Grammarly Review 2023: Is It Still Worth It? [+20% Discount]

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In today’s digital age, effective communication is more crucial than ever. Whether you’re drafting a crucial business email, penning your latest blog post, or simply chatting with friends online, clarity and correctness in language use can leave a lasting impression. Enter Grammarly, a cutting-edge digital writing assistant that promises to revolutionize how we write. With its array of features ranging from basic spell checks to intricate tone suggestions, it’s no wonder that Grammarly has garnered the attention of writers, professionals, and casual users alike. In this review, we’ll delve deep into its features, usability, and efficiency to determine whether it lives up to its promises and is worthy of being a staple in our writing toolkit.

First, let’s talk a little bit about what Grammarly is and why we find it so useful.

What Is Grammarly?

Grammarly is a free online grammar checker that lets you proofread articles, essays, emails, book chapters, and more for common grammar and spelling mistakes as well as typos. You can either write directly in their editor or upload documents you have written. There’s even a Google Chrome plugin that will edit documents and blog posts created outside of the Grammarly website. I used the plugin to edit this post! Hopefully, this Grammarly review will convince you that Grammarly is an amazing tool. They also offer a premium service that will uncover deeper grammatical issues and plagiarism detection. I think you’ll agree with me when I say typos and grammar mistakes are embarrassing. Grammarly takes the guesswork out of proofreading.

Features

Grammarly has a number of unique features that make it the best grammar checker on the market.

Web Editor

Grammarly features a clean web editor. You can upload your document by clicking on the “upload” button or simply copy and paste your text in the editor. The good thing is, you can add this tool to Chrome as an extension, making it exceptionally easy to use.

 

Apart from this, identifying errors is not that difficult with Grammarly. You will see your mistakes broken into categories. You simply need to click on your errors to see the suggestion.

Grammar Checking

It has a highly effective grammar-checking feature that can greatly benefit writers and bloggers. It has very high accuracy which was quite surprising coming from an automated tool. The free version checks for 150 critical grammar and spelling checks. The Premium version checks for 250+ more grammar and spelling checks to help you become a better writer. This feature is useful for people who are victims of making many mistakes during writing. Furthermore, it has a user interface that is both responsive and very simple to use. This is because Grammarly executes when the user begins writing and provides results when the writing stops.

Tone Detection

Grammarly checks your writing for tone so that your communications are clear and won’t be interpreted in the wrong way. The free version of Grammarly will show you an emoji corresponding to the tone of your writing. The premium version will even offer suggestions on how to rewrite your text for a better tone.

Integrations

One of the best features of Grammarly is that it works flawlessly with Google Chrome. Simply install the Grammarly Chrome plugin and start letting Grammarly correct your writing across the internet including in Gmail and Google Docs. Grammarly also integrates with Microsoft Word, Goo

Plagiarism Checker

Plagiarism checking is a Grammarly Premium feature. It can successfully check more than eight billion web pages when it is used to make documents. This is good for making data both standard and unique.

Suggestions for Vocabulary Enhancement

The application has an excellent database of vocabulary. It gives suggestions to improve the usage of vocabulary as you type. This feature is useful for people who have the habit of repeating some words when preparing documents.

A Review of Grammarly’s Pros/Cons

Grammarly Pros

• Integrates into Google Chrome so you don’t need to do anything else to get feedback.
• Excellent grammar proofreading with an extensive online knowledge base.
• Extremely useful for non-English speakers.
• Free version checks for over 100 different grammar rules (Premium does over 400).

Grammarly Cons

• Grammarly Premium costs $30/mo ($12/mo for an annual plan) which some users may balk at.
• Proofreading is still necessary since Grammarly will not catch every mistake.

What Grammarly Checks For

Grammarly checks for three main things: grammar, spelling, and vocabulary.

• Grammar: Grammarly checks your text for over 150 grammar rules (over 250 if you get Premium). It can check everything from subject-verb agreement to article use to modifier placement.
• Spelling: Spell checkers have been around for a long time, but Grammarly takes spell checking to another level. Their algorithm spots erroneous use of lose/loose, affect/effect, lie/lay, there/their/they’re and many other commonly confused words.
• Vocabulary: In addition to the grammar and spell checking, Grammarly will also suggest synonyms that it thinks will make your writing more powerful by analyzing the content as you write.
• Plagiarism: One of Grammarly’s unique features is its ability to automatically check for plagiarism within your work so that you know immediately whether you need to include citations or redo the writing.

Grammarly Premium Price

The Grammarly cost for a premium package is $30/month (or $12/month if you buy the annual package) which offers additional features you can’t find in the free version or the Grammarly Chrome plugin. However, you can get 20% off of Grammarly Premium by using this link. The features that are found in the premium version vs the free version can be seen in the table below:

Premium customers have even seen dramatic results over the free version:

• 99% of students see improved writing grades
• 76% of customers find writing more enjoyable
• 85% of customers are stronger writers

Overall, the premium version offers some great features that definitely help people become better writers.

