Using an AI-powered editing tool can help you make your writing clearer and more effective. There are many useful writing tools to choose from, including Grammarly and Quillbot.
Grammarly is a popular AI-powered grammar checker that can help you strengthen your prose and correct your grammatical errors. Quillbot is a software that started out as a paraphrasing tool, but now also includes grammar-checking capabilities.
So, how do you decide whether to use Quillbot vs Grammarly?
In this article, we’ll give you an overview of the features that each grammar checker offers and help you decide which one is right for you.
What Is Quillbot?
Quillbot is an AI-powered writing tool that helps you paraphrase your writing. It rearranges the order of your words and substitutes some words for synonyms to create a new, grammatically correct sentence.
You can even choose from one of several writing “modes” to determine what kind of tone you’re looking for, such as standard, formal, and creative. For example, you would probably want to use a formal tone when writing a business letter and a creative tone when writing a short story.
Also, Quillbot lets you choose whether you want to expand or shorten your text. If you’re writing an essay with a specific word count target, this tool can help you hit it.
When Quillbot was founded in 2017, paraphrasing was its primary function. Since then, it’s expanded to also include a grammar checker, which scans your work for typos, grammar mistakes, and more.
Quillbot includes the following tools:
- A grammar checker: checks your work for errors
- A plagiarism checker: specifically geared toward checking academic papers
- The summarizer: lets you shorten a long passage of text into a more concise overview
- SEO optimization tools: help you make your content search engine friendly
- A citation generator: lets you generate citations in Chicago, MLA, and Harvard formats
These additional features have turned Quillbot into a handy writing tool that can do a lot more than it used to. It’s a useful grammar checker, though far from the most advanced one on the market.
Price: Quillbot has a free version with limited features, and it offers three individual payment plans for its premium version:
- Monthly at $19.95
- Six months at $13.33/month, billed as $79.95
- Annual at $8.33/month, billed as $99.95
Bottom Line: Quillbot is a great paraphrasing tool, but its other features aren’t as robust as Grammarly’s. It can only do a few things very well, namely paraphrasing and summarizing.
A lot of students and academic writers love using Quillbot because of its citation generator and its ability to help you hit the right word counts. Also, many business owners and copywriters use Quillbot to improve their SEO optimization.
If you fit into any of the above categories, you might enjoy giving Quillbot a try. It’s also cheaper than Grammarly, so if you’re looking for a budget-friendly writing assistant, Quillbot fits better in that category.
What Is Grammarly?
Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that provides a wide range of editing tools.
It checks your writing in real time as you type in your normal browser or word processor, so you don’t have to copy and paste your writing into the app.
In addition to looking for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, Grammarly also makes style suggestions. It highlights wordy sentences, incorrect commas, repetitive words, and other similar weaknesses.
Grammarly includes the following 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 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 checker: compares your writing to other web pages 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
As a general online writing assistant, Grammarly is very easy to use because you can access its suggestions while you write.
Price: 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
Bottom Line: If you’re looking for an AI-powered writing assistant, and you’re not particularly focused on the paraphrasing tool, Grammarly is a more flexible option than Quillbot.
A lot of writers, bloggers, and content creators choose Grammarly over Quillbot because it helps improve their writing all around. It offers more robust suggestions across the board by checking grammar, assessing tone, and more.
Comparison of Quillbot vs Grammarly
So, what are the strengths and weaknesses of each tool?
Here’s our assessment of how they stack up in five key categories: usability, grammar checker, paraphrasing, plagiarism checking, and other features.
Usability
Both Quillbot and Grammarly integrate with many common software options. You can access both of them in your internet browser, Microsoft Word, and Google Docs, just to name a few.
The downside with Quillbot is that you have to copy and paste your content into the app to get it paraphrased. Using the tool is its own step in the process.
Grammarly, on the other hand, lets you write directly into your favorite word processor, and gives you suggestions as you go. It doesn’t have to be a separate step in your writing process—you can simply use it in real time as you draft.
All in all, Grammarly wins on usability.
Grammar Checker
It’s no surprise that Grammarly wins as a grammar checker, given its name. Grammarly is great at checking grammar for all types of writing, from blog posts to academic essays.
In addition to catching basic errors, Grammarly can also make style suggestions, such as catching repetitive words.
Quillbot includes a grammar checking tool, but it doesn’t catch as many weaknesses as Grammarly’s tool does. If you want to catch more subtle errors, Grammarly is a better bet.
Paraphrasing
Paraphrasing has always been Quillbot’s strongest skill. You can get any passage paraphrased quickly and painlessly, and you can even choose the tone you want your writing to be paraphrased into.
