Use the Best Grammar Checker in 2024 and Never Go Astray Again

Grammarly is arguably the most popular, and one of the best free grammar checkers around. It launched in 2009 and has more than 20 million users - a true testament to its worth. Both its great writing aid capabilities and many integrations make Grammarly a safe choice.

Overview

Grammarly refers to itself as a writing assistant, and that’s what separates it from many grammar checking tools. This software relies on its own database - as well as anonymous data collected from its users - to correct grammatical errors and spelling while helping writers improve their writing skills.

The reason Grammarly is one of the best free online grammar checkers is the quality and accessibility of its writing tools, even in its free version. This is in part thanks to the data collected from Grammarly’s huge user base, which leads to constant improvements across the board.

Grammarly operates by providing real-time corrections as you type, but you can also paste or import an existing text into the web app to check it for grammatical mistakes. Grammarly highlights any serious grammar errors in red, while word substitutes and style improvements are marked in green and blue.

The software allows you to immediately make necessary corrections by clicking the highlighted word or sentence. Grammarly is considered the best English grammar checker by many, as it provides a seamless writing experience, quickly and efficiently making corrections as you go, without the need to devote additional time to ironing out the text.

Grammarly is available on just about every platform. It comes as a browser extension, a desktop client for Windows and macOS, and it is available on Android and iOS smartphones as well.

When you have the desktop client installed, the grammar checker integrates with Microsoft Word and Outlook mail, while the browser plugin handles basically everything you do in-browser. This includes social media, team messaging apps, email, and so on. Furthermore, Grammarly also has a Google Docs plugin, which is why it’s often revered as the best free grammar checker.

As far as the quality of the corrections and suggestions go, Grammarly is top-notch. Thanks to its powerful AI, its corrections - especially the style and readability suggestions - are unmatched by its competitors. One crucial feature that helps Grammarly achieve this status is its ability to select the preferred style or intent of the text.

When you first install the plugin or paste a text into the desktop client, it allows you to select whether you want the text to sound authoritative, informative, casual, and so on. On top of that, Grammarly provides weekly feedback on your writing and features a plagiarism checker in its paid plans.

Pricing

If you want any of the advanced features that make Grammarly the best online grammar checker - anything beyond correcting spelling, grammar, and punctuation errors - you’ll need to subscribe to Grammarly Premium.

Readability and vocabulary improvements, a greater selection of writing tones, and the plagiarism checker are all available only if you use the paid version. Unfortunately, Grammarly doesn’t come cheap.

The monthly cost of Grammarly Premium is $29.95. The price is lower if you subscribe quarterly ($19.98/month) or yearly ($11.66/month). Grammarly offers discounts regularly, so keep an eye out for those. It also offers Business plans that cost $12.50 per month/user.

Final Thoughts

Without a doubt, Grammarly holds a deserved place among the best online English grammar checker options. While it doesn’t provide translations or language learning capabilities like some of its competitors, its core writing features are unmatched in quality. However, these features come at a hefty price.

Another robust and powerful grammar and spelling checker, Ginger employs powerful AI and contextual spelling corrections to keep your writing proper, engaging, and professional. Besides its wide array of correction features, Ginger also offers translation and English language learning options, making for a complete writing improvement package.

Overview

Like most grammar correction software, Ginger is best used as a real-time correction tool that highlights your mistakes as you type. Similarly to Grammarly and other top free grammar checkers, Ginger highlights your grammar errors as you go and provides the correct spelling as an alternative. However, Ginger not only corrects spelling and other errors according to grammar rules but can completely rewrite sentences or change the word order when needed.

This is thanks to its Contextual Spelling Correction technology, which takes into account the meaning and intent behind your sentences, offering improvements without altering the essence of the sentence. This patent-pending technology easily handles sentences with multiple mistakes in them, and it only takes one click to make suggested changes.

The Sentence Rephraser is equally valuable. While grammar and spelling corrections are important for any grammar corrector, they only get you so far. Idioms and phrases are what breathe life into writing, and the Sentence Rephraser does precisely that - editing even grammatically perfect sentences so they sound more natural.

When it comes to language learning capabilities, Ginger’s Personal Trainer has got you covered. This feature analyzes your writing mistakes to pin down the areas you struggle in the most. Ginger then provides you with weekly feedback reports so you can see where you make the most mistakes. Not only do you get weekly reports, but you can also then practice on your own sentences, allowing you to effectively iron out any mistakes.

