QuillBot Review: Features, Pricing, and Free Alternatives

Initially conceived as a paraphrasing tool, QuillBot has evolved significantly. With the continuous incorporation of features such as grammar and plagiarism checks, a word processor, translation capabilities, and citation support, QuillBot has become one of the most widely utilized tools by students for academic writing today with over 4.3 million users worldwide. 

In this comprehensive QuillBot review, we delve into its features, pricing, and QuillBot alternatives tailored for academic writing. Additionally, we discuss the reasons why QuillBot might not be the optimal choice for academic 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

• This article provides an in-depth QuillBot review and compares it with Paperpal, a preferred QuillBot alternative for academic writing. It focuses on QuillBot’s capabilities, especially for general and student-focused writing needs, and contrasts them with Paperpal’s advanced features tailored to academic writing.
• QuillBot offers versatile features for paraphrasing, grammar and plagiarism checking, citation generation, and basic summarization. However, its paraphrasing often alters the meaning and tone, which may not suit academic needs.
• Paperpal, designed specifically for academic and scientific writing, maintains the author’s voice, provides detailed language suggestions, and includes unique tools like academic translations, predictive writing, and consistency checks, making it more suited for researchers and scholars.
• The article concludes by recommending the best QuillBot alternative for refined, academic-standard writing and how to use both QuillBot and Paperpal together for targeted results. 

What is QuillBot?  

QuillBot is an AI writing assistant with features like paraphrasing, grammar checking, summarizing, and citation generation that enhance the clarity and quality of written content. Its efficient rephrasing of text using natural language processing (NLP) techniques makes it a valuable tool for writers, students, and professionals seeking to simplify complex sentences and improve readability. Let’s jump into our QuillBot review starting with its features. 

QuillBot Review: Key Features 

In our QuillBot review, we examine the features the AI tool offers to help creative writers, bloggers, and students enhance their writing.    

1. Paraphraser – QuillBot offers 8 pre-defined paraphrasing modes with in-built customization to change more (or less) of your writing.    
   1. Standard – Changes the word order and vocabulary of the text   
   2. Fluency – Improves readability and text clarity  
   3. Formal – Rephrases text to be suitable for formal communication  
   4. Simple – Presents text in lay terms  
   5. Creative – Rephrases text from a creative point of view 
   6. Academic – Rewrites text to sound academically correct 
   7. Expand and Shorten – Increases/Decreases text length without changing context  
   8. Custom – Rewrites text to match the unique description provided 

2. Grammar Checker – Instantly corrects grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors in US, UK, CA and AU English and other languages like German, French, Spanish, and Portuguese (Brazilian).  

3. Plagiarism Checker – Provides a plagiarism score and real-time analysis of improper attribution of authorship and citations for text scanned in 100+ languages.  

4. QuillBot Flow – An all-in-one word processor that helps you research, take notes, and auto-complete sentences to write research papers faster.  

5. Summarizer – Quickly extracts key points and summarizes essays, papers, and documents in bullet points and paragraphs.  

6. Free Essay Checker – QuillBot’s AI-driven essay checker roots our lack of fluency, tricky plurals, repetitions, and other issues to help you write an A-grade essay.   

7. Free AI Content Detector – Flags AI-generated content with indications like repeated words, awkward phrases, and unnatural flow.   

8. Citation Generator – Offers free citation generation capabilities for APA, MLA, and Chicago style as full and in-text citations.  

9. Translator – QuillBot provides real-time text translation in 40+ languages. 

QuillBot, at its core, is an article rewriter, but it can also double up as a grammar checker, plagiarism checker, and citation generator. Let’s review QuillBot from the perspective of academic writing and see how it performs against several QuillBot alternatives. 

Get all of QuillBot’s features and more with a Paperpal free account. Start writing with Paperpal.

