Grammarly is one of the most popular writing apps out there.
Designed to help people improve their writing, Grammarly began as an app to catch errors in spelling and punctuation. The app’s features have developed over time, so it offers far more than just this now, including checking your writing for correctness, clarity, engagement and delivery.
But no app is perfect for everyone. There are loads of writing softwares, and it is worthwhile analyzing the differences between them so you can find the perfect one for you.
In this article, I’ll explore a variety of writing apps and software for authors, looking at the various features, costs, and integrations to help you find the best option for your writing.
Why You Might Want a Grammarly Replacement
Given Grammarly has a large fan-base of users, you might ask: why would I need an alternative app for my writing?
If you’re a business writer, you might not need an alternative. You might find Grammarly suits your purposes perfectly.
However, if you’re a fiction author, or a narrative non-fiction author, or a poet, you might find Garmmarly’s focus on grammar doesn’t quite match your needs.
Let’s examine the possible reasons for this:
- When you’re writing fiction and/or narrative non-fiction, developing your story’s voice and your characters’ voices is of paramount importance, even more so than abiding by grammatical rules.
- You may want your voices to reflect real life. That is, your characters’ voices may not always be grammatically accurate and clear, since we don’t always speak with perfect grammar.
- If this is the case, an app that checks your writing for grammatical correctness, clarity and engagement may not be what you’re looking for.
- Often in fiction and poetry, you might choose to disregard grammatical correctness in order to focus instead on highlighting a specific word or idea through an unusual sentence structure or use of grammar.
- Fiction’s purpose is rarely to send across a direct message in the clearest and most concise form possible – that’s what business writing is about. Fiction, on the other hand, is about leaving space for the reader to reflect, to ask questions, to ponder themes, to question characters’ motivations, and to feel immersed in and challenged by the prose.
- In summary: strong fiction writing is about much more than just good grammar!
Now we’ve examined the reasons why you might be looking for a writing app that offers something different from Grammarly, let’s look at some of the alternatives.
Top Grammarly Competitors for Serious Writers
Fictionary
Summary: Fictionary Storyteller is designed to help authors self-edit their book. Fictionary’s focus is on story (or structural) editing, but there are also features within the app that can help you improve your prose, making your writing more sensory and immersive.
As a Fictionary Certified Storycoach Editor (FSCE) myself, I’m in a strong position to advocate for Storyteller’s value for fiction writers.
Features:
- Storyteller provides a way to break down your manuscript into smaller, more manageable structural units (scenes) for editing.
- Once the manuscript has been divided into scenes, you can edit each scene according to the 38 story elements required to ensure each scene is structurally sound. Storyteller’s design allows you to make extensive notes during the editing and revision process.
- Fictionary allows you to both self-edit your manuscript using Storyteller, and to work with a professional editor using Storycoach. As a writer, you only need to subscribe to Storyteller; a professional editor certified by Fictionary uses the Storycoach software, designed to work seamlessly with your Storyteller account.
- Stoyteller creates a narrative arc for your story, showing whether your story meets the key plot points of the three-act structure.
- A Story Map allows you to track the progress of different story elements throughout your narrative.
- A Story Goal Tracker tracks your protagonist’s progress towards and away from their story goal at each scene.
- Another feature allows you to see when each character enters and leaves the story.
- A Scene Purpose feature allows you to analyse the overall purpose of each scene, to ensure you’ve a wide variety of genre-appropriate scenes.
- Another feature tracks the length of each scene and the number of scenes in each chapter, so you can check to ensure structural balance.
- Another feature allows you to track how many characters are in each scene, so you can avoid overpopulating your scenes with characters.
- Although the story elements are focused primarily on structural editing, there are also elements focused on ensuring your writing is immersive and sensory, as well as features to help you check you’ve handled point-of-view narration well throughout the story.
- Storyteller has an optional Artificial Intelligence feature. If you choose to use this feature, you can ask the AI to assess whether each scene has a clear point-of-view goal and contains tension and conflict.
- The AI will also assess scene structure for you, allowing you to see whether your scene structure was clear enough to be discerned by artificial intelligence.
- Storyteller was originally designed for editing a completed manuscript. However, it also now allows you to draft your story directly into the app itself, and provides guidance on how to structure stories in different genres.
- This list is just an overview of the various features the app provides; to see all the different features, you can sign up for a free trial of Storyteller.
Perfect For: Authors of fiction and non-fiction narratives, and writers looking for a tool to help them structurally edit their story.
ProWritingAid
Summary: ProWritingAid describes itself as a digital toolkit that helps you bring your story to life. It’s an app designed for authors, focused primarily on copy-editing prose. Pro Writing Aid helps you strengthen your writing by fixing grammatical mistakes, improving the clarity of your sentences and creating more engaging prose.
Features:
- Provides real-time feedback on your grammar and style as you type.
- Identifies style improvements for you, including finding clichés, overused pronouns, alliteration, unintentional plagiarism, and so on.
- Offers rephrasing suggestions for your sentences, and contains a thesaurus to find alternative words.
- Highlights words you tend to overuse and offers suggestions to reduce them.
