A good online grammar checker is becoming more important to the work of students, writers, content writers, bloggers and authors every day. Writers may rely on technology to help them check their grammar if they’re not sure how to do it themselves. Or perhaps you haven’t encountered much formal grammar training. Either way, you could use a little extra help checking your word usage and sentence structure to make sure your writing passes muster.
Here are the best grammar checker around. You will be more productive.
ProWritingAid
What It Does: ProWritingAid is a web editor and plugin that will clean up your writing by detecting grammar and spelling mistakes, plagiarism and contextual errors. It also analyzes your writing and produces reports on writing style, sentence length, grammar, and repeated words and phrases.
Price: There’s a limited free version. If you upgrade to the premium membership, you can edit in Google Docs or Microsoft Word, access a desktop app and Chrome add-ins, and — best of all — lose the word-count cap.
A monthly membership is $20, a year’s membership is $79, or go the whole hog and buy a lifetime membership for $240.
Who It’s For: Anyone, including students, authors, freelancers or ESL writers.
How It Works: Click on “Try the editing tool,” create a free account, then paste in your text.
The Best Part: ProWritingAid has a premium option, but most of the areas you’ll want checked are available for free.
What Would Make It Better: Though ProWritingAid checks grammar, I slipped in a your/you’re mistake without getting flagged. I wasn’t overly fond of the tool’s inability to work offline, but its overall functionality is hard to argue with.
Our Recommendation: Use ProWritingAid in the self-editing stage to guide your edits.
More Details: For an in-depth explainer of ProwritingAid’s free and premium versions, check out our full ProwritingAid review.
AutoCrit
What It Does: AutoCrit analyzes your manuscript to identify areas for improvement, including pacing and momentum, dialogue, strong writing, word choice and repetition. Depending on what plan you choose, you can also compare your writing to that of popular authors like Danielle Steel or James Patterson.
Price: Three different plans are available: the “Free Forever” plan, which is free; the “Professional” for $30, or the “Annual Professional” for $297 per year. The latter offers a built-in discount of two months free every year.
Who It’s For: Fiction and non-fiction writers.
How It Works: Paste your text into the online dashboard or upload a document and click on AutoCrit’s tabs to see its analysis. This tool uses data from various genres and more than a million books to provide a word-by-word level analysis of your writing and shows easy ways to improve the readability of your work.
The Best Part: I spent the most time in the “Compare to Fiction” tab, which provides a comprehensive look at common issues. It highlighted my tendency to start sentences with “and” and “but,” and identified my most repeated words. I felt like I learned something about my writing, and that’s something I don’t think I could say about some other tools.
What Would Make It Better: A more accurate definition of passive voice. It highlights any use of the “be” and “had” verbs, neither of which fully capture passive voice (you need a past participle in addition to a “be” verb), and many active voice constructions were falsely labeled as passive.
Our Recommendation: AutoCrit is great to guide your edits in the self-editing stage. It’s best used for developmental edits, rewrites and avoiding common writing no-nos.
More Details: For an in-depth explainer of Autocrit’s Free Forever and paid versions, check out our full Autocrit review.
Grammarly
Grammarly (affiliate link) is a powerful grammar checker that provides tools to help you improve your writing. It’s a writing assistant that follows you almost everywhere you want to write.
This proofreading tool checks your work and suggests corrections for errors. By providing an explanation for those corrections, it helps you learn from your mistakes.
The free version will help you with spelling errors and basic grammar mistakes and could be adequate for casual writers.
Grammarly Premium catches advanced grammar and punctuation mistakes and contextual spelling errors. It provides suggestions for improvements in sentence structure, word choice, and readability.
It even allows you to set goals for tone and intent, an experimental function, but it can be useful.
Pros of Grammarly
- Easy to use grammar checker tool with a clean and simple user interface.
- Unlimited plagiarism checks with Grammarly Premium.
- The flexibility of multiple formats. It’s available as a web-based tool, web browser extension, desktop app, an add-on for Microsoft Word, or as a keyboard for your mobile devices.
Cons of Grammarly
- The free version has limited features and will catch fewer errors than the premium version. You’ll need to upgrade to Grammarly Premium to gain access to Grammarly’s best features.
- Google Docs integration is still in beta. You’ll need to copy and paste your text into the app to get the full benefit of your premium subscription.
- The Grammarly app can be a bit aggressive in suggesting errors. For example, Grammarly loves commas even when they may interrupt the flow of a sentence.
How Much Does Grammarly Cost?
You can try Grammarly (affiliate link) for free.
The Grammarly Premium upgrade has three options: $29.95 per month billed monthly, $19.98 per month billed quarterly ($59.95), or $11.66 per month billed annually ($139.95).
Grammarly Review
The free version of Grammarly will catch typos and basic grammatical errors. The premium version will intercept advanced errors like plagiarism and passive voice detection while also providing feedback to help you improve your writing.
As noted in our in-depth review of Grammarly, it is an excellent choice to improve your writing skills and keep your writing error-free, and it’s a unique gift you can give someone who writes a lot.
What It Does: Grammarly is a grammar checker and proofreader.
Price: A limited version is available for free, and Grammarly also offers a number of other free services such as a wordiness checker and tone detection. The full-featured premium service starts at $11.66 per month, and the business plan starts at $12.50 per member per month.
Who It’s For: Anyone, including writers, business people and academics.
How It Works: Copy and paste or upload your text into the online dashboard and let Grammarly work its magic. It flags potential errors, gives suggestions and provides an explanation so you can learn why it suggests the change. There’s also a free Grammarly Add-in available for Microsoft Word and a Grammarly for Chrome extension that’s also compatible with Google Docs.