Beyond this, Ginger also has a Dictionary and a Translator, which is why it’s always listed among the best free grammar checker options. The Dictionary provides short definitions for words you type into it, allowing you to quickly find out what an unknown word means without the need to Google it. The Translator is self-explanatory and currently covers 40 languages.

Ginger is available as a desktop client for Windows and Mac, as a browser extension for Chrome and Safari, as well as an app for Android and iOS. Furthermore, there’s a Ginger Android keyboard plugin too. Unless you’re using the browser extensions, you’ll mostly have to work from within Ginger to get real-time corrections. The biggest drawback here is the lack of Google Docs integration, but it does integrate with MS Office.

Price

Ginger is one of the best free grammar checkers around, with the free version allowing unlimited grammar and spell-checking, as well as translation to and from the English language. All of the other features are reserved for its paid plans. Ginger currently has a 30% discount going on for its paid plans, making it a great time to subscribe.

A single-month subscription currently costs $13.99, with the monthly price falling down to $7.49 or $6.99 per month if you subscribe for one or two years respectively.

Final Thoughts

While Ginger can go toe-to-toe with most grammar correction software in grammar and spell checking, its Contextual Spelling and English-learning capabilities are where it truly shines.

WhiteSmoke, a candidate for the title of the best grammar checker for Mac, combines the strengths of Ginger and Grammarly into one package. It combines grammar checking tools with strong translation software, anti-plagiarism detectors, and business correspondence templates, making it a great all-around package for users of all stripes.

Overview

Let’s start off with the core features: grammar and spell-checking. WhiteSmoke’s correction features are far from basic. Not only does it correct basic grammar and spelling mistakes, but it also successfully detects and corrects incomplete sentences, subject-verb disagreements, double negatives, punctuation, and double spacing. WhiteSmoke’s feature-rich corrections will guarantee that everything you write is top-notch.

On top of that, WhiteSmoke uses deep error analytics to analyze the structure and length of your sentences. This is what makes it one of the best essay and grammar checkers, as it provides suggestions on the lengths of sentences and the words used, then suggests improvements based upon that data. With it, you can make whole paragraphs or articles significantly better, as it leads to you using richer language and making your text a more engaging read.

WhiteSmoke exists as both a browser extension - available for most commonly used browsers - and a desktop client. It integrates with most writing platforms, and its browser extensions grant you correction capabilities in most online environments. 

As far as the corrections themselves go, WhiteSmoke goes a step beyond its competitors. Instead of just highlighting your mistakes and offering a correction like many online grammar checkers, it offers an explanation as to why a particular word or sentence is incorrect and provides multiple options you can change it to.

If you prefer to learn English the traditional way, and not only through writing, WhiteSmoke also offers comprehensive learning tutorials available in both video and text form. Similarly to Ginger, WhiteSmoke provides word definitions by drawing them from its Thesaurus feature. The software also comes with a plagiarism checker that any teacher, professor, or editor would highly value.

A feature that truly separates WhiteSmoke from other best grammar apps is its correspondence templates. While other online grammar checkers offer templates as well, none of them have such a wide selection. The available templates are divided into four groups: medicine, law, business, and personal. On top of all this, WhiteSmoke has a pretty powerful translation tool as well.

Pricing

Since WhiteSmoke is so feature-rich, it’s not surprising that it has no free version available. There are three annual pricing packages you can choose from: Web, Premium, and Business. All are currently available for 50% off regular prices. While this isn’t the best grammar checker software that’s free, it’s still pretty affordable.

The Web plan can only be used as a browser extension and includes the grammar checker, plagiarism detector, and translator. It currently costs $5 per month.

The Premium plan gives you access to desktop clients, as well as Microsoft Office and Gmail integrations. The price for this package is $6.66 per month, and it integrates with all writing platforms and offers one-click proofreading.

Lastly, the Business plan costs $11.50 a month. It allows the software to be used on three PCs and gives you access to phone support.

Final Thoughts

No one can dispute that WhiteSmoke deserves a spot on every best grammar checker and proofreading software list. While it doesn’t offer a free version, it justifies this move by offering a huge number of robust features.

As the name suggests, ProWritingAid is a grammar checker aimed at professional writers. This bit of software presents a full-rounded package that not only corrects your mistakes but helps you improve your knowledge of English, overcome writer’s block, and more.

Overview

While most grammar software we review focuses on helping users improve their English writing, ProWritingAid is the only one with a clear focus on people who write for a living. This software aims to provide a high level of automatic editing, greatly reducing the amount of work human editors will have to do afterward.

