Best Free Grammarly Alternatives for Browser, Word and Phone

LanguageTool is the closest free match to Grammarly, and it beats it on languages. It checks grammar, spelling and style in more than 30 languages, which makes it the pick for anyone who writes in English and another language.

It also runs in more places than most rivals. There are add-ons for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Opera, for Gmail, Outlook (beta), Apple Mail and Thunderbird, and for Google Docs, Word, Apple Pages and LibreOffice. Desktop apps exist for Mac and Windows, plus an iPhone app. The apps need a free account. LanguageTool says the browser add-on does not save your texts.

The free Basic plan has limits. Premium checks up to 150,000 characters per text field, while the free plan's limit is much lower (2,000 characters in LanguageTool's comparison table). Free users also get 3 sentence rephrases a day, and Premium adds more than 20,000 extra grammar, punctuation and style checks across seven languages. LanguageTool's pricing page shows Premium prices in your local currency at checkout.

What you lose vs Grammarly: generous AI rewriting on the free plan.

QuillBot is best known for paraphrasing, and that is where it beats Grammarly's free plan. Its App Store listing says the free version includes the Grammar Checker, 2 paraphraser modes, the Translator and the AI Detector at no cost.

Premium unlocks 10+ paraphrase modes and faster processing. On the US App Store it costs $19.99 a month, $79.99 for six months or $99.99 a year. The iPhone app adds an AI keyboard, including a Humanizer mode, so you can rewrite text in any app.

What you lose vs Grammarly: tone detection, and checks that pop up as you type everywhere on the web.

Sapling is a lighter grammar checker that sits inside the apps where most work writing happens: Chrome, Google Docs, Outlook and Word. The free plan gives basic writing suggestions and AI-detector checks of up to 2,000 characters per check, plus 20 saved text snippets.

There is a Chrome extension and add-ins for Google Docs, Outlook and Word. Pro costs $25 a month, or $12 a month billed yearly, and adds advanced suggestions, rephrasing, autocomplete in any app and checks of up to 100,000 characters. A free one-month Pro trial needs no card.

What you lose vs Grammarly: long-document checks and tone feedback on the free plan.

Wordtune, from AI21 Labs, limits its free AI features but not its grammar checks. The free Basic plan includes unlimited spelling corrections and grammar checks, 10 rewrites and AI suggestions a day and 3 AI summaries a month.

It works as a Chrome and Edge extension and as an iPhone app with an AI writing keyboard. Advanced costs $6.99 a month or $4.89 a month billed yearly. Unlimited costs $9.99 a month or $6.99 a month billed yearly.

What you lose vs Grammarly: Word, Google Docs and Firefox support, plus tone detection.

If you write in Google Docs, you may not need an extension at all. Docs underlines misspellings in red and grammar suggestions in blue, and you can accept or ignore each one.

Google's help page says spelling and grammar suggestions work in English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian. It costs nothing beyond a Google account. For more Docs tips, see how to strike through text in Google Docs.

What you lose vs Grammarly: style, clarity and tone feedback, and checks outside Docs.

Microsoft's grammar checker, called Microsoft Editor, is built into Word, Outlook and the Edge browser. Microsoft says you can sign in to Word for the web with a free Microsoft account to get basic spelling and grammar checking, in more than 20 languages.

A Microsoft 365 subscription adds refinements beyond the basics: clarity, conciseness, formality, vocabulary suggestions and readability statistics.

One change to know: the separate Microsoft Editor extensions for Edge and Chrome were retired on October 31, 2025. Microsoft says their writing features are now built into Edge's proofing tools, so Chrome users lost the free extension.

What you lose vs Grammarly: advanced suggestions without paying for Microsoft 365, and a Chrome extension.

ProWritingAid is built for people who write long: novelists, students and bloggers. Beyond grammar, it runs line-editing reports, and it offers story critiques and other feedback tools for fiction writers. It works on the web, in Google Docs and Microsoft Office, in a desktop editor and in browser and app integrations.

The free plan is a taster. It gives suggestions on 500 words at a time, line-editing reports up to twice a day on 500 words, and 10 rephrases a day. ProWritingAid only supports English (US, UK, Australian and Canadian).

Premium is $30 a month, or $10 a month billed yearly ($120). It is also one of the few writing tools sold as a lifetime licence: $399 for Premium or $699 for Premium Pro, a one-time cost. Yearly and lifetime plans can be refunded within three days.

What you lose vs Grammarly: a useful free plan for long documents, and other languages.

Hemingway Editor is not a grammar checker first. It highlights wordy sentences in yellow, harder ones in red, and flags adverbs, passive voice and complex words. That makes it great for blog posts, emails and reports where clarity matters more than commas. The Hemingway site also offers free online tools, including a grammar checker and a readability checker.

The Hemingway Editor desktop app for Mac and Windows costs $19.99, works offline, and can publish straight to WordPress or export to HTML, Markdown, Word or PDF. It does not include the newer AI features. Those are in Hemingway Editor Plus, from $8.33 a month ($100 a year) for 5,000 AI sentence rewrites a month, with a free two-week trial and no card needed.

What you lose vs Grammarly: in-app checks while you type in the browser.