The commonalities in Grammarly Free & Premium (& Business)

Grammarly Free checks grammar across – Correctness & Clarity criteria.

Grammarly Premium & Grammarly Business runs grammar checks across – Correctness, Clarity, Engagement, and Delivery.

Let me breakdown what each of these Grammar checks check 😛

Correctness: Spelling, Grammar, and Punctuation checks

Grammarly Correctness checks in action (Available in Free, Premium & Business)

Clarity: Wordiness/ Conciseness, Readability checks, Passive Voice, Unclear antecedent

Grammarly Clarity Check – Loads of wordiness opportunities missed! (Available in Free, Premium & Business)

Engagement: Monotony/ Repetition, Vocabulary

Grammarly Engagement suggestion (Available in Premium & Business only)

Delivery: Casualness/ Professionalism – based on what you chose under “domain” setting (more on domain later)

Grammarly Delivery Check Suggestion (Available in Premium & Business only)

All Grammarly versions come with a personal dictionary, which is important for me as I use a lot of jargon and Indian names, which are not standard English words. I can add these words to my personal dictionary either through the right-click menu or by visiting the Grammarly account page. Then onwards, Grammarly won’t highlight those words as errors.

Grammarly’s personal dictionary (Available in Free, Premium & Business)

All Grammarly versions allow you to set writing goals like the intent of the article, the audience category, style & emotions. Premium version & Business version also allows to set the domain type – General/ Business/ Technical/ Creative/ Casual. Note – I personally found these Goals thingy pretty useful. The real difference is between Business and Casual, switch to Business, and it will highlight everyday words like What’s up, buddy? And suggest you change to something formal. Switch to casual, and it will highlight formal language and suggest you casual alternatives.

Goal setting in Grammarly (Available in Free with limited selections, Premium & Business with all selections)

All versions show performance stats for your writings. The most important of these stats is the readability score based on industry-standard Flesch reading ease test.

Grammarly Performance Stats (Available in Free, Premium & Business)

The higher the readability score, the easier it is to read your text for the average audience. You must always strive to achieve a higher readability score to ensure more and more people can understand your text. Unless you cater to a specific audience who can understand difficult writings – example – medical research written to be read by medical professionals).

All Grammarly versions send progress emails and achievements to motivate you to keep writing more. This technique of not breaking the chain (of writing every week) is called the Seinfeld Strategy.

Weekly progress report sent by Grammarly (Available in Free, Premium & Business)

These progress emails from Grammarly have helped me a lot to write consistently; because I didn’t want to break the chain!

Another time-saving benefit of Grammarly Premium & Business is the Double Click to show definitions and synonyms feature. This feature needs to be enabled through the Grammarly button in Google Chrome/ Firefox browsers.

This is what it is –

Grammarly double-click definitions (Premium & Business)You don’t need to do a separate Google search to find out the meaning of an unknown word. Definitions and Synonyms via double clicks come in pretty handy when reading articles written on subjects you are not familiar with.

Grammarly has recently introduced Tone Detector as a Premium & Business only feature – 

As of me writing this article, the tone detector works only while writing an email. Tone Detector now works across the web (updated April 2020), except Google Docs. It automatically shows up on the compose/ write screen of almost all popular web-based blogging services, social networks, and email services like Gmail, Yahoo, Live, etc… a small icon, just beside the G logo of Grammarly will show you the tone of you are writing.

Grammarly Tone of Voice detection for Emails (Available in Premium & Business)

This can prevent unintended emotions in your writings. E.g., when writing to your boss, you don’t want to sound rude and angry unintentionally, right? Similarly, a friend may find it awkward and call you up for a thrashing when your email looks like a legal document.

Of course, this is based on AI and is not always right. I am sure Tone Detection will improve once Grammarly’s AI learns more through human feedback.

Update – April 2020.

Grammarly has introduced the autocorrect feature in Premium & Business editions. Autocorrect works through browser extensions across all the operating systems, including Linux.

The benefit is self-explanatory, the feature works just like the autocorrect feature found in mobile phones for ages. It automatically corrects the spelling of common words and saves valuable time in correcting them later.

As of me writing this update, autocorrect is far from perfect. It is inconsistent, slow, and fails to correct the spellings most of the time.

Have a look at it:

Grammarly’s Autocorrect Feature – I guess it’s in beta

Now let’s talk about Grammarly Business exclusive features.

When it comes to Grammarly Business, there are a few administrative specific additions to the Premium offering. Read the next section to find out more.

What is Grammarly for Business?

Grammarly Business offers all of the Premium features with two additional functionalities to easily add or remove team members, and an overview of individual member’s performance stats.