Grammarly can also rephrase your sentences, but it will only do it for sentences that are highlighted as weak—not for the entire passage.
Quillbot, on the other hand, can paraphrase everything for you and rewrite it in a stronger way.
Overall, the paraphrasing tool in Quillbot is far more sophisticated. If you’re looking for a paraphrasing tool, Quillbot is more effective than Grammarly.
Plagiarism Checking
Both Grammarly and Quillbot have plagiarism checking tools.
Grammarly’s plagiarism checker has been around for longer, and is trusted by more writers. It lets you detect potentially plagiarized content and replace it with more original content. The premium plan lets you do unlimited plagiarism checks.
Quillbot’s plagiarism checking tool is particularly well-suited toward academic papers. Its paraphrasing tool can help you rephrase duplicate content in your own words.
The downside is that you can only check 20 pages per month for plagiarism with Quillbot, even with the premium plan, which might not be enough if you’re a student or academic.
Overall, the two software options can both detect plagiarism well and help you replace it. They’re good options in this category, though Grammarly wins if you need to check more than 20 pages a month.
Other Features
Grammarly includes a tone detection tool that can tell you how your content sounds, such as formal, confident, or optimistic. It also gives you a readability score based on your word length, sentence length, and vocabulary choices, so you can see how readable your writing is.
Quillbot has a summarizer tool that lets you synthesize a long passage of text. If you often need to create a quick overview of what you’ve written, it might be worth looking into this feature, since Grammarly doesn’t have an equivalent tool.
Also, Quillbot has a great citation generator, so you don’t have to write any citations on your own. Many students, professors, and other academics find this feature useful.
Finally, Quillbot has an SEO optimization feature, which can help you plan your content to improve your SEO rankings.
Free vs Premium of Quillbot vs Grammarly
Both Quillbot and Grammarly have free versions, which offer a smaller selection of features than their premium versions.
The Quillbot free version only lets you paraphrase up to 150 words at once—about a paragraph or two of writing. Also, it only lets you choose from two modes (Standard and Fluency).
If you pay for a Premium Quillbot account, you can paraphrase unlimited words and access four additional modes (Creative, Formal, Shorten, and Expand). You’ll also have access to plagiarism detection and other more advanced features.
The free version of Grammarly gives you basic writing suggestions to improve spelling, grammar, punctuation, and conciseness. It’s similar to the spellchecker that comes with a standard word processor like MS Word.
Grammarly Premium gives you access to plagiarism detection, sentence rewrites, and more advanced suggestions, which most writers find much more useful than the free version. However, it requires a hefty subscription.
You can try both tools for free first before deciding whether or not to sign up for Premium.
Why ProWritingAid Is a Great Alternative
Grammarly and Quillbot aren’t the only options on the market.
ProWritingAid goes beyond being a basic grammar checker that simply looks for mistakes. It makes advanced suggestions that can help you make your writing truly shine.
When it comes to suggestions, ProWritingAid goes further than both Grammarly and Quillbot. Its advanced analysis helps you improve the style, structure, and readability of your work in just a few clicks.
ProWritingAid comes with over 20 reports you can use to evaluate your writing. The free version of the software allows you to run most of the reports on up to 500 words.
ProWritingAid’s reports include:
- Repeated words and close echoes
- Commonly overused language
- Sticky sentences
- Sentence structure visualizations
- A full summary of your document to help you plan your editing
- Vague and abstract words
... and more!
If you’re unsure about what a suggestion means, or why you’re being told to change something, ProWritingAid comes with in-tool learning resources to help you out. Just click on the orange “i” icon on a ProWritingAid suggestion to learn more.
Both Grammarly and Quillbot only offer automatic correction without added learning resources. With ProWritingAid, you can learn about the issue and improve your writing skills over time.
ProWritingAid integrates with all the softwares that Grammarly and Quillbot support, such as Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Google Chrome, and Firefox. It also lets you integrate with more sophisticated word processors like Scrivener and Final Draft.
Best of all, ProWritingAid is free to try and doesn’t require you to enter your payment details.
Conclusion on Quillbot vs Grammarly
Both Quillbot and Grammarly are good software options for improving your writing. They both use machine learning to catch your grammatical errors.
If you’re a professional writer looking for a tool to help you with your freelance writing career, you can consider investing in both of them at once. Otherwise, it might not be worth the price to use more than one premium tool at a time.
Quillbot is a better option if you’re looking primarily for a paraphrasing tool, and Grammarly is a better option if you’re looking for a more robust grammar-checking AI.
ProWritingAid provides even more advanced analysis than either Grammarly or Quillbot. If you are looking for a single online editing tool that does all of the above, ProWritingAid is the logical choice.
Good luck, and happy writing!