ProWritingAid vs Grammarly: Which Is Better for You?

Even the best writers need to edit their work. But it’s always tricky to figure out what to improve when you’re editing on your own.

That’s where grammar checkers come in. They can serve as fresh eyes to help you correct your mistakes, improve the flow of your sentences, and make your writing shine.

The two top grammar checkers in the market are ProWritingAid and Grammarly. So which one is right for you?

In this article, we’ll give you an overview of the features that each grammar checker offers and help you decide which one is worth your money.

Quick ProWritingAid Review

ProWritingAid is a popular grammar checking tool that helps millions of users enhance their writing. Here’s a quick review of ProWritingAid’s features.

How Does ProWritingAid Work?

ProWritingAid is a software that will check your work for grammar and spelling mistakes, as well as ways to improve the style and readability of your writing.

You can use ProWritingAid with anything you write, from a simple email to a full-length book. As long as it involves words, ProWritingAid can help.

Once you start typing, the software will point out suggested improvements you might not spot on your own, such as typos, punctuation errors, weak adjectives, repetitive words, and so much more. You can then decide which suggestions to apply and which ones to dismiss.

It also includes a built-in plagiarism checker that will let you know how much your writing overlaps with existing written work.

You can use ProWritingAid as either a desktop app or a web editor. You can also integrate ProWritingAid into your favorite writing software, like Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Final Draft, or Scrivener.

ProWritingAid additionally comes with educational material, like in-app explanations, video lessons, quizzes, and interviews with famous writers. That way, you can improve your own writing abilities every time you use the grammar checker.

What Are ProWritingAid’s Top Features?

The software will ask you upfront what type of document you’re working on. That way, it can give you context-sensitive style suggestions.

You can choose from the following document types, many of which include various sub-options:

• General
• Academic (sub-options: Academic Essay, Abstract, Admissions Letter, and more)
• Business (sub-options: Cover Letter, Email, Case Study, and more)
• Technical
• Creative (sub-options: Nonfiction, Fantasy, Historical Fiction, and more)
• Casual
• Web (sub-options: General Web Copy, Short Web Article, and more)
• Script

Once you’ve selected your document type, you can start writing. ProWritingAid offers 20 different writing reports that analyze your writing and help you understand where you can improve.

Here’s a quick overview of what these reports offer:

• Writing Style Report: highlights areas of your text that a copyeditor would tell you to revise, including passive voice, overuse of adverbs, repeated sentence starts, and more
• Grammar Report: uses advanced AI to catch grammar and punctuation mistakes, as well as misused words such as “adverse” vs “averse”
• Overused Words Report: highlights words that weaken your writing, such as “very,” “just,” and “maybe”
• Clichés and Redundancies Report: picks up on tired phrases and sentences so you can find fresh ways to express your ideas
• Sticky Sentence Report: looks for glue words that hold a sentence together without adding meaning, such as “and,” “in,” “the,” “of,” etc.
• Readability Report: uses the top readability measures out there, such as the Flesch Reading Ease Score, to highlight sentences that will be hard for readers to understand
• Repeats Check: catches words or phrases that you use repeatedly in the same paragraph or throughout the document
• Sentence Length Report: ensures you’re using varying sentence lengths to engage the reader, instead of too many long sentences or too many choppy sentences
• Pronoun Report: looks at the percentage of pronouns in your writing, so you can replace repetitive pronouns with more dynamic wording
• Transition Report: looks for transition words like “similarly,” “nevertheless,” and “as a result,” so you can make sure you’re using enough transitions to guide your reader through the document
• Consistency Check: makes sure you’re using consistent hyphenation, capitalization, punctuation, and more
• Pacing Check: monitors the balance between fast-paced sections, such as dialogue and character action, versus slow-paced sections, such as introspection and backstory
• Dialogue Tags Check: analyzes all your dialogue tags, such as “She said” or “He explained,” to make sure they’re necessary and effective
• Contextual Thesaurus Report: allows you to explore a wide range of synonyms for any given word, so you can use the most effective word choices possible
• Diction Report: looks for unnecessarily verbose phrases, such as “has the ability to” instead of “can,” to make your writing clearer
• Alliteration Report: highlights all instances of alliteration in your text to help you use rhythm and sound more effectively
• Homonym Check: points out misused homophones, such as “weather” vs “whether”
• Acronym Check: creates a list of all the acronyms you use in your text so you can create a glossary
• House Style Check: allows you to create customized reports to look for specific issues based on the topic you’re writing about
• Plagiarism Report: checks your work against over a billion web pages and articles to make sure you’ve cited any content you’re using

Together, all these reports give you a wealth of different suggestions for improving your work. You can choose the ones that will help you communicate more clearly and maximize the power of your writing.

Quick Grammarly Review

Grammarly is another popular grammar checker. It’s more expensive than ProWritingAid, and it offers many similar features and options.

How Does Grammarly Work?

Like ProWritingAid, Grammarly checks your writing in real time as you type.

Grammarly focuses primarily on catching errors, such as typos, grammatical mistakes, and misused punctuation.

In addition to catching basic mistakes, Grammarly also offers style suggestions, though its style reports aren’t as comprehensive as ProWritingAid’s. It includes suggestions related to wordy sentences, repetitive words, incorrect comma usage, and other similar fixes.

You can integrate Grammarly with many major apps, like Chrome, Firefox, Google Docs, and Microsoft Word. Unlike ProWritingAid, however, Grammarly doesn’t allow integration with Scrivener or Final Draft.

What Are Grammarly’s Top Features?