Pros of QuillBot 

1. Easy-to-use – QuillBot reviews show it has a minimal learning curve and is quite user-friendly with feature navigation and texting out all the features.   
2. Free Extensions – It provides extensions for Chrome, Word, and MacOS without tab switching or desktop app downloads.  
3. Free AI Detector – QuillBot offers an AI detector so you can test the generated content to see if it sounds robotic.  
4. QuillBot Flow – QuillBot Flow allows you to paraphrase, summarize, research, and more with built-in grammar checking and citations.  
5. Freeze Words – The AI tool allows you to freeze words like nouns that you don’t want to paraphrase. However, the free version only provides one frozen word.  
6. Lucrative Plans – QuillBot’s premium plans are affordable. Plus, they offer a 100% money-back guarantee within 72 hours. 

Like QuillBot, but want more? Try Paperpal’s comprehensive toolkit for academics

Cons of QuillBot 

1. Paraphrasing Limitations — QuillBot’s paraphrased text output doesn’t sound like human-written text and lacks flow and context. Getting the desired output often requires a lot of manual editing.   
2. Limitations of the free version – The free version allows paraphrasing up to 125 words at a time and restricts users to two writing modes: Standard and Fluency.  
3. Limited use of plagiarism checker – QuillBot’s plagiarism checker is available only as a premium version, which allows to scan 25,000 words.    
4. Lack of a comprehensive grammar checker – Unlike other free QuillBot alternatives, the tool does not provide detailed insights into the grammar corrections it makes.  

Looking for a QuillBot alternative for academic writing? Start writing with Paperpal for free

QuillBot’s Pricing Plans 

As part of our QuillBot review, we also cover the pricing plans. Quillbot has both free and premium plans with the following features:  

Free Plan:  

1. Paraphrasing tool with a 125-word limit  
2. Two writing modes 
3. Correct basic grammar errors
4. Generate text with 50 AI prompts/day
5. Generate basic summaries
6. AI Detection (1200 words)

Premium Plan:  

QuillBot Premium offers advanced features, backed by a 3-day money-back guarantee. These are available at US$4.17 for Annual, US$6.66 for Semi-Annual, and US$9.95 for Monthly plans. 

1. Seven paraphraser writing modes  
2. Four synonym options  
3. Phrases compare modes  
4. Unlimited words and phrases  
5. Faster processing speed  
6. Summarize up to 6,000 words  
7. Advanced grammar rewrites  
8. QuillBot Flow  
9. Unlimited words for paraphrasing tool  

QuillBot is a great paraphrasing tool with additional features for academic writing. However, even with QuillBot Premium, the content output doesn’t live up to the standards of other more academia-focused QuillBot alternatives. Let’s understand how Paperpal, a tool like QuillBot, delivers more than Quillbot, Grammarly, Jenni and other AI academic writing assistants in the market today.   

Need access to advanced AI academic writing features for free? Try Paperpal

Why is Paperpal a better alternative to QuillBot?  

Paperpal, an AI writing assistant trained on millions of scholarly articles and over 22 years of STM expertise, is specially for academic and scientific writing. Unlike QuillBot, Paperpal understands academic context and enhances clarity, sentence structure, and academic tone accurately all while retaining the author’s voice and meaning. 

When trying out Paperpal as a QuillBot alternative, you’ll find that it offers more comprehensive language and grammar suggestions to help you achieve academic writing excellence, rather than merely providing one-time corrections. 

Let’s dive deeper into this AI academic writing assistant and understand why Paperpal the perfect QuillBot alternative for academics.  

