Grammarly Review – Is Grammarly Worth it? [2024 Update]

As a leader in the AI writing tools industry, Grammarly has established a strong foothold among various target audience segments due to its first-mover advantage. Until recently, researchers, PhD students, and authors have also relied on Grammarly to improve their academic writing skills. 

Grammarly acts as a great assistant that can proofread and edit your writing to enhance readability and follow a conversational or confident tone, but does this hold relevance for academic writing? We aren’t so sure. In this detailed Grammarly review, we explore the features of Paperpal vs Grammarly, pricing, and Grammarly alternatives tailored to academic writing; we also explain if Grammarly is worth the hype and may not be the best choice for research writing. 

Disclaimer: This article is based on independent research and is intended to provide an unbiased comparison of various AI writing tools, including our own. While we strive to present accurate and up-to-date information, features, and pricing, we recommend checking directly with the respective companies for the latest details, as offerings may change over time. Additionally, any opinions expressed here reflect the author’s perspective and may not represent the official stance of the companies/tools discussed.

TL;DR – What does this Grammarly review focus on?

What is Grammarly?

Grammarly is a comprehensive AI writing assistant offering grammar checking, proofreading, spell checking, and plagiarism detection on a single platform. While core grammar improvement benefits most users, Grammarly extends beyond basic error correction with features tailored to various content types. Let’s review Grammarly’s features

Ideal for bloggers, content creators, students, and authors, Grammarly offers: 

• Proofreading: Catches grammatical mistakes, spelling errors, and punctuation issues.
• Tone and Fluency suggestions: Provides writing feedback and tone recommendations.
• Rewrite and Paraphrasing: Provides suggestions to improve language clarity through generative AI paraphrasing and rewriting.
• Plagiarism detection: Flags specific sentences for similarity, provides information about the source, and calculates an overall originality score for your document.
• Generative AI Capabilities: Grammarly Go allows you to quickly compose, rewrite, ideate, and reply with basic prompts.
• Exclusive Features for Academic Writing:
  • Free Essay Checker: Grammarly’s free version is customized to identify grammatical errors in essays.
  • Free Citation Generator: Add your citation information, and Grammarly formats it as per APA, MLA, and Chicago style.
  • Thesis Statement Generator: Share some basic details, and Grammarly provides ideas for your thesis statement.

Grammarly goes beyond simply identifying mistakes, empowering users to strengthen writing skills through detailed feedback and learning tools. Here’s a Grammarly review considering academic writing as a use case, through its pros and cons. 

Grammarly Review: Pros and Cons

Pros of Grammarly

• Real-time language and grammar suggestions: Grammarly helps you check and fix grammatical errors as you write, resulting in a cleaner final result.
• Clarity and readability suggestions: Grammarly helps improve the clarity and flow of your writing by suggesting simpler word choices, restructuring sentences, and highlighting confusing passages. This can enhance your writing’s overall quality and accessibility to readers.
• Citations and formatting: Grammarly offers basic citation suggestions and formatting checks. This can save you time and ensure consistency in your references.
• Generative AI Capabilities: Based on your prompts, Grammarly provides you with polished drafts in seconds.

Cons of Grammarly

• Aggressive elimination of passive voice: To make your writing sound more natural and clearer, Grammarly always nudges its users to use active voice. While using a friendly and inviting tone can be beneficial for marketing and business-related tasks, passive voice is not unusual in scientific writing as it encourages a more objective style when describing data collection or outlining methods.
• Limited suggestions for academic tone: In our Grammarly review, we found that Grammarly’s tone suggestions are less attuned to the formality required in journal submissions. The AI writing tool also misses out on the usage of patient-first language, a crucial aspect of academic writing, particularly in the fields of medicine and healthcare.
• Limited detection of stylistic inconsistencies: While Grammarly catches inconsistencies in language and hyphenation, it has limitations in academic writing. It doesn’t consistently enforce specific academic style guides and often misses errors in tables, equations, figures, and number formatting, as identified in our detailed Grammarly review.
• Academic precision relies on expert prompts: Grammarly’s Gen AI does a great job of streamlining day-to-day tasks, like writing an email, rewriting, and paraphrasing generic text. However, crafting precise academic content requires real prompt mastery, and fine-tuning it to get your desired output can be time-consuming.
• No language translation capabilities: In our Grammarly review, we found that many ESL researchers grapple with effectively communicating their ideas in English. While Grammarly offers valuable assistance in correcting grammatical errors, incorporating a real-time translation feature directly within the writing process would be even more beneficial. This feature would empower ESL researchers to write seamlessly in their native language, with the tool automatically translating their thoughts into clear and accurate English.

Grammarly’s Pricing Plans

Grammarly’s pricing plans are as follows –   

• Free – Access basic language and tonality checks and 100 Generative AI prompt usage at no cost.
• Premium – At US$30.16 monthly or US$142.34 annually, Grammarly allows access to tone adjustments, check plagiarism, build citations, and use 1,000 Generative AI prompts.