The admin panel (Grammarly Business)

If you are a business that needs it’s staff to minimize grammatical errors, you can purchase Grammarly business and assign Grammarly premium accounts to your team members. A business account also allows you to look at the performance and writing stats of your team members. This can be really useful if you run a content writing business and want performance stats to be a part of your staff’s KPIs.

If a team member leaves the business, you can easily deactivate Grammarly’s Business membership from their email address and assign the same slot to a new recruit.

Grammarly Business requires a minimum of 3 team members

I’ve never used Grammarly Business because I don’t own any business. I activated a 14 day trial of Grammarly Business to take the screenshots.

Grammarly added a style guide for business users recently. This works similarly to the style guide offered by ProWritingAid Premium. Unfortunately, Grammarly Premium is left out of this feature.

Style guide works just like a personal dictionary but supports adding brand-specific writing styles too. For example, if you own a business named Smith & Co. and want to ensure that your business name is mentioned correctly across your written communications, you can add it to Grammarly’s style guide. If one of your employees incorrectly types the name as Smith and Company, Grammarly will prompt the correct name.

Grammarly Business Style Guide in action

As a business owner, you can also set the tone of your writings to be standardized across all communication channels. Say if you set the tone to be formal and an employee writes an email to a client which is too informal, Grammarly Business will prompt the employee that he is being informal.

The Style Guide Dictionary

Grammarly Business has an admin dashboard which will report cases with breach of the style guide so that you can directly address your team.

IMO, a style guide will be useful for individuals too, especially solo freelance writers like me. I hope the feature (excluding the business admin dashboard) is added to Grammarly Premium soon.

How is Grammarly’s plagiarism checker?

Do you even need a plagiarism checker if you never copy anyone else’s work?

I ran a plagiarism check on a random article about the fish oil – it scored 21%! As in, 21% of that article on the topic “Fish Oil” appeared to be copied from other sources.

Plagiarism check (Premium & Business)

Your own observations and thoughts on specific topics may match with billions of other people on earth. Especially, when it comes to sciences – it is challenging to avoid referring to other articles on the topic (but that can be offset by citing sources and references).

Nevertheless, you don’t want to be in a spot when someone is pointing the finger at you for writing plagiarised content.

Almost every agency, organization, institutions, etc.. want their employees to produce original content. So before someone else runs a plagiarism check and finds out duplicate content, it is better to check it ourselves and make necessary changes if relevant.

Back to the question – How is Grammarly’s plagiarism checker?

Grammarly uses ProQuest databases with billions of indexed web pages, academic textbooks, journals, novels, research papers, essays, and other forms of literary work.

ProQuest database is comparable to other plagiarism databases like Turnitin & iThenticate.

Grammarly’s plagiarism check is thorough yet lightning fast. It compares the text with billions of records within a few seconds to give out a percentage score for the number of plagiarized statements found in our writing.

It highlights the portion of our writing which appears to be plagiarized and gives reference to the document/web page with similar content. This way, you can rewrite that portion in a simpler and more in-depth form OR provide a reference to the original source as a citation. It’s actually a win-win situation for you and the readers.

• Readers are happier as they get more in-depth content, with links to more resources via citations
• Search engines are delighted because users love your original content

What I liked about Grammarly’s plagiarism checker is that the results are displayed then and there without having to copy and paste the document in a separate plagiarism checker. It also suggests citing that paragraph in MLA, APA or Chicago format.

Grammarly’s plagiarism check is fast, thorough, and cheap too. (Part of Premium plan @ $11/ mo).

Comparatively, Copyscape charges 3c per search for the first 200 words + 1c per additional 100 words, so a 1000 word article will cost 11c to check.

Another plagiarism checker – Unicheck charges $5 per 20 checks. With Grammarly, we get unlimited checks with the added advantage of advanced grammar checking and vocabulary enhancement.

Lastly, WriteCheck from Turnitin costs $29.95 for five checks of 5000 words each.

If checking for plagiarism is a one-off activity, then Copyscape or Unicheck will be more cost-effective,

What are the Cons of Grammarly?

After using Grammarly for years, I found a few annoyances, and most of these were easily ignorable. Let me list them for you –

1. Grammarly deems bucket brigades and fillers as unnecessary, and I find this quite annoying. I understand, they can be omitted for preciseness, but sometimes you need them as part of the flow or narrative. Grammarly keeps highlighting these even when we select the Casual domain of writing.
2. It does not highlight cliches. Grammarly’s vocabulary enhancer does suggest alternative words to replace more common words, but it doesn’t recommend a replacement for cliches.

Example – Sorry for the late response. It is a classical apologetic response; a better alternative is “Thanks for your patience.”

Surprisingly, Grammarly has a blog post about common cliches and their alternatives. But when I type the exact cliches, it does not suggest any replacement.