- Helps you remove echoes and check for variety in sentence structures.
- Help you check how you’ve balanced different sensory details.
- Provides reports analysing your dialogue and pacing.
- Offers a comprehensive story critique.
- Makes comparisons between your writing and other popular authors.
Perfect for: Authors of fiction and non-fiction narratives looking for help with copyediting and refining their prose.
Hemingway
Summary: A writing tool inspired by the clarity of the prose for which Ernest Hemingway was famous, Hemingway is designed to help you make your prose more clear and concise.
Features:
- Using colour coding, the app helps writers keep their sentences punchy and direct.
- Highlights weak phrases, complex words, excessive adjectives and adverbs, and passive voice.
- Provides a readability score for your prose.
- The app uses artificial intelligence to suggest how you could rewrite your weaker sentences.
Perfect for: Writers (of fiction, non-fiction and business writing) looking to keep their prose clear, concise and direct. However, if you’re a writer who never quite matched with Hemingway’s prose style, then this might not be the tool for you.
Plottr
Summary: Plottr is a downloadable software designed to help authors plot out their stories and novels.
Features:
- Provides multiple story-type templates for writers to work with.
- Includes an introductory tour to help new users navigate the software.
- Helps you lay out your key scenes on plotlines and sub-plotlines using diagrams.
- Allows you to make scene annotations on cards, and move them around your plot-lines as you choose.
- Contains character tabs so you can make and keep notes about your different characters.
- Allows you to track character traits and development across plotlines.
Perfect For: Fiction and narrative non-fiction writers looking for software that helps them plot their story and keep track of all their plotting notes in a cohesive visual diagram.
Free Grammarly Alternatives
Although Grammarly has a free version, you do have to pay for its premium plans.
The free version of Grammarly offers:
- Spelling and punctuation checks.
- Analysis of your writing tone.
- 100 AI prompts for generating text.
By comparison, the premium version also offers:
- The rewriting of full sentences.
- Adjustments for your writing tone and fluency in English.
- Unlimited personalised suggestions.
- Plagiarism detector tools.
- 2000 AI prompts for generating text.
Let’s look at a few of the free alternatives to Grammarly available.
ProWritingAid (Free Version)
The free version of ProWritingAid doesn’t provide all the tools described above, which are part of the premium (paid-for) version. However, there’s a free version available online which offers limited features, including:
- Spelling, grammar and punctuation check.
- Word Explorer and thesaurus.
- Limited AI rephrasing suggestions: 10 per day plus 3 ‘sparks’ designed to enhance your writing.
- A 500 word count limit per session.
Hemingway (Free Version)
The Hemingway app free version scores your readability and identifies various issues with your writing, but doesn’t include the AI-powered rewriting suggestions you find in the paid version.
WordTune (Free Version)
WordTune is a spelling and punctuation app which offers both free and paid options. The features of the free version are designed for writers looking to fix spelling and grammatical errors, for limited use only. WordTune focuses on full sentences: you hover over a sentence and the app provides multiple suggestions for how you could rewrite a sentence. Its features include:
- 10 rewrites and AI suggestions daily to improve sentence clarity and fluency, and limited AI generations.
- Unlimited spelling corrections and grammar checks.
- 3 monthly AI summarizations of your text.
To gain greater or unlimited usage of these features, you need to purchase a subscription.
WordTune isn’t designed specifically with authors in mind, but more broadly for general writing including articles, documents and reports.
Ginger Softwares (Free Version)
Ginger Softwares offers many of the same features of Grammarly, plus a similar rephrasing feature to WordTune. The free versions features include:
- A 600 character limit.
- Basic grammar checks.
- Rewrite suggestions and synonyms for your words.
By upgrading to the paid version, you gain unlimited corrections, unlimited sentence rephrasing, translation between multiple languages and other additional features including a synonym dictionary and text reader.
It’s perfect for writers looking for a tool that includes translation as well as sentence checks and rewrites.
SlickWrite
SlickWrite is a totally free tool offering features that you often have to pay for elsewhere. Its features include:
- Allows you to check for vocabulary variety.
- Contains a Flow tool, which helps you check for variety in the flow of your sentences.
- Offers statistical feedback on your grammar.
- Contains a Word Associator, which works similarly to a thesaurus.
- Allows for up to 30,000 words to be checked at a time.
Feedback from online reviews suggest the app can be slightly tricky to use, but overall contains a great range of tools available for a free app.
It’s perfect for budget-restricted writers looking for a free grammar-check app.
Apps Like Grammarly
WordTune (Premium)
- We’ve already covered the free version of WordTune above. The premium version of the app offer writers unlimited rewrite suggestions, including rewrite suggestions for entire paragraphs at a time.
- The app also provides access to vocabulary enhancements, clarity improvements and fluency increases.
- The premium version allows you to choose the types of rewrites you’re looking for, including making your writing formal or informal, and making your sentences longer or shorter.
Ulysses
- Ulysses is an app designed to allow authors to shuffle around the different parts and scenes of a book easily. It includes a built-in proof-reader and editing assistant.
