Grammarly

Grammarly is a writing assistant that layers grammar, spelling, and style checking with AI-driven suggestions, and it ships as a browser extension, desktop app, and integration inside Word and Google Docs rather than as a standalone editor someone has to switch into. That distribution model is the core of its value proposition: corrections and rewrite suggestions appear inside whatever a person is already typing in, so the tool doesn't require changing where writing happens or copy-pasting text into a separate window.

Free and Pro Plan Features

The free plan covers basic grammar and spelling correction plus a monthly allotment of AI prompts (100/month at the time of this review), which is enough to evaluate whether the suggestion quality fits a given writing style before paying for anything. The Pro plan adds the features that differentiate Grammarly from a plain spellchecker: tone detection (flagging whether a draft reads as too formal, too blunt, or off-brand for its intended audience), full-sentence rewrites rather than word-level fixes, and plagiarism detection. Pro-level team features (shared style guides, brand tone consistency across multiple writers) that used to sit behind a separate Business tier are now folded into Pro directly.

Pricing and Enterprise Tier

Pricing runs $12/month on annual billing, or a substantially higher $30/month if billed monthly instead, which is one of the largest monthly-versus-annual gaps among mainstream productivity subscriptions. For an individual or small team confident they'll keep using the tool past a trial period, annual billing is the price actually worth comparing against competitors; the monthly rate functions more as a short-term trial price than a sustainable ongoing cost.

For an organization that has outgrown per-seat pricing, Enterprise moves to custom quotes built around requirements that individual writers don't need: unlimited AI usage, bring-your-own-key model access, data-loss-prevention controls, and single sign-on. That tier is aimed at compliance and IT requirements rather than at writing quality itself, since the underlying suggestion engine doesn't materially change between Pro and Enterprise.

Who Benefits Most

For students, non-native English writers, and anyone drafting high-stakes documents (a cover letter, a client email, a grant application), the combination of grammar correction and tone detection addresses two different failure modes at once: the technical correctness a spellchecker already covers, and the softer question of whether a draft reads the way its author intends it to. That second problem is harder to self-diagnose, which is where an outside suggestion engine adds value beyond what careful proofreading alone can catch.

The practical question for evaluating Grammarly against a narrower tool (a plain spellchecker) or a broader one (a general-purpose LLM asked to "fix my writing") is where tone-consistency and inline, in-context suggestions matter more than raw generative rewriting. A general chat assistant can rewrite a paragraph on request, but it doesn't sit inside every app someone types in and flag issues as they're typed, which is the specific workflow Grammarly is built around. For teams that need a consistent brand voice across many writers rather than one-off rewrites, the tone and style-guide features in Pro are the actual differentiator worth weighing against a cheaper, more general tool that has to be prompted every time.