        3. Grammarly sometimes fails to detect multiple contextual errors in a sentence. This is ok for people with good grammar skills as they can spot out these errors while revising what they’ve written. But hey, what about people who need Grammarly the most – they will solely rely on Grammarly and may not be able to spot these errors.

Picture of Grammarly contextual error.

Note that hear remains hear and doesn’t change to here

       4. Grammarly can make you over-dependent on Grammarly!

At one point, I stopped thinking about my sentence construction and spellings as Grammarly was there to help. Good that I realized this and stopped using it for real-time corrections.

Now I write my copy, edit, revise, recheck by myself, and just before publishing – I run it through Grammarly for errors I might have missed.

        5. At the time of writing this article, Grammarly does not work in Quora. Update – It works now!

        5. It does not work offline.

That’s a bit of nitpicking considering the internet is available – EVERYWHERE!

        6. Getting a student discount is not easy. More on that later.

        7. Grammarly does not work with complicated poems like this :p

Eye have a spelling chequer,
It came with my Pea Sea.
It plane lee marks four my revue
Miss Steaks I can knot sea.

Eye strike the quays and type a whirred
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am write oar wrong
It tells me straight a weigh.

Eye ran this poem threw it,
Your shore real glad two no.
Its vary polished in its weigh.
My chequer tolled me sew.

A chequer is a bless thing,
It freeze yew lodes of thyme.
It helps me right all stiles of righting,
And aides me when eye rime.

Each frays come posed up on my screen
Eye trussed too bee a joule.
The chequer pours o’er every word
Two cheque sum spelling rule.

This poem above is too harsh of a test for an AI-based grammar checker.

However, Grammarly does offer Human Proofreading Service.

Humans like me, or you can easily fix complicated contextual grammatical errors like in the poem above!

How much does Grammarly Premium cost? Is Grammarly Premium worth it?

With Grammarly Premium, you are putting in a decent amount of money ($139/year) for more in-depth grammar checks.

The cost of Grammarly Premium is just like the structure of a Gym Membership. Basically, the cost of 1 month of membership is almost 1/4th the cost of yearly membership! Yes, for the price of 4 months – you get a year of Grammarly Premium if you can pay that much amount upfront.

Next question that pops up is –

Is there a Grammarly Premium Trial version to try before I buy it?

The short and sweet answer is NO! The long and more delicious answer is YES!

There is no trial period for the Premium version.

But, Grammarly Business does offer a 14-day trial, which provides all the functions of the Grammarly Premium + dashboard with performance stats. You can signup for Grammarly Business Trial to experience Premium features. Grammarly Business trial requires your credit card/ PayPal details. And if you forget to cancel within 14 days – they will deduct the subscription amount automatically from your card/ PayPal.

Worry not, subscribe to Grammarly Business trial, and cancel the subscription immediately, yes IMMEDIATELY. You will still get to try all the Premium & Business features of Grammarly for another 14 days before you go back to the free version automatically.

If you found Grammarly Business to be valuable, you can signup for the Premium version, which is much cheaper compared to the Business version sans team dashboard.

The second option is to sign up for Grammarly Premium directly. Grammarly offers a 7-day money-back refund policy if you think you don’t need a premium subscription.

But if you write a lot, you may not think of canceling Grammarly premium.

Let’s get back to the question – Should you pay for Grammarly Premium – is it worth it?

Well, the easy answer is – It depends!

Let me simplify the decision-making process for you –

Grammarly free is good if –

1. You write occasionally, and writing is not your job role or hobby
2. There are no one nitpicking grammatical errors as long as the message is clear
3. You don’t write to the world (as in – masses)

Grammarly Premium is good if –

1. You earn through your writing
2. You want to improve your writing
3. You don’t like people pointing out your grammatical errors
4. You are a perfectionist
5. You write to the world
6. You want to ensure your copy is free of unintentional plagiarism

Grammarly Business is useful if –

1. You own a business and want your team to reduce grammatical errors
2. You want your team to follow your brand-specific writing style
3. You want to track the writing performance of your team members
4. You want to activate/ deactivate Premium memberships as and when a new team member joins or someone leaves

What Grammarly do I use?

I am currently a Grammarly Premium user, as I want my writing to be as error-free as possible.

Writing is my source of income, I want to keep improving my grammar, and I write for the masses. That’s why I don’t mind paying a yearly fee for Grammarly Premium checks (and Plagiarism checks).

NOTE: Grammarly Premium is effective at detecting advanced grammatical errors – but nothing matches a human proofreader. If you are earning a lot of money from your writing business, then I would suggest hiring a human to proofread copies.

Human Proofreading Service (All versions)

Student discount for Grammarly – Do students get a discount?

Yes, Grammarly does offer student discounts.

