Grammarly Grammar Checker Review 2024

While video content is slowly becoming a cornerstone of most websites, the written word hasn’t vanished. Whether you are starting a blog, a simple brochure website, or an online store, you have to write something. And if you want to succeed, your written text has to be perfect.

Not everyone is an expert, and it is hard to compete with native language speakers when writing professional content. That’s where grammar tools come to the rescue. In this review, we will explore Grammarly, one of the most popular grammar tools on the market.

Detailed Grammarly review

• Who should use the Grammarly grammar tool?
• Is Grammarly easy to use?
• How to use Grammarly
• The plagiarism detector
• What do you get with the free version?
• What do you get with the premium version?
• Comparison table
• FAQs

Who should use the Grammarly grammar tool?

Grammarly is a tool worth considering both by beginners and experts. First-time bloggers will cherish the help of an AI instructor that will guide them in the right direction. Students will have it easier when writing papers for their strict professors, and professionals will be able to relax knowing that Grammarly will pick on their typos. 

Even native speakers can use help sometimes. Do you need a comma in a specific sentence? Grammarly will take care of that. Can’t remember a particular word? No worries; Grammarly will offer you a synonym that you can use.

So, no matter your expertise and the number of words you type daily, you can benefit from Grammarly.

Is Grammarly easy to use?

Grammarly aims to deliver a perfect grammar tool to the broad masses. To make it easily accessible, the interface must be clean and easy to use. The good news is that the designers have accomplished this challenging task and have created a minimalistic interface that is easy to understand both for beginners and professional writers.

The free plan can be set up instantly, and if you decide to dive deeper and get extra features, you can be assured that the payment and registration process is relatively straightforward.

The user interface is clean and minimalistic. There are only four main links included in the main menu located on the left-hand side of the screen. Here you can do several things:

• Start working on a new document;
• Upload an existing document and let Grammarly check it;
• Modify your account information and settings;
• Manage apps; and
• Log out.

However, while this is the main dashboard, it won’t be your go-to address when it comes to Grammarly. Let’s examine how versatile this tool is and the areas where it can help you.

How to use Grammarly

Grammarly is known for its integrations into popular browsers, other popular desktop software, and even mobile devices.

The Dashboard – handle your text through an online editor

Before we get into details about the extension, let’s see how Grammarly works in its natural environment.

Just as you would open a new document in Microsoft Office or Google Docs, you can quickly set up a new document from your Grammarly dashboard. The simple text editor allows you to type your text, paste it from a clipboard or even upload an existing record stored on your computer or any cloud service.

This is where the fun begins. Grammarly will display a popup window with a couple of questions as soon as you share a text to process. Here you can set:

• Audience – Let Grammarly know who your audience is. Are you writing for a general audience, or is this a scientific paper you’re working on?
• Formality – Do you want to use slang or wish to be formal?
• Domain – Are you writing an email to a friend, writing a college paper, or a business proposal?
• Tone – Should this text feel friendly, analytical, or maybe optimistic?
• Intent – Do you want the text to be informative or perhaps funny?

These five premium options will let Grammarly know what your plans are and who your audience is. Based on these options, AI will tailor the suggestions to your needs and will be able to offer the correct pointers.

For example, if you write a business proposal, Grammarly will automatically recognize all of your slang and street language. It will mark it in the text and suggest changing the sentences to make them better suited for a business proposal. 

On the other hand, if you’re writing an email to your friend, you do not want Grammarly to recommend technical terms and synonyms that are not usually used among a general audience. 

Now that Grammarly has established the evaluation parameters, you will see your score in the upper right corner of the page. The text will be underlined in several different colors, letting you know what kind of suggestions have been added. 

The free version of the tool enables you to check punctuation, grammar, and spelling. The premium version adds things like:

• Clarity-focused sentence rewrites;
• Tone adjustments;
• Plagiarism detection;
• Word choice;
• Formality level;
• Fluency; and
• Additional advanced suggestions.

The best way to fix your text is to slowly start reading it from the very start and check the colorized spots. Let Grammarly show you its suggestions, which can be accepted or denied with a single click.

The more you work with the tool, the more it will learn about your writing style. That means that Grammarly will start recognizing your mistakes and will allow you to fix those through the entire document quickly.

Install the add-on and have Grammarly always active in your browser

Sometimes, you will not want to upload your text to the Grammarly dashboard just to check a couple of sentences. You will want the app to recognize what you write in your browser.

Luckily, Grammarly comes with a powerful extension that sits in the corner of every page you visit. It can work in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Internet Explorer. If you enable the add-on and write something, Grammarly will analyze the text and make suggestions on almost every page you visit.

This feature is perfect in multiple situations:

• Blogging – If you’re writing your article in WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or any other free website builder, Grammarly will help you with the content without leaving the text editor.
• Email – You don’t have to leave your email tool to check your written text. For example, if you open Gmail and start composing, Grammarly will be there waiting for you.

• Social Media – No matter which social media option you’re using, the powerful artificial intelligence will be able to handle your writing.
• Google Docs – although still in the beta version, Grammarly works nicely with Google Docs.

Although the browser extension is quite powerful and works almost on all sites, please note that it does not work in all situations. For example, if you’re using lesser-known SaaS products via Chrome, it may happen that Grammarly does not recognize its editor. You will have to copy your text to the dashboard in these situations and check your text there before copying it back to the editor.

