Grammarly vs. ProWritingAid Review: Which One Is Better? [2021 Review]

1. Interface & Design

You won’t be able to take maximum advantage of any tool if its interface is not user-friendly. So don’t forget to check with design and interface before investing in any proofreading tool. Let’s find out how good Grammarly and ProWritingAid are in terms of ease of use.

Grammarly

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.

Google Chrome Extension

Grammarly has a Google Chrome plugin that plugins into most forms on the internet automatically so that you can check your grammar as you go. The Chrome plugin also auto-corrects your writing as you type, so you edit less later.

Microsoft Word Editor

The Word editor works just like Grammarly’s web editor, except that the suggestions are embedded directly in Word so you don’t have to leave your favorite writing software.

You can even use Microsoft’s Editor side-by-side with Grammarly’s editor.

ProWritingAid

Web Editor

Compared to Grammarly, ProWritingAid’s editor is not that clean. It shows your errors on the left side of the app. To see the suggestions, you need to click on a tiny arrow and then hover over the text to check the recommendations.

The web editor has a sidebar that shows how you can improve your writing based on various attributes, including grammar/spelling, sentence length, etc. The interface can take some getting used to since what qualifies as green/good is not always intuitive. For example, the green dots showing whether your writing meets that attribute do not line up in the center of the sidebar, so visually it can be confusing to understand when your writing meets the bar for that attribute.

Unlike Grammarly, suggested improvements are hidden behind a tab in the sidebar labeled “Improvements” which makes it hard to see how you can quickly edit the text.

Google Chrome Extension

Like Grammarly, ProWritingAid has a Chrome plugin that will show up in just about any text form on the web, including while we were editing this article.

The biggest disadvantage of ProWritingAid’s Google Chrome plugin that we found was the lack of auto-correction as you type. This is one thing that Grammarly has nailed. While it may seem trivial, Grammarly has built such robust AI that their auto-correction is almost always 100% correct.

Microsoft Word

ProWritingAid’s Office integration is very similar to Grammarly’s. ProWritingAid showed all of the same suggestions as their web editor and focused the “improvements” sidebar so that it was the first thing we saw.

Grammarly vs. ProWritingAid Result

Winner: Grammarly

Grammarly is the clear winner in terms of user interface since the sidebar often clutters ProWritingAid’s interface and hides the important information about suggested improvements.

2. Features

Both Grammarly and ProWritingAid support a variety of features to help you write better content.

Grammarly

Grammarly comes with both desktop and web versions and can be integrated into Microsoft Word. Moreover, you can use it on your Android and iOS phones. It supports both the free and paid versions. Some of the major features of Grammarly include:

• Grammar checker
• Plagiarism checker
• Spelling
• Punctuations
• Tone detector
• Word variety
• Style suggestions
• Repetitive words
• Weak adjectives
• Word variety

Note: The Free plan has limited features only. You will need to upgrade to the premium plan to access all the features.

ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid supports more features than Grammarly. However, it does not support the iOS and Android app. Similar to Grammarly, it comes with both free and paid versions. Some of the additional features of ProWritingAid which are missing in Grammarly include:

• Dialogue checks
• Context-sensitive style suggestions
• Homonyms
• Visualize Sentence
• Word Explorer
• Contextual Thesaurus Report

Grammarly vs. ProWritingAid Results

Winner: ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid offers more features than the free version of Grammarly, but similar levels of features as Grammarly Premium.

3. Accuracy

Accuracy is an important feature to look into when choosing a proofreading tool. After all, everyone wants their content to be correct.

Grammarly

We’ve been using Grammarly for years on our own websites and have found that it catches most errors. As you can see from the side-by-side comparison of the two products, Grammarly flagged more issues, including the British version of the word “fiber”.

When we evaluate the entire article, Grammarly produced fewer errors than ProWritingAid, but we accepted more of its recommendations. Thus, we can say, though Grammarly determines fewer errors, but is more accurate in its recommendations. 

ProWritingAid

Compared to Grammarly, ProWritingAid provided more suggestions throughout the entire test article, but we accepted more of the Grammarly corrections. 

When writing this article, we noticed ProWritingAid flagged the misspelling of “plugin” as you can see below, but none of the suggestions were accurate.

According to our testing, ProWritingAid seems like a better tool for fiction writers as it takes care of things like fragmented sentences and dialogue better than Grammarly.

ProWritingAid impressed us with its ability to remove fluff from our articles. We noticed how many filler words we used. For example, in this review, we included the following sentence at the beginning:

“For the purposes of this review,”

which ProWritingAid corrected to:

For this review,”

ProWritingAid did this on several occasions, and removing the fluff was always the best option.

