Writing flawless pieces is hard—almost impossible for the first draft—and that’s why we’ll always talk about proofreading software.
Grammarly and ProWritingAid are undoubtedly two of the best grammar checking tools on the market right now. But there will always be a debate among users concerning the best among the two tools.
We all know that both tools ease the editing burden (and they do quite an excellent job), but one is better; the question is: which one?
First, I’ll briefly overview the two software solutions and then compare them, feature by feature, to see which does a better job.
What Is Grammarly?
Grammarly is a proofreading software tool that corrects grammar, offers comprehensive feedback on different areas of your text, checks plagiarism, and performs other cool proofreading stuff in real-time.
Whether it’s a blog post, email, academic assignment, or any other writing, you can utilize the tool’s features to identify and correct spelling and grammatical errors.
The tool also detects other errors, including sentence structure issues and misused words, provides solutions to style changes and wrong punctuation, and allows you to customize your personal dictionary by adding new words.
Grammarly Pros
1. The editing happens in real-time. Grammarly underlines incorrect words whilst you’re writing. This way, you know what’s wrong with your words and sentences as soon as you type them.
2. Fast. Grammarly’s response time is shorter than most grammar checkers.
3. It’s Customizable. The tool lets you add words that are incorrect or are from other languages to the dictionary. It might be a brand name, fictional character, a word from an unsupported language, or a word that’s not technically correct.
4. Helps You Improve Your Writing. The tool consistently flags common errors in your writing and provides explanations and solutions. Over time, you learn how to avoid those mistakes and prevent them even before the editing stage.
5. It’s Easy to Use. Grammarly has tidy UIs and is very easy to use. It doesn’t take that long for a beginner to master its features.
6. Has High Accuracy. It’s very accurate and identifies more errors than most grammar checking tools.
Grammarly Cons
1. Has a Limited Free Version. The free version only offers basic spelling and grammatical error corrections. If you want to utilize the tool’s advanced editing capabilities, you need to upgrade to a premium plan.
2. Aggressive Advertisement Campaigns. Free version users are subjected to distracting ads.
3. Relatively Pricey. Although its subscription costs are merited, Grammarly is high-priced compared to other grammar checking tools, including ProWritingAid.
What Is ProWritingAid?
ProWritingAid is like Grammarly in many ways: it’s a style editor and grammar checker, helps you optimize word choices, corrects mistakes and, fundamentally, edit your punctuation and grammar.
And it gives the user very comprehensive reports which can be used to improve writing. In addition to the well detailed reports, ProWritingAid has in-app articles, videos, and quizzes.
It also comes with integrations for WordPress, Gmail, and Google Docs.
ProWritingAid Pros
1. Provides In-Depth Reports. ProWritingAid analyzes your text, identifies areas that need improvements, and provides reports for those areas—the tool gives over 20 different reports.
2. Is Packed with A Lot of Features. This proofreading software has more features than its competition.
3. Offers Both Mac and Windows support. ProWritingAid supports both Desktop versions, which is something we can’t say for most grammar checking tools.
4. It’s Versatile. This proofreading software has more integrations than most (if not all) of the grammar checking tools.
5. Offers a Lifetime Plan. There’s a lifetime plan if you’re totally hooked. With this plan, you never have to pay again.
6. Has Cheap Pricing Plans. Apart from the fact that they provide a lifetime plan, ProWritingAid’s pricing plans are relatively cheaper—the plans cost less than Grammarly.
ProWritingAid Cons
1. Has a Limited Free Version. I think we all expect free things to lack one or two features that premium products and services have. ProWritingAid has its plagiarism checker available only on premium plans.
2. Limited Plagiarism Checks. So, a couple of words ago, I complained about ProWritingAid having limited its plagiarism checker to premium plans only. It also happens that its plagiarism checker isn’t that thorough.
3. Slow Processing Speed. The app takes a bit longer to process large texts.
4. Has No Mobile Apps. ProWritingAid is not available as a mobile app on both iOS and Android.
Pricing
Pricing is an important factor when we are comparing grammar checkers. A grammar checker could be good but with high unmerited pricing strata, purchasing the tool becomes a cost-inefficient move.
Let us take a look at the tools’ pricing plans.
Grammarly Pricing
Grammarly offers three pricing plans. These plans change from time to time, but this is how they were structured at the time of publishing.
1. Grammarly Free
With the free plan, you can use web browser extensions, a Microsoft Office add-in, a web-based personal editor, or the desktop app. In addition to various checks, the free plan comes with definitions and synonym suggestions and sends performance analytics to your email.
It’s great, but not sufficient.
The free version lacks some extra grammar and spell check rules and misses a couple of issues. Compared to the paid versions, the free plan detects fewer issues.