Of course, ProWritingAid corrects grammar and spelling mistakes. This also includes punctuation mistakes, double negatives, subject-verb disagreements, and so forth. Additionally, it detects redundancies and terminology and contextual errors.

ProWritingAid also features a plagiarism checker - an invaluable tool for anyone who aims to publish their writing in any form. Furthermore, the software employs a variety of readability improvement features. It improves paragraph structure, detects overused phrases and sentence constructions, and corrects repetitive paragraphs and terminology errors.

While some grammar checkers just highlight your mistakes and offer improvements, ProWritingAid provides whole reports. This is why it’s widely considered to be the best grammar checker for writers. After the program scans your text, it offers a variety of reports like grammar or style. Each contains thorough explanations of your mistakes and the ways to improve them. While this might be too much for people looking to get quick, short corrections for their emails or social media posts, professional writers will love it.

ProWritingAid also provides synonyms, draws words from the Thesaurus database, and can pull up famous quotes or words that rhyme with the word you’ve highlighted. It even offers tools to help you get over writer’s block by providing plot twists, writing assignments, or giving you inspirational quotes from famous writers.

This free grammar checker tool can be used on multiple platforms: You can use it as a browser extension for Chrome or Firefox, download its desktop client for Windows or Mac, or install it as a direct WordPress plugin - a great feature for blog writers. 

Fiction writers will appreciate the fact that ProWritingAid integrates with Scrivener. It also integrates with Open Office, Microsoft Word, and Google Docs.

Pricing

As mentioned, ProWritingAid has a free version that provides spelling and grammar checks without any of the additional features and reports we’ve talked about previously. Furthermore, you can only process up to 500 words in one go.

This is by far the best grammar checker for Word, but you’ll have to subscribe to one of the paid plans to experience its full might. The monthly price is $20, but you can get a discount if you subscribe for longer periods. There’s also a lifetime license available for $399. Business plans are available for larger teams or companies - just contact the company’s salespeople to get a quote.

Final Thoughts

ProWritingAid is the optimal choice for professionals, who typically have higher demands than casual writers. However, if you just need quick and simple grammar/spelling correction, other providers from this list might be more suitable.

Just as ProWritingAid is built with professional writers in mind, PaperRater is marketed as an ideal tool for high school and college students. If you’re looking for a grammar checker best suited to quickly and efficiently check your papers for mistakes and possible plagiarism, PaperRater is the software for you.

Overview

PaperRater is aimed at students wishing to check their term papers before turning them in. Before you start checking your essay, PaperRater will ask for your education level and the type of paper you’re writing to provide the appropriate corrections.

This is a great feature, as different papers on different educational levels vary greatly in tone, language, and the precision required by teachers. Furthermore, PaperRater compares your paper to essays written by other users of the same educational level to provide better corrections and give you grade estimates.

Unlike many best grammar app and sentence checker options, PaperRater doesn’t provide real-time corrections. Instead, it requires you to copy and paste your paper into the software for it to scan the text and provide corrections and improvements. 

This is a huge drawback compared to competitors like Grammarly, which seamlessly provides corrections as you go. However, due to the marketed purpose of the product, which is checking papers for errors before you turn them in, this is somewhat understandable. 

What errors does PaperRater detect? It mostly provides grammar and spelling correction, as well as stylistic improvements based on your sentence length and vocabulary. However, it lacks the contextual analysis many best free grammar and punctuation checker software providers offer.

By comparing your paper to others of the same level in its database, PaperRater can give you an estimate of the grade you’ll receive. Do note that due to the lack of contextual analysis, it can’t detect how well you’ve understood and presented a certain topic - it mostly just bases the grade on style and readability.

Another pitfall of PaperRater is that it doesn’t correct your mistakes automatically. It underlines your mistakes, detects plagiarism, and provides a report, but it’s less than an ideal tool for quickly ironing out grammar and spelling mistakes.

Pricing

PaperRater is likely the best grammar checker you can get for free. It comes with completely free grammar and spelling corrections, writing suggestions, and grade scoring. However, it does limit your paper submissions to a maximum of five pages per submission. You can make 50 monthly submissions, and 10 monthly plagiarism checks.

The paid plan costs $11.21 per month or $71.55 per year. It allows 20 pages per submission, 200 submissions per month, and 25 monthly plagiarism checks.

Final Thoughts

If you ask yourself “What is the best grammar checker software?” PaperRater probably won’t be the first one to come to mind. Still, it deserves a spot on our “Best Grammar Checker” list thanks to the generous features offered by its free version and ease of use, as well as being a great tool for students looking to improve the quality of their papers.