premium for tone and style feedback. All of them are enough for correctness, which is what most people are actually paying for. Turn them on for a week before you subscribe to anything.

Is Copilot better than Grammarly? And which AI is best for grammar?

Both questions come straight from Google’s question box, and they need the same answer, because they compare two different kinds of tool.

A general assistant such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Microsoft Copilot is better at rewriting. Give it a clumsy paragraph and ask for a shorter, plainer version and it will beat any grammar checker. It can also explain why a sentence is weak, which teaches you something.

A checker such as Grammarly or LanguageTool is better at catching. It works inline, in every text box, on everything you write, without you deciding to ask. That is the difference, and it matters: the errors that embarrass you are in the emails you never thought to check.

Two cautions on using an assistant as an editor. It will quietly change your meaning if you let it rewrite whole paragraphs, so paste back sentence by sentence. And it flattens voice towards the same neutral register, which is why so much writing now reads the same. Ask it to fix errors and keep your wording, not to improve the text.

The practical setup for most people: a free inline checker for catching, and an assistant for the paragraphs that actually matter.

What your writing tool can see

A grammar extension works by reading what you type. Not just in your document, but in every field on every site where it is switched on: internal tools, ticketing systems, webmail, admin panels.

For most people that is an acceptable trade. For anyone handling client data, health information, legal drafts or anything under an NDA, it needs a decision rather than a default.

Three ways to handle it. Disable the extension per site, which every major tool supports. Use a checker that can run on your own infrastructure, which LanguageTool offers alongside EU-hosted plans. Or use on-device tools such as Apple’s Writing Tools, where the text does not leave the machine at all.

If you are choosing for a team, ask the vendor two questions in writing: where text is processed, and whether it is retained or used for training.

Half of these problems are sentence length

Worth saying, because no subscription fixes it.

Most writing flagged as unclear is not ungrammatical. It is too long. The UK government’s editorial team, who write for tens of millions of readers, keep sentences short, cut jargon, and prefer the common word to the formal one. Their writing guidance is published openly and is a better editor than most software.

The underlying idea is plain English: one idea per sentence, active voice, no word doing decoration. Hemingway Editor enforces exactly this for free, which is why it stays on this list despite doing almost nothing else.

How we test and price these tools

Every price here was read from the vendor’s own pricing page in a browser on 6 September 2026, not copied from another round-up. Where a tool advertises a discounted first year, we say what it renews at.

We test each checker on the same set of real sentences: subject-verb agreement, tense slips, comma splices, and the article and preposition errors that non-native speakers actually make. Then we count the false positives, because a tool that flags correct writing gets ignored within a week.

We also record where each one works, since a checker that only runs in its own web editor is a different product from one that runs everywhere you type. No vendor pays for a place on this list.