Grammarly works on your smartphone as well

Do you need to check the text on your phone? Just install the iOS or Android keyboard, and let Grammarly correct your text on any phone you own.

This may feel redundant for those who use smartphones to view the latest Tik Tok videos and chat with their buddies. However, for anyone who uses a phone to communicate with business partners or school, you will love the fact that Grammarly will catch all of your grammar, punctuation, and other mistakes on the go and fix them before you embarrass yourself.

Need your text checked on desktop apps?

Similar to the browser extension, the Windows or Mac add-ons will help you correct any document on your computer.

The most common uses are Microsoft Word or Outlook, where Grammarly will integrate and let you check your text without leaving the apps.

The plagiarism detector – make sure your text is unique

With so much text available online and the increasing number of bloggers, the battle against plagiarized content becomes nearly impossible.

Whether you need to check what your colleague wrote or make sure that the paper you’re about to send to your teacher is unique, Grammarly’s plagiarism checker is here to help.

As soon as you hit the button to check for plagiarism, artificial intelligence will scan your text and compare it to millions of similar texts that are found online. In a matter of seconds, you will get a simple report showing you the percentage of copied text.

Before you start screaming when Grammarly marks part of your text as plagiarized, you should know that it is almost impossible to have a perfect score here. Why? Since your copy is scrutinized and checked against literally millions of pages, it is enough just to have a common phrase in your text recognized. So, having something assessed as having up to 5% of plagiarized content is not worrisome.

On the other hand, if you find a couple of consecutive sentences marked as plagiarized, chances are that the text is stolen from another source.

What’s great about this tool is that everything it finds will be automatically linked to the original site. You can quickly check to see if it’s just the phrase that was identical or the entire paragraph was copied from another source.

Grammarly will also identify the number of sources. So, even if your text has just fragments of copied text, it will recognize them and tie them to the same original source that you can quickly check.

Plagiarism example

To show you how the plagiarism tool works, I took the introduction from one of our latest blog articles and copied it to Grammarly.

After about five seconds, the tool reported 37% plagiarized content.

As you can see from the screenshot, the entire paragraph was recognized correctly as content from our blog. I was first shocked to see that the rest of the content was not recognized. Then, I realized that the problem was that the content was published only a couple of days ago, and it was probably not indexed properly yet.

Then I chose an older article to test this theory. This article has had enough time to be indexed, so I took a paragraph from it and placed it into Grammarly.

This time, the content was entirely recognized. You can see that from the screenshot which shows 100% plagiarism, and it linked the content directly to our article. It also shows that the content has only one match, which is also important as that means that there were no other identical paragraphs found anywhere on the Internet.

What do you get with the free version?

If you’re just starting with a grammar tool, you will love the fact that Grammarly comes with a free plan. It’s more than enough to check your text occasionally and comes with the following tools that will check and fix your:

• Spelling;
• Grammar; and
• Punctuation.

It might come as a surprise that the free version works on all described devices and add-ons, so you can use it in your preferred browser, as a desktop app, or your mobile phone. It’s worth noting that you will still only receive access to essential functions on those platforms.

The free version is tied to one person, and you can’t share the account with your colleagues.

What do you get with the premium version?

The premium version comes with robust checks that you will definitely need if you’re writing on an everyday basis. But is it worth upgrading/paying?

Along with spelling, grammar, and punctuation, the premium version will also check for consistency in your writing. This means that the AI will automatically recognize if you repeat yourself and suggest that you use synonyms where possible. The premium version also comes with:

• Conciseness – Make every sentence easy to understand and follow.
• Clarity-focused sentence rewrites – Edit long and hard-to-read sentences.
• Formatting – Convert long lists into bulletins.
• Compelling vocabulary – Find synonyms and make the text more vivid.
• Lively sentence variety – Find monotonous passages and quickly rewrite them.
• Confident writing – Identify mistakes, and make your sentence sound more confident.
• Politeness – Eliminate phrases that sound harsh, and come up with something more polite.
• Formality level – Make sure you have the appropriate tone in your message.
• Inclusive language – Sounds respectful and current even if you’re in a hurry.

The premium version offers advanced suggestions across all devices and add-ons.

If you need access for more users and extra features, you can choose to upgrade to the Business plan.

Comparison table

	Grammarly	ProWritingAid	Linguix
Free plan	Yes	Yes	No
Premium version	From $11.66/month	From $20/month	From $8/month
Plagiarism checker	Yes	Yes	Yes
Translator	No	No	No
Integrations	Yes	Yes	Yes
Smartphone version	Yes	No	No

FAQs

Conclusion

Everyone can write. Everyone can start a blog. However, a few grammar and spelling mistakes, occasional commas, plagiarism, and a couple of synonyms can make a difference between a piece that no one will ever read and the one that will rank high on Google and reach thousands of people.

Since it’s complicated and time-consuming to make it on your own (and quite expensive to hire an expert to manually edit your every text), Grammarly is definitely worth it.

If you’re not sure if you need it, I strongly suggest getting the free plan. After a couple of weeks, you will notice the difference in your work process and decide if you need the premium version. No matter what you choose, Grammarly is an excellent tool that helps millions of users worldwide and can quickly become the tool you can’t live without.