Grammarly vs. ProWritingAid Result

Winner: Tie

Grammarly and ProWritingAid both have their strengths and weaknesses in terms of accuracy. While we accepted more of Grammarly’s suggestions, ProWritingAid offered a lot of helpful tips to improve the flow and readability of our writing.

4. Integrations

Grammarly

The Grammarly Chrome plugin works with most browser forms including email, WordPress, Google Docs, and more.

They also have plugins for Microsoft Word and Outlook. You can even download a desktop version of Grammarly for Windows or a mobile keyboard for your phone.

ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid has similar extensibility. The Chrome plugin works with most browser forms including email, WordPress, Google Docs, and more.

ProWritingAid also has Microsoft Word, Scrivener, Open Office, and other integrations.

Grammarly vs. ProWritingAid Result

Winner: ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid has more integrations than Grammarly.

5. Pricing

Pricing is also an important factor to consider when choosing a proofreading tool. Let’s compare how much these two tools cost.

Grammarly

Grammarly’s Google Chrome plugin is free, but only offers limited editing checks.

Grammarly Premium monthly plan costs $30 per month while the quarterly plan costs $20 per month. If you buy Grammarly premium for a year, you will need to pay an average of $12 per month which works out to $144. You can try out its free plan to find out whether or not you need to upgrade to the paid plan.

However, if you use this link, you can get 10% off Grammarly plans which leaves you with the following pricing:

ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid also offers a free Google Chrome plugin with limited checks.

ProWritingAid comes with four pricing plans. The one-year cost for ProWritingAid is $79, while the lifetime plan costs $399. However, you can get 20% off these plans with our special link. Like Grammarly, it also comes with a free trial plan so you can try that first.

ProWritingAid vs. Grammarly Result

Winner: ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid is far cheaper than Grammarly ($79 compared to $129 for an annual plan). However, you can use this link to get 10% off a Grammarly Premium account or learn how you can get 20% off of ProWritingAid here.

6. Customer Support

As technical issues might happen at any time, you must have immediate access to a support team. Let’s find out how proactively Grammarly and ProWritingAid handle problems of their users.

Grammarly

Grammarly offers 24/7 support via submitting a ticket and email. You can also visit their help center and go through the knowledge base to find an answer to your queries.

ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid support team is available from Monday to Friday between 8 am to 5 pm GMT. You can contact them via their “Contact us” page and email. They also have an FAQ page where you can find articles for specific technical issues.

7. Pros & Cons

Like every proofreading tool, Grammarly and ProWritingAid have some pros and cons. We have listed some major ones below. This section will help you make a better decision.

Grammarly Pros

• Grammarly underlines all the incorrect words and allows you to edit a document in real-time.
• The tool is quite user-friendly. Even beginners can use it without any prior training.
• It is designed to offer a quick check for your writing.
• Comparatively, it’s more accurate, especially for non-fiction writers.
• It gives you indirect account-based document storage.
• For more, check out our full Grammarly review.

Grammarly Cons

• Grammarly Chrome extension is not compatible with a few websites.
• Microsoft office is not supported on Mac.
• Though the majority of the mistakes suggested by Grammarly are correct, sometimes it catches wrong mistakes.
• The free version is only suitable for grammatical and spelling errors.

ProWritingAid Pros

• ProWritingAid supports more features than other proofreading editing tools available on the market.
• Based on your writing, it gives you more than 20 different reports for improvements.
• It is comparatively cheaper than other grammar checkers.
• ProWritingAid supports more integrations than other tools.

ProWritingAid Cons

• In comparison to Grammarly, it has slower editing, especially when you add a large segment of text to edit.
• ProWritingAid does not have a mobile application for Android and iOS.
• Plagiarism checker is available only for the premium plan.
• For more, check out our full ProWritingAid review.

Final Thoughts

We think Grammarly and ProWritingAid are both great grammar tools. Grammarly has a cleaner interface and identifies more issues, but ProWritingAid is cheaper and has more integrations than Grammarly Premium.

In this post, we compared Both Grammarly and ProWritingAid in terms of pricing, ease of use, features, customer support, and more. We’re confident that after going through this guide, you can better decide which tool is useful for you.  Check them out at the links below:

Grammarly: https://grammarly.com

ProWritingAid: https://prowritingaid.com/

FAQs

Can you use both ProWritingAid and Grammarly’s Chrome plugins together?

Yes! You can use both Grammarly and ProWritingAid‘s Google Chrome plugins at the same time. You will just see more errors and suggestions identified.

Below is an example of when the red-underlined words are Grammarly’s suggestions and yellow is ProWritingAid’s.

If there are overlapping suggestions, you will see a word or phrase double underlined.

Read More

• Grammarly Review
• ProWritingAid Review