- It offers suggestions for capitalization, punctuation, semantics, redundancy, style and more.
- Once you’ve finished writing, Ulysses can turn your texts into PDFs, word documents, e-books and blog posts.
CorrectMe
- This app isn’t specifically designed for authors, but for anyone wanting to check their spelling and grammar.
- The features include grammar check, spellcheck, recommendations for rewrites, synonym suggestions and definitions.
- The app also provides short grammatical explanations of where you made mistakes, which can be useful for anyone seeking to improve their grasp of grammar for the future.
Websites like Grammarly for Poets
Grammar-checking apps like Grammarly aren’t designed for poetry writers.
The obvious reason for this is that, of course, poetry doesn’t always abide by the same rules of grammar as prose and business writing.
Just as fiction writers may choose to eschew rules of good grammar in order to create a strong voice, poets often also choose to put aside grammatical rules in order to create the correct emphasis, rhythm and pauses within their verse.
As a result, poetry apps don’t tend to focus on areas like spelling and grammar checks – this simply isn’t what most poets are looking for.
Let’s take a quick look at a few tools which do exist specifically to support poets as they write.
Poetizer
- Poetizer describes itself as a social network with an embedded smart tech publishing house for creative writers.
- Poetizer allows writers to convert their texts into books and online literary contributions, and allows writer to promote their books for sale on the network.
- The site is particularly favoured by poets.
Rhymer’s Block
- Rhymer’s Block is designed for poets and songwriters.
- It contains a rhyming dictionary, and a suggestion engine which is designed to offer colour-coded rhyme highlighting. It allows you to save your work to the cloud, helps you to create customized visual layouts, and to embed SoundCloud jams into your notes.
- It also offers a community for writers to show, collaborate and comment on each other’s work, as well as to take part in off-the-cuff rap battles.
- This app is perfect for poets and songwriters looking for a tool to help capture their inspiration, find new sources of inspiration, and engage with other writers.
Poet’s Pad
- Poet’s Pad contains idea-generating tools to help poets overcome writers’ block, including an emotion-based word and phrase generator.
- It also contains a rhyming dictionary, a regular dictionary, a thesaurus, a digital audio recorder, and software to help you create and edit your poetry by stanza.
Maiku
- This is a great app if you’d like to start writing haiku poetry – short poems in the Japanese style, which traditionally contain only 17 syllables.
- The Maiku app counts your syllables as you write, making it easier for you to work within the constraints of the haiku form.
Poet Assistant
- This app contains a set of offline tools designed to help you write poetry, including a rhyming dictionary, a standard dictionary and a thesaurus.
- It also includes a simple editor playback tool so you can hear your poetry out loud.
How to Pick the Best Grammarly Alternative
Let’s look at the factors which might affect how you choose the writing app or software to best suit your purposes.
Cost
In this article, we’ve looked at the free writing tools available, as well as the free options within apps which also offer a premium subscription. Your available budget is bound to be a deciding factor as to which tool you choose.
When taking this into account, a key point of consideration is whether your hope to traditionally publish or self-publish your work.
If you’re planning to self-publish as a career, and you take your author business seriously by investment in professional editing, advertising and marketing, then purchasing writing tools can make financial sense.That’s because increasing the volume of high-quality books you publish can substantially improve your income.
Purpose of the App and Stage of your Writing
As we’ve seen, different apps have different purposes, though there are crossovers between them. Which tool you choose will be influenced by what you’re seeking to achieve.
- If you’re looking for help getting started on your story idea and planning your novel, then an app like Plottr or Fictionary Storyteller could help you at this stage of your writing.
- If you’re needing an app to help you organise your scenes as you write, then Fictionary Storyteller or Ulysses might be just what you’re looking for.
- Once you’ve completed your first draft, then you’ll need to structurally edit your novel, in which case Fictionary Stoyteller is perfect for your needs.
- After your story has been structurally edited, then you’ll want to target your prose in more detail through a copy-edit – and Pro Writing Aid might be ideal at this point.
- Once you’ve edited your story and your prose, then it’s time for a grammar check – in which case Grammarly or an app like Grammarly (Hemingway, Ginger, WordTune, etc.) can be useful for a final spelling and grammar check.
What you don’t want to do is skip one of the earlier stages in favour of the latter. Writing a successful novel is about so much more than having perfectly crafted sentences.
Indeed, if you’re hoping to get your work traditionally published, whilst you’ll want your draft to be in good shape as regards spelling and grammar, it’s arguably more important to focus on creating a structurally sound and immersive story.
Publishing houses generally have their own proof-readers, and do not depend on authors to check their grammar. But a literary agent is unlikely to take on a structurally weak story, or a manuscript lacking a strong voice.
Conclusion
For any writer new to the world of writing apps and software, the vast quantity of options can seem overwhelming and confusing.
A clear understanding of the stages of writing and editing a book is necessary for any writer.
Now we’ve looked at these different stages of writing a book, and which writing tools are best positioned to help you at each stage, you should be in a strong position to start trialling out the different tools. Signing up for free trials is often the best way to discover which tools are best suited to your needs.