While conducting the Grammarly review, we found out that the free version allows users to experience the platform, it also employs persistent reminders about additional features and benefits unlocked through Grammarly Premium, which can be frustrating or distracting. 

In addition to that, it doesn’t fully understand academic writing conventions and can misfire in cases that need strict adherence to academic tonality, avoiding accidental plagiarism, and more. Researchers should be cautious while using Grammarly for academic writing.  

Fortunately, there is a better Grammarly alternative for academic writing. Let’s delve into the details of this trusted AI academic writing assistant.    

Why Paperpal is a Better Alternative to Grammarly for Academic Writing?

Paperpal is a comprehensive AI academic writing assistant that offers real-time, subject-specific language suggestions to help you achieve publication success faster. When you compare Paperpal vs Grammarly, you’ll notice that Grammarly’s coverage of errors and language suggestions is pretty low.

The latter’s ML models outperform Grammarly, providing 2 to 3 times more suggestions on par with corrections by professional academic editors. With over 21 years of STM expertise and robust AI trained on millions of published research manuscripts, Paperpal, the Grammarly alternative, helps academics write 2x faster. It offers precise language and grammar suggestions, generative AI capabilities, academic tone adherence, and more.   

In the previous section, we discussed how Grammarly’s free features are designed to entice you to buy a Premium plan. Well, with Paperpal, a free Grammarly alternative, you get much more than just a teaser! Let’s dive into why it is the AI academic writing tool you’ve been searching for. 

Top Features of Paperpal

1. Language Suggestions: Paperpal understands academic writing structure and conventions, provides 200+ language suggestions based on scientific contexts, while retaining references, equations, technical terms, and non-English words.
2. Paperpal Research: Get science-backed answers with verified citations to your questions from over 250 million research articles as you write. You can also save relevant articles to your citation library, which helps you to research, write and cite with confidence.
3. Paperpal Cite: Generate unlimited citations in APA, MLA, Chicago and 10,000+ styles for your references.
4. Paperpal Write: If you’re struggling to convey ideas into content, provide Paperpal the context of your idea in less than 15 words, and Paperpal’s Write will provide suggestions based on context, custom instructions, or pre-set writing prompts. With Paperpal Write, you can quickly create a first draft, expand on existing content, write a counterargument, and much more.
5. Paraphrase: Improve clarity and tone with accurate paraphrasing. Retain the context of your work and meet journal-prescribed word counts with a formal tone
6. Trim: Get a concise version of your writing, without losing meaning, to meet word count limits
7. Plagiarism Checker: Paperpal checks your paper for similarity against 100 billion online webpages and provides you with a detailed report with a similarity score that lets you address actionable items, cite overlooked sources, and avoid accidental plagiarism. Users can scan upto 7000 words/month (~25 pages) for free.   
8. Contextual Synonyms: Struggling with vocabulary? Just highlight a word and Paperpal instantly dives into a vast database of high-impact research, analyzing how similar words have been used in published papers. It then presents you with a list of relevant academic vocabulary alternatives, ranked by their usage and context, so you’re always using the right words.
9. Academic Translation: Translating academic text with DeepL and Google Translate often leads to unnecessary context-switching or introduces distractions, which can lead to miscommunication and delay the process. Paperpal supports translation for 30+ top language pairs, so you can write in your preferred language and get accurate academic translations in one click!
10. Academic Consistency Checks: Paperpal’s consistency checks ensure style uniformity in the presentation of numbers, tables, figures, equation labels, word forms and spelling, and statistics. By automating these tedious manual checks and providing a simple click-and-fix solution, this Grammarly alternative saves researchers both time and effort.
11. Templates: Paperpal’s secure generative AI technology is tailored to academic writing conventions and based on proprietary large language models. Templates enables users to generate outlines and emails, and brainstorm with AI.
12. Check and Refine – Once you’re done with your writing, this Grammarly alternative also helps with editing and refining your text. Students and academics can use its suite of checks to correct and enhance their language, grammar, word choice, phrasing, consistency, and more!
13. Journal Submission Checks: Provides 30+ language and technical compliance pre-submission checks to boost your manuscript’s chance of acceptance
14. AI Review: Instant, targeted advice on your draft to identify logical gaps and improve flow and readability before submission
15. Human Editing: Get a professional human editor to review your manuscript to enhance quality, ensuring it meets high academic standards

Paperpal’s Pricing Plans

Compared to Grammarly’s free version, this Grammarly alternative offers a whole lot more. You get access to the following features:  

1. Language Suggestions – 200/month
2. 5 uses/day of AI features
   1. Rewrite (Paraphrase, Trim, Synonyms and more)
   2. Research
   3. Templates
   4. Predictive Writing
   5. Translate
3. Unlimited citation generation
4. Scan and check up to 7000 words or 25 pages for plagiarism
5. Free submission readiness summary report 

Paperpal vs Grammarly: Which is Better for Academic Writing?

