5 Free Alternatives to Grammarly

Primary keyword: free Grammarly alternatives
Slug: free-grammarly-alternatives
Meta description (146 chars): 5 free Grammarly alternatives that check grammar, rewrite awkward sentences and tighten your writing — LanguageTool, Hemingway, QuillBot and more.
Published: 2026-11-14
Live URL: https://www.toolsofweb.com/blog/free-grammarly-alternatives

Grammarly Pro costs $12 a month on the annual plan ($144 a year) or $30 a month if you pay monthly, according to Grammarly's own pricing page. These five free alternatives cover the same ground — grammar checking, sentence rewrites and readability — without a subscription, and most of them work in your browser with no sign-up.

Try the free Word Counter

Use ToolsOfWeb's Word Counter to check length, reading time and sentence count before you run a draft through any grammar checker — free, no sign-up, and your text never leaves your browser.

Why does Grammarly cost $12 a month — and what do you actually get?

Grammarly Pro — the paid plan, renamed from Premium in late 2024 — costs $12 a month billed annually, $20 a month billed quarterly, or $30 a month billed monthly, per Grammarly's pricing page. It adds full-sentence rewrites, tone suggestions and a plagiarism checker on top of the free plan's basic spelling and grammar checks.

The free plan is genuinely useful: it catches spelling mistakes and basic grammar errors as you type, in the browser extension and in Google Docs. What you pay for is the next layer — rewriting a stiff sentence, adjusting tone for a client email, and checking a paper for plagiarism. Most people do not need all three at once, and that is the point of this list: each free tool below covers one of those paid features well, so you can mix and match instead of paying $144 a year.

What is the best free Grammarly alternative overall?

LanguageTool is the closest free replacement for Grammarly. Its free plan checks grammar, spelling and punctuation in more than 30 languages, runs in your browser with no sign-up, and its core is open source — you can run it on your own server. The free plan caps how much text you can check at once, but for writing it is enough.

LanguageTool started as an open-source project in 2003, and that history shows in how it behaves: no dark patterns, no account wall for basic checks, and browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari. Where it beats Grammarly free is languages — Grammarly is English-first, while LanguageTool has deep rule sets for German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch and Polish, among others. Where it falls short is the paid extras: advanced style checks, a personal style guide and unlimited AI rephrasing sit behind Premium, which costs about $5 a month on the annual plan. For straight grammar checking, though, the free tier is the strongest single replacement on this list.

Which free tool makes your writing clearer, not just correct?

Hemingway Editor is the readability coach. Its free web app needs no sign-up and no account: paste your text and it highlights long sentences in red, hard-to-read sentences in yellow, adverbs in blue and passive voice in green, then gives your draft a readability grade. It does not check grammar or spelling — pair it with LanguageTool for that.

For tightening drafts it is genuinely useful and completely free in the browser. Hemingway works because it shows you the problem instead of fixing it for you. A sentence highlighted red is too long; split it. A paragraph full of green is passive; rewrite it in the active voice. That discipline is what made the tool popular with bloggers and copywriters, and the free web version has stayed free for years. There is a desktop app for a one-time $19.99 if you want to work offline, and a Plus plan at $10 a month that adds AI sentence rewrites — but the core readability check costs nothing.

How do I rewrite a clumsy sentence for free?

QuillBot is the rewrite specialist. Its free plan paraphrases up to 125 words per request in Standard and Fluency modes, with no card and no subscription, and it also includes a free grammar checker and a summarizer. Paste a paragraph that reads like it was written by a committee, pick a mode, and QuillBot gives you a cleaner version.

The limit is the point: 125 words per request is plenty for one awkward paragraph, and there is no cap on how many requests you can make. What QuillBot is not is a full grammar checker, so do not use it as your only tool — run LanguageTool first for the grammar pass, then QuillBot for the sentences that still sound wrong. Used that way, the two free plans together cover almost everything Grammarly Pro does for rewriting, at zero cost.

What if I want a free checker built into tools I already use?

Microsoft Editor is free with a Microsoft account and built into Word for the web, Outlook and the Edge browser — grammar and spelling checks where you write, with nothing to install. Slick Write is a web app that is free with no account, and it checks grammar, style and flow with statistics on sentence variety, passive voice and adverb frequency.

Editor is the low-friction choice if you already live in Microsoft's apps; it underlines mistakes as you type and suggests fixes inline. Slick Write is the better second opinion: paste a finished draft and it shows you patterns — too many long sentences in a row, the same word repeated, a paragraph that drifts — that a simple underline never reveals. Neither asks for payment, and neither needs a browser extension to work.

Which free Grammarly alternative should you pick?

If you pick just one, pick LanguageTool — it replaces the most of Grammarly. If you write for a living, use the free stack: LanguageTool for grammar, QuillBot for rewrites, Hemingway for readability. The table below compares all five so you can match the tool to the job.

Tool	Best for	What is free	The catch
LanguageTool	Everyday grammar checking	Grammar and spelling in 30+ languages	Per-check character limit on the free plan
Hemingway Editor	Readability and clear sentences	Full web app, no sign-up	No grammar or spell checking
QuillBot	Rewriting awkward sentences	Paraphrasing up to 125 words per request	Not a full grammar checker
Microsoft Editor	Checking inside Word, Outlook and Edge	Grammar and spelling with a free Microsoft account	Needs a Microsoft account
Slick Write	A second opinion on a finished draft	Full grammar, style and flow checks, no account	Paste-in web app only, no extension

Before any of them, run your draft through the Word Counter to check length and reading time, and use the Character Counter when a form or post has a hard limit.

FAQs

Is Grammarly free?
Yes. Grammarly's free plan costs nothing and catches basic spelling and grammar mistakes as you type. The paid plan, Grammarly Pro, costs $12 a month billed annually ($144 a year) or $30 a month billed monthly, and adds full-sentence rewrites, tone suggestions and a plagiarism checker.

Is LanguageTool really free?
Yes. LanguageTool's free Basic plan checks grammar, spelling and punctuation in more than 30 languages, with no sign-up needed for basic checks in the browser. The free plan limits how much text you can check at once; Premium, at about $5 a month annually, raises that limit and adds advanced style checks.

Can free grammar checkers replace Grammarly Premium?
For most people, yes — with one condition. No single free tool does everything Premium does, so combine two: LanguageTool for grammar and QuillBot for rewrites covers the paid features most writers actually use. Add Hemingway for readability and you have the full stack at zero cost.

Do these free tools keep or sell my writing?
It depends on the tool, so read its privacy policy before pasting anything sensitive. LanguageTool states that customer inputs are no longer used to train its models. As a rule, never paste passwords, private client work or unpublished writing into any cloud checker — check it locally first.

Which free Grammarly alternative is best for students?
LanguageTool plus Hemingway. LanguageTool catches the grammar mistakes that cost marks, Hemingway flags the long, tangled sentences that make essays hard to read, and both are free with no sign-up. Check your word count first with the Word Counter so essays land inside the limit.

Try the free Word Counter

Open the Word Counter and paste your draft to check words, characters, sentences and reading time — free, with no sign-up and nothing uploaded. Clean up the text first with the Text Cleaner, fix capitalisation with the Case Converter, and read the word counter guide for how the counts are calculated.