The Best Part: Grammarly is easy to use and pointed out a vocabulary issue or two that none of the other tools did. It’s superior to Microsoft Word’s grammar checker. Its synonym suggestion feature is pretty nifty, too.
What Would Make It Better: As an editor, I work with many styles of writing, so it’d be helpful if Grammarly provided the option to switch between a few to ensure writers receive fitting suggestions to improve their work. For example, if you don’t use the Oxford comma, the editor will prompt you to do so, which isn’t right for all writing styles.
Our Recommendation: Grammarly is best for the final proofreading stage, or for people who want to learn more about the technical aspects of grammar. If you’re an editor or strong writer, you might find yourself ignoring more flagged items than you fix.
More Details: For an in-depth explainer of Grammarly’s free and premium versions, check out our full Grammarly review.
Ginger
Ginger is an online grammar checker tool that corrects “all types of grammatical mistakes, including punctuation, sentence structure, and style.” It also provides translation into over 40 different languages. For example, you can write in German and then translate it into English.
The free tool is limited to 350 characters. However, if you are willing to sign up for the Ginger grammar checker, you can get a far more robust Google Chrome extension for free. This will give you access to the Ginger Writer app, where you can copy and paste your text to find any errors.
Ginger has a mobile app, Ginger Keyboard, to catch spelling mistakes in texts, emails (Outlook, Gmail, etc.), and social media posts. It works with MS Word, but not Google Docs.
Pros of Ginger
- It provides translations for over 40 languages, allowing you to communicate in multiple languages.
- The free version includes three writing tools— an editing window with translations, a dictionary, and a thesaurus.
- The premium version includes a “personal trainer” to improve your English. The trainer provides “personalized practice sessions based on your own writing” and is like having a virtual writing tutor.
Cons of Ginger
- Multiple steps to work through your text in the Ginger Writer app. First, you have to hover over mistakes to find out what is wrong. Then you need to click a text box to either accept or reject the error. There is no sidebar (like Grammarly), listing each potential grammar mistake.
- It provides minimal feedback about errors in the free version.
- Ginger is not compatible with the Mac OS or Google Docs.
How Much Does Ginger Cost?
If you need more than the free version, upgrading to Ginger Premium has three options. $20.97 per month billed monthly, $7.49 per month billed annually ($89.88), or a two-year subscription for $159.84. Note these prices reflect a special promo discount of 30% off all plans.
Ginger Review
The free version of Ginger offers basic spell check and grammar checking. You’ll need to upgrade to the premium version for more advanced grammar checking or to see an analysis of your errors.
If English is your second language, or if you wish to switch between languages while also double-checking your grammar, Ginger is a great grammar checker app.
Hemingway Editor
The Hemingway Editor is a style checker that provides feedback to keep your writing easy to read. Following the style of Hemingway, it aims for clear, simple sentence structures.
It labels complex sentences as either “hard to read” or “very hard to read.” This way, you can rewrite overly complex sentences that might trip up your reader.
It also flags the use of the passive voice, excessive adverbs, and complex phrases.
Pros of Hemingway Editor
- The online version is free.
- If you get distracted when you write online, an inexpensive desktop version is available to help you avoid temptations.
- Alerts you to writing that is either hard to read or understand that you might not catch on your own.
Cons of Hemingway Editor
- You need to copy and paste your text into the app for it to review your work, and it won’t preserve your formatting.
- It doesn’t provide suggestions on how to edit complex sentences. Fixing your text is up to you.
- Following every suggestion could cause your writing to become TOO simplistic. Although you always want to be clear in your writing, sometimes, a bit of complexity is appropriate.
How Much Does Hemingway Editor Cost?
The online version is free. If you want to work offline, there is a desktop app available for $19.99.
Hemingway Editor Review
The Hemingway Editor is not a replacement for grammar check software. But it is an excellent complement to these tools.
This app helps you enhance your readability and avoid the stumbling blocks that could cause your readers to bail. It can help ensure your writing gets read.
After the Deadline
After the Deadline is an open-source grammar checking tool.
To quickly check a piece of writing for free, you can copy and paste it into the interface at polishmywriting.com. This tool provides feedback on spelling errors and provides grammar and style suggestions, as shown below.
After the Deadline is also available as a plugin for supported web applications, most notably WordPress.
Pros of After the Deadline
- Free for personal use.
- The English language isn’t the only option: a spelling mistake checker is also available in French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish.
- You can install it as a WordPress plugin for grammar checking directly on your website.
Cons of After the Deadline
- It has limited features compared to other grammar correction tools.
- You’ll have to click on each error to see what is wrong, and then select suggested fixes from a drop-down box.
- It’s a super basic grammar tool; it missed contextual spelling errors and punctuation errors in a 200-word sample.
How Much Does After the Deadline Cost?
It’s free for personal use.
After the Deadline Review
If you’re a blogger who composes posts directly in WordPress, this free grammar checker can cut down on potential errors.
The open-source code is available for developers to use in applications.
Conclusion
Grammar is a subject that’s not often taught in schools. This is unfortunate as a lot of kids grow up without a good grasp of it, and find it hard to learn as adults. Many of those people learn from writing services, also known as content mills. These mills tend to have bad grammar on their websites, and this gives visitors a poor impression of their site! If you own a website that provides free content to visitors, then you should always try to be as grammatically correct as possible if you want more visitors.