2. Grammarly Premium
This is how Grammarly premium—for individual users—is structured:
- One-time monthly subscription costs $29.95/month
- The quarterly subscription costs $19.98/month ($59.95 in total)
- The annual subscription costs $11.66/month (total payment of $139.95)
Grammarly premium subscribers get:
- All the features in the free plan
- A Plagiarism checker
- Sentence rewriting suggestions
- Multiple word choices
- Advanced suggestions
- Tone adjustment
- And a bunch of other proofreading features
3. Grammarly Business
This plan is suitable for professional teams with members from 3 up to 149.
This is how Grammarly Business packages are structured:
- 3 to 9 members — $12.50/member/month
- 10 to 49 members — $12.08/member/month
- 50 to 149 members — $11.67/member/month
With the Business plan, you get:
- All the features in the Premium plan
- A Style guide
- An Admin Panel
- Email support
ProWritingAid Pricing
ProWritingAid also offers three pricing plans. These are:
1. ProWritingAid Free
The free version of ProWritingAid is only available on their website. Using the free plan, you get access to features like:
- A summary report of major mistakes in your writing.
- Up to 19 writing reports
The free version limits your word count to 500 per editing session.
2. ProWritingAid Premium
The Premium Plan has:
- All the features of the free plan
- A desktop version
- Integrations and Add-Ins for Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Chrome, and Scrivener.
- No word count limit
And this is how the payment plans for ProWritingAid Premium are structured:
- Monthly Subscription: $20
- Annual Subscription: $79
- Lifetime Subscription: $399
3. ProWritingAid Premium Plus
ProWritingAid also offers a Premium Plus plan. The subscriptions are as follows:
- Monthly Subscription: $24
- Annual Subscription: $89
- Lifetime Subscription: $499
The Premium pricing plan gives you access to:
- All of the features in the ProWritingAid premium plan
- 60 plagiarism checks per year
Grammarly vs. ProWritingAid: Features Compared
Let’s compare the tools’ features and see how they fare against each other.
Ding! Ding! Ding! Grammarly versus ProWritingAid, who wins?
Let’s get ready to rumble!
Grammar and Spelling Checking
Identifying and rectifying grammatical errors in your writing is a fundamental function of a grammar checker. That and tackling misspellings are the distinct uses of proofreading software. Let’s take a look at what these grammar checkers offer.
Grammarly
Grammarly provides corrections and suggestions on spelling, grammar, and punctuation to improve the correctness of your writing. Grammarly’s sophisticated AI checks your text for grammatical errors, misspellings, and incorrect punctuation in real-time.
The tool goes deeper, checking your writing for structure issues, misused phrases, and a bunch of other mistakes in your text. Grammarly also suggests alternative words for the identified misspellings and words used out of context.
ProWritingAid
ProWritingAid’s AI is also good at identifying grammatical issues and highlighting misspelled words in your writing. Just like Grammarly, it offers suggestions of replacements for the misspelled words.
This proofreading tool supports a variety of English versions, including American, British English Canadian, and Australian.
Which Is Better?
They both are good; if there are differences in quality, they are very marginal. No clear winner here.
Plagiarism Checker
Publishing unique content is very important. Plagiarized material will leave a huge dent on your reputation and probably end your career as a writer. This is how the two tools’ plagiarism checkers fare against each other.
Grammarly
Grammarly searches the web for text similar to yours to ensure that your writing is unique and original.
The plagiarism checking tool flips over more than 15 billion sites comparing the web content with your text. The tool then gives you an originality score for your efforts.
Grammarly also identifies texts that require citations and goes as far as providing links to the sources of similar writing.
You get citation data on three referencing formats: Chicago Manual of Style, APA, and MLA.
Grammarly also suggests corresponding links for citations. By clicking the links, you directly jump to online resources for citation formats for your writing.
ProWritingAid
ProWritingAid looks for matches for your text on billions of online sources and offline databases.
It checks your work against over a billion web pages, published works, and academic papers to be sure of its originality.
The plagiarism report can be accessed using the online editing tool or through the Microsoft Word Add-In.
The ProWritingAid plagiarism report tells you which texts have the words or ideas verbatim as yours. In addition, it also gives you a percentage of similarity between the two texts.
Which Is Better?
Both tools offer plagiarism checkers, which check your work against billions of published content.
But…
ProWritingAid’s plagiarism checker just falls a bit short of the standard set by Grammarly’s plagiarism checker.
Writing Reports
The tools provide writing reports to help you identify areas of your writing that require improvement.
Grammarly
Grammarly’s performance reports help you see how easy reading your text is.
