Review
I ran three months of client emails, two long reports and a 40,000-word manuscript through Grammarly Premium. It saved me from real embarrassment twice — and tried to flatten my voice about a hundred times.
If you write for work every day, Grammarly Pro pays for itself the first time it catches a mangled sentence in a client proposal. If you write occasionally, the free plan already does 80% of the job — save your money.
Get startedFree · Pro from $12/mo
Reading about it only gets you so far. Start the free plan and see it work in under five minutes.
We may earn a commission on purchases. It never affects our scores.
Every writing tool promises to make you sound smarter. Grammarly is the only one I have kept installed for nine years, and that is partly stubbornness and partly because it keeps catching the thing I cannot see: my own typo, three hours into a draft, in the sentence I have already read four times.
For this review I did not run benchmark sentences. I used it the way you would — on invoices, on cold emails, on a 40,000-word document written across two months, and on the messy Slack messages I send before coffee.
The core engine is very good at the boring stuff and quietly excellent at one specific thing: missing words. When you rewrite a sentence halfway through, you leave debris behind. Grammarly finds that debris almost every time. Over three months it flagged 412 issues in my work. I accepted 268. Of the ones I rejected, most were style opinions rather than errors.
Accept every suggestion and you will end up with prose that sounds like a HR memo. Grammarly hates short sentences, distrusts semicolons and wants to replace any interesting verb with a safer one. Writers with a voice should treat the style panel as advice from a cautious colleague, not an editor.
The AI rewrite feature has the same problem in a bigger package. It produces competent, sanded-down paragraphs. Fine for a status update. Not fine for anything anyone chooses to read.
Pro costs $12 a month on the annual plan, or $30 if you pay monthly — one of the widest gaps in the category, and a nudge you should notice. Free covers spelling, grammar and basic clarity. Pro adds full-sentence rewrites, tone rewriting, plagiarism detection and a much bigger AI allowance.
My rule after three months: if writing is how you earn money, buy it. If you write a handful of emails a day, the free plan is already more than most people use.
ProWritingAid gives deeper reports and a one-off lifetime licence, which suits novelists. Microsoft Editor is included with Microsoft 365 and is good enough for internal documents. If you mainly want AI drafting rather than correction, a general assistant such as Claude will do more for the same money.
Grammarly is not magic and it will not make you a better writer. It makes you a less embarrassing one, everywhere you type, with almost no friction — and after three months that turned out to be worth the subscription for me and probably not for my brother, who writes four emails a week.
| Free plan | Yes — grammar, spelling, basic tone |
|---|---|
| Pro price | $12/mo billed annually, $30 monthly |
| Platforms | Web, Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, browser extensions |
| Integrations | Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Outlook, Slack, LinkedIn |
| Plagiarism check | Pro and above |
| Team plan | From $15/user/mo |
Scores from our own testing. Prices are launch RRP in USD.
We built the same full-stack app twice — once in Lovable, once in Bolt — tracking prompts, errors, deploy time and monthly cost. One of them got us to a live, database-backed product without touching a terminal.
Surfer's content score is the most addictive number in SEO. After three months and 22 published articles, I can tell you exactly when chasing it helps and when it quietly ruins your writing.
Two tax years, one small limited company and far too many receipts later — here is where QuickBooks Online earns its price, and where the upsells start to grate.