Grammarly

Grammarly checks more than spelling and grammar. It looks at tone (does this email sound too blunt?), clarity (is this sentence easy to read?), and conciseness, and each suggestion explains why the change helps.

The free plan covers spelling and grammar, shows you how your writing is likely to come across, and includes 100 AI prompts a month. That is genuinely useful on its own — most writing errors fall into those categories. Pro adds full-sentence rewrites in one click, tone adjustment, unlimited personalised suggestions, plagiarism and AI-text detection, 2,000 AI prompts per member a month, and paragraph translation across 19 languages. The full list is on Grammarly's plans page.

Grammarly is not an AI writing assistant in the same sense as Claude or ChatGPT. It does not aim to write full drafts for you. It checks and improves what you have already written, which is a different kind of help — and often the more useful kind, because editing your own writing is harder than generating new text.

Grammarly's generative AI features run on monthly AI prompts: 100 on Free and 2,000 per member on Pro. You can rewrite a sentence in a different tone, draft a reply to an email, shorten a paragraph, or summarise a document. These features work inside the same interface as the grammar checker — you highlight text and choose an action or type a prompt.

The output is serviceable. It produces grammatically correct, adequately structured text that covers the obvious points, without the precision or voice control that Claude delivers. For quick email replies and routine business communication, it is fast and good enough. For anything that needs to sound like a specific person or carry a specific argument, expect to edit it.

Pro also includes translation: it translates paragraphs across 19 languages inside the apps where you write, and a free web translator on Grammarly's site handles up to 5,000 characters at a time. For translating whole documents with formatting, DeepL is still the specialist.

The practical workflow for most users: write the draft yourself, use Grammarly to fix grammar and tone, and use its AI prompts for quick replies and short text you do not care deeply about.

Grammarly's real advantage over AI writing tools is where it runs. Install the browser extension and Grammarly works in Gmail, Outlook, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, Notion, Slack, HubSpot, and every other text field in your browser. It works in Microsoft Word and Google Docs via add-ons. It has a desktop app for writing offline. It runs inside Grammarly's own editor at app.grammarly.com.

This ubiquity is the product's core value proposition. You do not need to copy text into a chat interface and paste the corrected version back. The checks happen where you are already writing, in real time, as you type. For someone who writes in five different tools every day — email, Slack, Google Docs, a CMS, a project management tool — that integration reduces friction significantly.

Claude and ChatGPT are more capable at actual writing and editing, but they require you to move text out of your workflow and back in. Grammarly stays in the workflow. For editing rather than generating, that is often the better trade-off.

Grammarly no longer sells a separate Business plan. Its plans page says Pro now includes team features that were previously available only in Business, and Pro is offered for eligible individuals and teams at $12 per member a month. Enterprise, for larger organisations, is sold through Superhuman with custom pricing.

On Pro, teams get one shared style guide and one brand tone, snippets for reusable text, account roles and permissions, and team analytics. The style guide lets you define rules — always use the Oxford comma, call the product by its exact name — and Grammarly flags violations across every member's writing. The brand tone defines how the team should sound, and Grammarly nudges writers toward it.

Enterprise adds unlimited style guides and brand tones, SAML single sign-on, custom roles, and individual as well as team analytics. Large organisations with several brands or strict IT requirements need it; most small teams do not.

For a marketing team of five or more people producing content regularly, the shared style guide solves a real problem: getting several writers to sound like one brand without an editor reviewing every piece. It is not a replacement for editorial judgement, but it catches the mechanical inconsistencies that slip through even when the writing is otherwise good.

The plan choice is simpler than it used to be, because there are now only three options.

**Stay on Free** if you mainly want typos and grammar mistakes caught while you write emails and documents. The free plan also shows how your tone is likely to land and gives you 100 AI prompts a month, which is enough for occasional rewrites. Many confident writers never need more.

**Choose Pro** if one of these applies: you write in English as a second language and want full-sentence rewrites and fluency help; you send a lot of client-facing writing and want tone adjustment, not just tone detection; you publish content and need plagiarism and AI-text detection; or you work across languages and want paragraph translation in 19 languages inside your apps. Pro is also the plan for a small team that wants one shared style guide and brand tone.

**Talk to sales about Enterprise** if you need SAML single sign-on, several brands with separate style guides, custom roles, or individual-level analytics.

A simple test before paying: install the free extension, use it for two working weeks, and note how often you wished you could rewrite a whole sentence or change the tone of a message. If that happens daily, Pro earns its price. If you only notice the grammar fixes, stay on Free. For translation specifically, try the free Grammarly translator first to see whether its quality is enough for your language pair.

If you are deciding between Free and Pro, our honest review of whether Grammarly Premium is worth it walks through who should pay.

If you are a native English writer with strong grammar and you write in a handful of specific tools — say, Google Docs and Gmail only — the Grammarly Pro price is hard to justify at $12 a month. The free grammar checker covers what most confident writers actually need, and using Claude or ChatGPT for occasional editing achieves better results on specific pieces than Grammarly's automated suggestions do.

If your primary AI writing workflow already involves pasting drafts into Claude or ChatGPT for editing feedback, Grammarly Pro is redundant for the editing function. Those tools will give you more precise, context-aware suggestions on a single piece. Grammarly's advantage is real-time, in-context checking across every app you use — not the quality of its suggestions on any given document.

For technical writers working with specialised domain terminology — medical, legal, engineering, software documentation — Grammarly's suggestions can be actively unhelpful. It does not know that "instantiate" is correct usage in a Java context or that certain passive constructions are standard in legal writing. The suggestion engine optimises for general-purpose business prose, and that optimisation clashes with specialist registers. In those cases, the free plan for basic spell-check is enough, and the Pro suggestions are noise.