When you start a new document in Grammarly, you can set your writing goals in advance, so the software knows what kinds of suggestions to focus on. You can select from the following categories:

• Intent (e.g. inform, describe, convince, or tell a story)
• Audience (e.g. general, knowledgeable, or expert)
• Formality (e.g. formal, informal)
• Domain (e.g. general, academic, business, email, creative, or casual)

Once you’ve set your goals, you can start writing. Grammarly offers the following popular features:

• Spell check: checks for spelling errors and lets you add words to a custom personal dictionary if needed
• Grammar check: looks for common grammar and punctuation mistakes
• Readability score: looks at factors like word length, sentence length, and vocabulary choices to create a readability score from 1 to 100
• Writing style suggestions: provides word choice suggestions based on the intended audience and tone of your work
• Plagiarism detection: compares your writing to other webpages and articles to give you a plagiarism score
• Tone adjustments: helps you strike the right tone in your writing
• Writing assistant: includes an AI-powered writing assistant that proposes new suggestions for you

ProWritingAid vs Grammarly: Points of Comparison

So now that you have a quick overview of how each software works, how should you decide which one to use?

There are several factors you might want to consider. One is the quality of analysis available. If you want to improve your writing on a deeper level, you want to use an app that can make more sophisticated suggestions.

Another factor that matters to a lot of users is price. If you want to invest in your writing, but you’re on a tight budget, the different price options can make a huge difference.

In this section, we’ll look at how ProWritingAid and Grammarly compare to help you make your choice.

The Key Differences Between ProWritingAid vs Grammarly

Here are the four most important differences between ProWritingAid vs Grammarly.

Difference 1: Quality of Analysis

With 20 different writing reports, ProWritingAid offers a more detailed analysis of your writing than all the other grammar checkers on the market.

It goes beyond simply looking for writing errors and actually helps you truly enhance the style and structure of your writing.

For example, the Echo report highlights any repeated words or similar sentence structures you have in your writing. This feature will improve your stylistic choices on a more nuanced level than simply catching mistakes.

It will pick up all the errors that you can’t see on your own, which you would normally have to hire a professional editor for.

Meanwhile, Grammarly focuses mostly on catching basic mistakes, like grammar and punctuation. It can turn bad writing into decent writing, but it’s not geared toward making deeper improvements that turn decent writing into great writing.

Difference 2: Price

In terms of sheer bang for your buck, ProWritingAid wins by a mile.

Both ProWritingAid and Grammarly offer free versions that let you use the basic features of the editing tool, but you need to upgrade to the Premium plan to access every tool.

You can use every ProWritingAid report in the free version, with a word count limit of up to 500 words. More in-depth reports are behind a paywall in Grammarly’s Premium version.

Grammarly offers three individual payment plans for its Premium version:

• Monthly at $30
• Quarterly at $20/month billed as $60
• Annual at $12/month billed as $144

The ProWritingAid Premium plan, in comparison, is more affordable. Check out our most current pricing here. There’s also a discount for students, and you can start with a free trial to test out the Premium option before you pay for the yearly subscription.

Even without the student discount, ProWritingAid is less expensive than Grammarly’s annual plan. It’s a lot more value for a much smaller price.

Difference 3: Long-Form Content

Grammarly might work fine for short emails and blog posts, but ProWritingAid is much easier to use with longer content.

If you’re writing a book, for example, you need to copy and paste each section manually into the Grammarly app. This is because Grammarly’s software doesn’t handle long content well. The app runs much more slowly once you pass more than 10,000 words, and it maxes out after about 20,000 words.

On the other hand, ProWritingAid can scan up to 100,000 words at a time without a significant reduction in speed. That’s why ProWritingAid is especially popular with fiction writers.

It also lets you integrate with apps like Scrivener and Final Draft, as well as Microsoft Word. ProWritingAid Everywhere will work with any app you have downloaded on your computer. That way, you can check ProWritingAid’s suggestions, make your edits, and save the file directly in your favorite writing app.

Difference 4: Educational Materials

Unlike Grammarly, ProWritingAid offers a wealth of educational materials. You can see in-app explanations of each suggestion so you understand the root of the issue.

For example, if one of your sentences has been flagged as a sticky sentence and you don’t know what that means, you can read an explanation with a single click.

If you’ve noticed that you struggle with a particular grammar rule, such as when to use colons versus semicolons, you can watch videos on the topic and even quiz yourself later.

There’s even a Writer’s Resource library full of articles and eBooks, which you can download and reference later.

If you want to improve your writing ability, using ProWritingAid is a great way to fix your errors quickly while also building long-term writing skills as you go.

User Opinions on ProWritingAid vs Grammarly

It’s clear that we think ProWritingAid is the best grammar checker tool available, but of course, we’re a little biased.

Luckily, it’s not just us. Read what recent users have to say about how ProWritingAid compares to Grammarly:

Many award-winning authors, including K.M. Weiland, Talia Hibbert, and 21-time New York Times bestselling author Jerry Jenkins, also use ProWritingAid for their own work.

Conclusion on ProWritingAid vs Grammarly

There you have it—a complete rundown of the differences between ProWritingAid and Grammarly. Here’s a quick summary:

• Both grammar checkers check for grammar errors, spelling mistakes, plagiarism, and other basic writing issues
• ProWritingAid offers 20 reports with deep analysis and suggestions for improving your writing, while Grammarly’s analysis doesn’t go into the same level of detail
• The ProWritingAid Premium plan is much more affordable than the Grammarly Premium plan
• ProWritingAid provides quick analysis of long-form content, making it great for fiction writers, while Grammarly maxes out at around 10,000–20,000 words
• ProWritingAid also includes educational materials to help you improve your own writing ability over time

Now that you’re armed with all the facts, it’s time to see for yourself. You can sign up for a ProWritingAid subscription today.