What is the best grammar checker in 2026?

Grammarly, now part of Superhuman, is still the default answer to "which grammar checker should I use" for a reason. It catches grammar, punctuation and spelling slips, flags tone and clarity, and rewrites clunky sentences. The real advantage is reach: it works in the browser, in Word and in desktop apps, so you don't copy and paste text around.

The free plan corrects spelling and grammar and includes 100 AI prompts a month. Pro costs $12 a month billed yearly, so $144 a year, and raises the AI allowance to 2,000 prompts. Paid month to month, Pro jumps to $30, which works out to $360 over twelve months: two and a half times the annual price for the same product. Enterprise pricing is quote only.

What the negative reviews say: most complaints aren't about the corrections, they're about billing. Users report charges after a forgotten trial and renewals they didn't expect. Grammarly now sends a reminder two days before a Pro trial ends, but put the date in your calendar anyway. Non-English suggestions (French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese) are still in beta and mostly reserved for paid plans.

ProWritingAid is the tool long-form writers keep recommending. Beyond grammar, it runs reports on overused words, sentence length variety, pacing, repeated phrases and readability. If you're editing a 60,000-word manuscript or a thesis chapter, those reports show patterns a sentence-by-sentence checker never surfaces.

Pricing is clear and, unusually, includes a lifetime option. Premium costs $30 a month, or $10 a month billed yearly ($120), or $399 once. Premium Pro, which adds more AI features, costs $36 a month, $12 a month yearly ($144), or $699 lifetime. If you plan to use it for more than three or four years, the lifetime license beats any subscription on this list.

The free plan checks text in 500-word chunks and allows 10 rephrases a day, enough to judge the corrections. Two limits matter: it handles English only, and the refund window is three days on annual and lifetime plans, while monthly payments aren't refundable at all. Try the free plan on a real chapter before you pay.

LanguageTool started in Hamburg and now sits in the Learneo group. Its pitch is breadth: one subscription corrects English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Polish and Portuguese. If your day mixes an English report and a Spanish email, that one subscription replaces two.

The free version is now tighter than many lists suggest. It checks 2,000 characters per field and allows three AI rephrases a day, and the browser extension is now for Premium subscribers only: free users paste text into the website. Premium raises the limit to 150,000 characters per text and adds more than 20,000 extra rules.

LanguageTool bills in euros. Its help center lists €19.90 a month, €39.90 a quarter, €59.89 a year and €99.90 for two years, with up to 20% off for students and teachers and a 14-day refund window. Reviews have soured: users mention slowdowns, false corrections and slow support. Your text is processed on its servers; tech-savvy users self-host the open LanguageTool server to keep text local.

QuillBot is a paraphraser first and a grammar checker second. Paste a sentence, pick a mode, and it rewrites it several ways; it also summarizes and checks grammar. Students like it for untangling a heavy paragraph, writers for finding a simpler phrasing.

Premium costs $19.95 month to month, $13.31 a month on the semiannual plan, or $8.33 a month billed yearly ($99.95). With a verified .edu email, the student price drops to $6.25 a month ($74.95 a year). The annual plan is where the value is.

Its grammar checker is decent but not the reason to buy. Use QuillBot to rework text, then run the final version through a dedicated checker. And check your school's rules: undisclosed automatic paraphrasing can get you in trouble even when the ideas are yours.

Wordtune focuses on rewriting sentences: shorter, more formal, more casual, or just clearer. Its free Basic plan is generous on the essentials, with unlimited spelling and grammar corrections and 10 rewrites a day, which already covers a lot of everyday email.

Its paid plans have the cheapest first year on this list: Advanced costs $4.89 a month billed yearly and Unlimited $6.99 a month billed yearly. For someone who mostly wants to polish emails and posts, that's a fraction of Grammarly Pro.

The trade-off: Wordtune is a rewriting tool with grammar on the side, not a deep style analyzer like ProWritingAid. It won't give you readability reports on a manuscript. And like any rewriting tool, read every suggestion: it can change your meaning while making the sentence sound smoother.

Antidote comes from Druide in Montreal and is best known as the reference French checker. Its English module is less famous but built the same way: a detailed corrector that explains each rule, plus dictionaries and writing guides. Translators and bilingual professionals often use it as their single tool for both languages.

Correction runs on your computer, not in the cloud. Only the AI rephrasing mode sends text to Druide's servers, over an encrypted connection, and Druide says it doesn't keep that text or train on it. That makes Antidote one of the few paid checkers where a confidential document never leaves your machine.

Antidote is now subscription only for new customers. Antidote+ costs $59.95 for the first year for one language, then $48 at renewal; English and French together cost $89.95, then $72. A family plan covers five people from $99.95. Prices are in US dollars with tax on top, and there's a 30-day trial. Long-time users dislike the end of lifetime licenses, and reviews mention slowdowns on very large documents and add-ins that break after updates.