Grammarly Free vs. Premium

We used the free version of Grammarly for years until recently upgrading. We are so glad that we did. Grammarly Premium makes us better writers while the free version just checks for basic grammar and spelling mistakes. First, let’s break down the differences between the free and premium versions. The main differences are the addition of full-sentence rewrites, word choice, tone suggestions, and plagiarism detection. This makes a huge difference. In our test article, the free version of Grammarly found only 9 issues while the premium version found a whopping 53 issues. Watch the comparison below.

How to Use Grammarly to Check Grammar

Using Grammarly was a breeze. All I did was go to their website and create an account. I also added the Google Chrome plugin when I registered. Once I had an account, using Grammarly was very natural. The interface is very similar to Google Docs. When you first log in, you can either create a new document or upload an existing one. Once you have created a new document you can click on it and be taken to the editor. I used two paragraphs from one of my other sites, Viola Central, as an example: As you can see from the image above, Grammarly does a great job of capturing the key errors. While it is not 100% (it says my use of the word “viola” might be incorrect and could possibly be “villa”), it certainly works well enough. The interface is very similar when using the Google Chrome plugin. Grammarly will check for grammar errors and typos while you type, underlining words and phrases it thinks may have issues.

Testing Grammarly

In order to show you how powerful Grammarly’s algorithms are and prepare this Grammarly review, I have taken a sample poorly written paragraph from an English class website at Penn State University. According to the PSU website, the paragraph has the circled four errors that were identified by human proofreaders: Let’s see how Grammarly did: Wow! Grammarly identified more errors than the human did and actually offered suggestions.

How Does Grammarly Compare With Competitors?

Grammarly vs Ginger

Grammarly’s closest competitor is Ginger Software. Like Grammarly, Ginger offers a Google Chrome and Microsoft Office plugin in addition to the online portal. They are also free. In fact, the offer plenty of options for which devices you can use Ginger on including: Windows app, iOS, Android, Chrome extension, Safari extension. I personally prefer Grammarly’s online interface over Ginger’s. Grammarly immediately shows you the errors on the right-hand side of the screen whereas Ginger forces you to scroll over the word/phrase.

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Grammarly vs Hemingway

Hemingway is another app that can be used for checking your writing. However, it does this in a different way than Grammarly. While Grammarly will point out specific grammar issues, Hemingway will focus on the bigger picture of your writing. Hemingway will give you feedback on whether sentences are hard to read and some general stats about your writing, such as how many adverbs you used, but it won’t give you much else. You are on your own to make the corrections it suggests. We love Hemingway as a writing platform, but cannot recommend it as a good grammar checker.

Other Benefits of Grammarly

Grammarly boasts of providing consumers with a ton of benefits, including:

• It has the potential of scanning for up to one hundred and fifty common and even advanced grammar rules. This is very good as it only shows its robustness and how thorough it is
• It is designed to even check for plagiarism and go the extra mile to create references that it considers the text was lifted from
• It has free online services i.e. community-driven forum, reference guide and a thesaurus
• The application is available as a plug-in for Microsoft Word
• The premium version contextually scans texts for typos and mistakes and proceeds to provide suggestions to improve the writing
• It has 100% money back guarantee. This means that consumers can have their money reimbursed if they are not happy with the product.
• It allows people to utilize either UK or US standards
• Its features are customizable
• It can be used for by schools, businesses, and individuals

GrammarlyGO

GrammarlyGO is Grammarly’s foray into AI-rewriting and writing tools to compete with market leaders like ChatGPT and Jasper.ai. It is a great tool the comes included with Grammarly’s plans. Read our full review of GrammarlyGO to learn more.

Final Words

After using Grammarly for the past month, I have come to love this grammar checker which is why I wanted to write this Grammarly review. As the example above proved, Grammarly actually performs better than a human proofreader in most cases. However, Grammarly does offer human proofreading in their Premium service at 2 cents per word for 24-hour turnaround. Hopefully, this Grammarly review proved why this free grammar checker is amazing. Here’s a quick recap:

Pros

• Integrated within your browser so you don’t need to do anything else to get feedback
• Excellent grammar proofreading with an extensive online knowledgebase
• Extremely useful for non-English speakers
• Free version checks for over 100 different grammar rules (Premium does up to 250)

Cons

• The Premium version costs $30/mo which some users may balk at.
• Proofreading is still necessary since Grammarly will not catch every mistake.

Go ahead, give Grammarly a free trial and see if you don’t feel the same as me! I hope this Grammarly review has convinced you.