Top Features of Paperpal  

1. Language Suggestions: Paperpal comprehends the structure and conventions of academic writing, offering precise language suggestions tailored to scientific contexts. It retains references, equations, technical terms, and non-English words
2. Generative AI Writing Templates: Paperpal Generative AI writing Templates help you get started with your writing via outlines, titles, abstracts, keywords and more. Summarize lengthy text, extract key highlights, and write professional emails in a click 
3. In-built Search: Get science-backed answers with verified citations to your questions from over 250 million research articles across all key disciplines. Paperpal’s AI ranks these papers based on their relevance to your query, and generates a concise, fact-based response summarizing the insights from the top 10 articles. 
4. Citation Generator: Generate complete, correctly formatted citations in 10,000+ styles including APA, MLA, and Chicago styles. You can also save relevant articles to your Citation Library, which helps you to research, write and cite on-the go
5. Predictive Writing: If you’re struggling to convey ideas into written content, simply add a starting sentence, upload a reference file, or tell Paperpal what to write and Paperpal’s Write feature will analyze existing text and generate coherent content. Use Paperpal Write to draft literature reviews based on your notes, get counterarguments or new perspectives, find examples to explain your ideas, summarize papers you are reading, or just expand on text to keep up your writing flow.
6. Plagiarism Checker: Scan upto 7000 words (~25 pages) for free. Paperpal gives you a detailed report with a similarity score to help you address actionable items, cite overlooked sources, and prevent accidental plagiarism
7. Contextual Synonyms: Struggling with vocabulary? Highlight a word, and Paperpal accesses a vast database of impactful research to analyze how similar words have been used in published papers. It then presents a list of relevant academic vocabulary alternatives, ranked by usage and context, ensuring you always choose the right words
8. Academic Translation: Paperpal Translate supports translation optimized to academic writing across 30+ top language pairs, powered by DeepL. This means, even if you’re translating in languages other than English, Paperpal retains context, preserve technical terms, and adhere to patient-first language (critical in fields such as medicine and psychology), making it a reliable online translator for academics
9. Consistency Checks: Paperpal ensures style uniformity in numbers, tables, figures, equation labels, word forms, spelling, and statistics. By automating tedious manual checks and providing a simple click-and-fix solution, Paperpal saves researchers time and effort
10. Be Submission Ready: Paperpal offers 3 types of language and technical compliance pre-submission checks, apart from Plagiarism Checks to ensure your manuscript is submission-ready, increasing its chances of acceptance
    
    1. Journal Submission Checks: Provides 30+ language and technical compliance pre-submission checks to boost your manuscript’s chance of acceptance 
    2. AI Review: Instant, targeted advice on your draft to identify logical gaps and improve flow and readability before submission  
    3. Human Editing Check: Get a professional human editor to review your manuscript to enhance quality, ensuring it meets high academic standards 

Ready to explore the most trusted alternative to QuillBot? Start writing with Paperpal

Paperpal’s Pricing Plans 

Paperpal, like QuillBot comes with free and paid plans for users. However, Paperpal does a lot better when considering QuillBot alternatives as its free plan offers users more support. When you sign up for free, you get access to 

Paperpal does a lot better as a QuillBot alternative in terms of pricing because it offers limited usage to academic writing benefits like language suggestions, generative AI, language translations, contextual synonyms, etc. Sign up with Paperpal for free, and you get the following:   

1. Language Correction: Get 200 language correction suggestions per month 

2. Generative AI Features: Generate outlines, titles, abstracts, summaries and more with Paperpal Copilot, available to use up to 5 times a day.  

3. Unlimited Citation Generation: Find references on Paperpal’s database and cite them in 10,000+ styles including APA, MLA, Chicago etc.  

4. Plagiarism and Submission Readiness Checks: Scan up to 7000 words for free and check for plagiarism. Get a summary report of 30+ language and technical checks and evaluate your manuscript for submission.   

5. Monthly and Daily Resets: Get a fresh quota of assistance for your ongoing or new projects with limits being reset daily or monthly based on your chosen feature. 

With a free account, you can choose your editing mode (Extensive or Essential) and language styles. You also get a free account on Researcher.Life, a subscription-based platform that hosts the best AI tools and services to help you speed up, simplify, and streamline your research journey.   

Paperpal’s Prime plan unlocks unlimited access to all the free features, plus consistency, plagiarism, and submission readiness checks at just US$25 per month, US$55 per quarter or US$139 per year.  

Paperpal vs QuillBot – Which is better for academic writing?  

QuillBot is handy for fixing essays and grammar quickly when you’re in a rush. But Paperpal gives you all of QuillBot’s features and more, for free. Let’s see how Paperpal is the best QuillBot alternative.  