Our Grammarly review concluded that it is a trusted AI writing assistant, but if you’re in search for a niche, free Grammarly alternative tailored to academic writing, Paperpal might be a better choice. This Grammarly vs Paperpal comparison proves it.   

Feature	Paperpal	Grammarly
Target Audience	Academics, Researchers, Students	All Writers (general, creative, business)
Academic Focus	High, tailored for academics	Yes, but less than Paperpal
Language Suggestions	Academic-focused, preserves references, equations, technical terms, and non-English words	Aggressive passive voice correction, doesn’t preserve academic terms
Literature Search	Provides science-backed answers from 250 MN+ research articles. Save relevant ones in the citation library for citing later	N/A
Citation Generator	Generates formatted citations in 10,000+ styles including APA, MLA, Chicago and more	Generates citations only in APA, MLA, and Chicago styles
Plagiarism checks	Scans academic text against a database of 99 billion webpages including 200 million Open Access research articles	Catches plagiarism using ProQuest’s database of millions of graduate works including dissertations and theses
Language Translation	Accurate academic translations for 30+ language pairs	N/A
Academic Tone Suggestions	Ensures academic tone adherence	Provides suggestions as Confident, Informative, etc.
Predictive Writing	Suggests possible follow-up sentences based on existing text. Extract key takeaways, draft a literature review, or expand text with pre-built prompts	Requires extensive prompt writing for targeted results
Text Paraphrasing and Shortening	Paraphrases effectively, trims word length and ensures an academic tone all while retaining context and meaning	General paraphrasing, not specific to academic purposes
Feedback & Insights	Offers detailed insights to enhance scholarly writing	Broad communication goals feedback
Integration	Available on Word, Web, Chrome, and Overleaf	Available on Word, Web, and Google Docs
Pricing	Monthly plan – $25  Quarterly plan – $55  Yearly plan – $139   Free plan allows for limited access to premium features	Priced at US$30.16 a month or US$142.34 a year   Free plan offers only grammar and language checks

 

Grammarly Review: Is Grammarly Worth it?

Based on the 2022 whitepaper by the University of Cambridge titled ‘Comparison of Automated English Editing Tools,¹Paperpal was the most appealing writing and editing tool for researchers. We followed this up with a blinded benchmarking analysis in October 2023, when senior editors from the Editage training department evaluated Paperpal vs Grammarly (Academic Mode) and three other AI tools.

In the detailed Grammarly review, our experts identified error detection to be poor in comparison to Paperpal, even in its Academic mode. It fails to correct specific word choice (“administered” works better with chemotherapy, not “added”) and does not understand technical terminology (“Kaplan-Meyer” should be “Kaplan-Meier”).

In terms of language editing coverage, Paperpal provided the highest number of suggested edits (392) with 3.88 edits per sentence on average, compared to Grammarly (187 with 1.77 edits per sentence on average) – over 2x the number of edits that Grammarly (Academic mode) does.   

The experts also found the least issues in language, with no issues in terms of comprehension and integrity, in documents edited by Paperpal. In contrast, Grammarly (Academic Mode) had the most incorrect suggestions across all categories in the analysis, which could be frustrating for authors.  

Who should use Grammarly?

Followed by our detailed Grammarly review, if your work involves writing crisp marketing copy or sending professional emails, or if you require generic writing assistance, Grammarly is a good choice. Grammarly for students also offers tailored features that can help enhance their writing journey throughout the academic process. 

Who should use Paperpal?

If you are a master’s or PhD student, educator, researcher, or working in academia, Paperpal is your best bet. With its focus on academic writing and empowering students and researchers to write high-quality academic content, every time, this trusted AI academic writing assistant is the ally you need to succeed.   

There are several free Grammarly alternatives like Copy.ai, Jasper, and Frase that offer features similar to Grammarly. However, if you’re seeking a comprehensive AI toolkit tailored for research papers, thesis, and dissertations, Paperpal stands out. Try Paperpal for Free today to experience its advanced language checks and academic style suggestions firsthand.

Frequently Asked Questions

References:

1. Alexopoulou, D., 2022. Comparison of Automated English Editing Tools. University of Cambridge. Available at: https://www.paperpal.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Comparison-of-Automated-English-Editing-Tools_Cambridge-University_June-2022-1.pdf

Paperpal is a comprehensive AI writing toolkit that helps students and researchers achieve 2x the writing in half the time. It leverages 21+ years of STM experience and insights from millions of research articles to provide in-depth academic writing, language editing, and submission readiness support to help you write better, faster. 

Get accurate academic translations, rewriting support, grammar checks, vocabulary suggestions, and generative AI assistance that delivers human precision at machine speed. Try for free or upgrade to Paperpal Prime starting at US$25 a month to access premium features, including consistency, plagiarism, and 30+ submission readiness checks to help you succeed. 

Experience the future of academic writing – Sign up to Paperpal and start writing for free!