But there is a caveat – It is not as simple as uploading a picture of your college ID to get the discount as an individual student.

The process to get student discount for Grammarly is –

Your educational institution must join Grammarly and purchase licenses in bulk. These student licenses cost a fraction of the original price, but again – your institution must buy them for all the interested students in BULK.

Your educational institution can purchase licenses in bulk! If more than 20 students require Grammarly, you can get a custom quote!

So, if only five students in your institution show interest in purchasing Grammarly Premium, it will cost $100/year, per student. If 20 of the students need Grammarly, the cost per student will go down to just $60/year per student.

I wish it were as easy as obtaining student discounts on Apple and Microsoft products. Unlike Grammarly, all they need is a picture of your student ID card and institution’s email address.

Does Grammarly work with other languages?

As of today, Grammarly is only available for English. However, it does support different versions of English. Grammarly can customize recommendations based on American, British, Canadian, or Australian English. Language preference can be set through Grammarly’s account settings and customizations page.

Grammarly alternatives – How do they compare?

There are multiple free and premium alternatives available for Grammarly.

The ones that I’ve tried are SlickWrite (Free) & ProWritingAid (Free & Paid). Other Grammarly competitors available to try are WhiteSmoke (Free & Paid), Ginger (Free & Paid), GradeProof (Free & Paid), and LanguageTool (Free & Paid)

SlickWrite has more checks compared to Grammarly – like the “Honesty & Objectivity” checks – seriously. But unlike Grammarly, SlickWrite only highlights the errors and improvement opportunities – it doesn’t suggest the correction. So its more of an opportunity highlighter, which should be good enough for people with enough grammar knowledge to correct mistakes on their own.

ProWritingAid is very much like Grammarly but offers more grammar checks in the free version, albeit 500-word count restriction applies. When it comes to the paid version – ProWritingAid costs half as much as Grammarly.

I’ve done a comparison post – Grammarly vs. ProWritingAid as a quick pre-buying decision-maker.

I haven’t tried WhiteSmoke, Ginger, Gradeproof, & LanguageTool yet; if you have – leave your thoughts on the same in the comments.

Then there is the Hemingway online website; it is not a full-blown grammar checker though. Hemingway is an online editor focused on readability and readability only. It gives suggestions to make the text easier to read. In short, it’s suitable for people with good grammatical but poor communication skills.

Is Grammarly Safe?

I consider the privacy and security of my data as the topmost priority. I don’t want my private writings to be spread to the world or my client’s content to leak before being officially published. Obviously, I was concerned about the safety of Grammarly as the final proofreading involves using Grammarly for every document I create for myself or my clients.

I investigated, and this is what I learned –

• Grammarly stores your data on their servers, and it is encrypted (as in, no one but you can access it)
• Information is transferred from your computer to their servers through SSL/TLS – which encrypts your data to prevent your service provider/ government/ hacker from reading it
• Data is stored in the United States but complies with EU privacy laws too
• Although encryption can is breakable, it is not at all easy – so your information is safe
• If you do not want your data to be stored anywhere, then use this text box to correct grammatical errors through Grammarly. Read more about it in this article – Grammarly & Privacy.
• Grammarly also offers 2FA (two-factor authentication) for that extra layer of security

All in all, Grammarly is safe – unless you hold the secret formula to reverse aging and a group of ten thousand hackers has teamed up to crack encryption from your computer to get the formula and sell it easily for a hundred zillion dollars.

The Verdict – Grammarly Reviewed

All in all,

• Grammarly Free can correct spelling errors and grammatical errors way better than other free grammar checkers
• Grammarly Premium & Business can correct spelling errors, basic to advance level grammatical errors, can detect the tone of writing, suggest vocabulary enhancements, add a handy dictionary which is literally 2 clicks away.
• Grammarly Premium can also check your text for plagiarism

It is quite apparent that Grammarly Premium has more features compared to Grammarly Free, but not everyone requires premium features.

The questions you must ask yourself before getting the premium version (approx $11/mo), or a Business version ($15/mo) are –

• How good are you at correcting grammatical errors yourself?
• Is it absolutely necessary that your writings should be free of grammatical errors? (a few professions require this)
• Is it absolutely essential that your writings should be free from plagiarism?
• How many of those additional functionalities do you need?
• In the long run, will you benefit more than the price you are paying for it? 
• For the Business version – Do you run a business that requires your staff to produce error-free and plagiarism-free content?

For me, Grammarly is a must.

Yeah, it is not perfect, but it gets the work done pretty well.

See if it works for you too… Start using Grammarly Free first, and then you can upgrade to the Premium version later.

Leave your thoughts, comments, suggestions, feedback, jokes, etc.. in the comments box, I would love to hear back from my readers.