Feature	Paperpal	QuillBot
Target Audience	Academics, researchers, students	Students and other writers (general, creative, business)
Academic Focus	High, tailored for academics	Low, compared to Paperpal
Language Suggestions	In-depth and academic-focussed suggestions to improve academic writing	Generic writing suggestions
Predictive Text Suggestions	Get free context-relevant text suggestions to eliminate writer’s block	Offers AI-assisted auto-complete as a premium feature
Academic Tone Suggestions	Ensures academic tone adherence	Provides academic mode of language editing as a premium feature
Academic Vocabulary	Provides synonyms used in academic context, ranked by usage in published literature	Provides a synonym slider allowing the extent of paraphrasing. The output often becomes difficult to understand and irrelevant to context
In-built search	Provides science-backed answers from 250 million research articles as you write	Not available
Consistency	Flags inconsistencies in word usage, spelling, numbers, statistics, equations	Not available
Plagiarism Check	Scans up to 7,000 words for free. Provides a   similarity score, side-by-side comparisons, and color-coded results with the full report.	Scan up to 25000 words with a premium subscription
Citation Builder	Allows to find, generate, and cite papers in 10,000+ citation styles for free	Create full and in-text citations for free
Rewrite, Paraphrase, and Trim	Paraphrases effectively, trims word length up to 25%, and ensures an academic tone all while retaining the context and original meaning.	QuillBot allows up to 125 words in the Free version.     QuillBot Flow (premium feature) can paraphrase and summarize but often loses context, adds complex synonyms, making the suggestions unsuitable for academic writing.
Language Translation	Offers accurate academic translations to and from 30+ languages, powered by DeepL	Offers generic language translations for 40+ languages
AI Writing Templates	Generate outlines, titles, abstracts, summaries, study highlights, keywords, and emails.	QuillBot Flow offers Write Assist to complete your sentences and has a built-in web search to browse search results.
Feedback & Insights	Offers detailed insights to enhance scholarly writing	No detailed feedback
Integration	Available on Word and Web (Windows and Mac), Overleaf and Chrome (Coming soon)	Available on Word, Web (Chrome), and Mac OS
Pricing	Priced at US$25/month,  $55/quarter or US$139/ year	Priced at US$9.95/month, $39.95/semi annual or US$49.95/year

Is QuillBot worth it?  

In a 2022 whitepaper by the University of Cambridge titled ‘Comparison of Automated English Editing Tools,’ Paperpal emerged as the preferred writing and editing tool among researchers.

Following this, a blinded benchmarking analysis was conducted in October 2023. Senior editors from the Editage training department evaluated Paperpal against QuillBot and three other AI tools for academic writing. In terms of language editing coverage, Paperpal provided the highest number of suggested edits (392) with an average of 3.88 edits per sentence. This was higher than that by QuillBot, which suggested 259 edits or 2.42 edits per sentence on average. 

With a focus on paraphrasing, QuillBot often simplifies academic text into more generalized language. In a detailed QuillBot review, experts have stated that QuillBot tends to offer heavier suggestions compared to Paperpal but most of these involved unnecessary rephrasing of original text.

These heavy revisions not only deviate from the author’s original voice and tone but also alter the intended meaning. For instance, the term “external fluctuation” has a specific meaning, and it needs to be retained, but QuillBot suggested revising it to “even when things change outside” which alters its significance.

For authors with English as a second language, who may not catch these edits, such changes could mean the difference between acceptance and rejection. Here, Paperpal is the best QuillBot alternative to enhance the clarity, sentence structure, and maintain an academic tone while preserving the author’s voice and intended meaning. 

Who should use QuillBot?  

If you’re a student hurrying to submit your essay and need basic checks before handing it in, QuillBot is a suitable choice. The tool provides sufficient capabilities for a one-time check and ensures your work is free of errors. 

Who should use Paperpal? 

If you’re a student, educator, researcher, or an academic aiming to refine your academic writing, overcome writer’s block, and initiate your research projects, dissertations, theses, and more, Paperpal is your best option. This trusted AI writing tool supports you from first draft to submission readiness, boosting your productivity and helping you achieve 2x the writing in half the time. 

While there are various free alternatives to QuillBot such as Grammarly, Jasper, and Frase, if you require a comprehensive AI toolkit designed specifically for academic writing, Paperpal should be your first choice. Try Paperpal for free and see the difference for yourself.  

Frequently Asked Questions   

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$19 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!