To make your writing more lucid and easily readable, Grammarly analyzes your texts, identifies, and alerts you of wordy, anaconda-long sentences. It enables you to be economical and efficient with your sentences by providing suggestions—suggests synonyms and efficient phrases to use in place of weak sentences and unnecessary words and phrases.
The reports include:
1. Readability Score
To help you increase the readability of your text, Grammarly uses readability scores. It measures how easy it is for an average Joe to read your text. Your writing has to achieve at least a 60 for it to have an average reading level. Going higher than 60 means you’re getting better
2. Text Scores
Then there are text scores, which range from 1 to 100. The tool looks at the types of suggestions thrown at your texts—the more suggestions there are, the less the score.
3. Vocabulary
Grammarly looks at rare and unique words in your writing. Your text has unique words if you use a lot of different words compared to other texts. Rare words are simply the percentage of words your writing has that are not commonly used English words.
The vocabulary scores are there to help you add variety to your vocabulary.
4. Word Count
The word count looks at reading time, character and word count, and the amount/number of sentences.
The objective is to help you customize your writing—blog posts, speeches, emails, et cetera—to fit your target audience.
ProWritingAid
ProWritingAid analyzes your writing and provides a bunch of reports on areas that need tweaking. The reports either offer you quick fixes or give you in-depth analyses to improve your writing style.
Here are a chosen few out of the bulk:
1. The Readability Report
ProWritingAid recognizes that great writers rarely employ fancy words to show mastery. Great writers deliver content that easily communicates their intended message.
Your readers don’t have to look up words or decode your writing. No! They don’t owe you that much effort.
ProWritingAid’s readability report employs the Flesch Reading Ease Score to canvass your text and highlight sentences that will be toilsome for your readers.
2. The Writing Style Report
High-quality content has a lot more than just correct grammar. ProWritingAid provides the Style Report to highlight areas of writing that require revisions to improve coherence, tidiness, and readability.
Things tackled include passive and hidden verbs, over-reliance on adverbs, repeated sentence starts, and other important areas.
3. The Transition Report
ProWritingAid also looks at the amount of “road signs” used in your writing—AKA transition words.
Transitions help your readers move smoothly between ideas and this report seeks to help you incorporate them into your writing. The tool scans your text, looking for transitions like “similarly,” “nevertheless, or “as a result.”
If transitions don’t make up at least 25% of your writing (that is one in every four sentences), the report prompts you to revise it and add more “road signs.”
4. The Overused Words Report
Overuse of intensifiers or hesitant words weakens your writing and makes it sound unconvincing.
Words like “very,” “just,” or “maybe” need to be used sparingly to prevent them from undermining your ideas. And… by flagging these unwanted weights, that’s exactly what this report helps you achieve.
Which Is Better?
Both Grammarly and ProWritingAid provide comprehensive writing reports, but Grammarly marginally edges the latter because it employs better algorithms to analyze your text (at least at face value).
Tone Detector
The tone detector enables you to publish content tailor-made for your target audience.
Grammarly
We all know that to be considered a good writer, you need to deliver content tailored to fit the context or medium through which it’s published and not escape the formality of the occasion or purpose.
You ought to make sure the tone is appropriate for the context—i.e., a business email should not sound the same as a set of lecture notes on puberty.
Grammarly’s tone detector allows you to choose a suitable tone, be it formal, or friendly and write consistently in that tone throughout the document. The tool can pick up irregularities in your capitalization, punctuation, phrasing, and word choice and alerts you using purple lines.
You are also provided with suggestions to improve the clarity of your writing, make it a bit more professional and polished, and engaging.
ProWritingAid
ProWritingAid does not have this specific feature, but the writing style report does tackle irregularities in your tone of voice, so we can’t say that it’s completely absent.
Which Is Better?
In this category, Grammarly is the outright winner since ProWritingAid doesn’t have this specific feature.
Add-Ins/Plugins/Integrations
I believe that the most efficient way of using a grammar checker is through integrations and add-ins.
With integrations and add-ins, you don’t have to keep copying and pasting texts or switching between tabs to write and edit—you can write and edit simultaneously, in the same window or on the same page. This way, you save both time and energy.
Grammarly
Grammarly has plugins for a variety of platforms. You can integrate Grammarly with web browsers like Edge, Firefox, Safari.
The tool also has an Office add-in for your Microsoft Outlook and Word. On top of that, Grammarly offers a browser extension for web-based applications like Slack.
This software solution is also available as a desktop app that allows you to create and save docs on the cloud. If you have already written works, you can simply copy and paste it into the app’s window.
ProWritingAid
Just like Grammarly, ProWritingAid is available as an online word editor, desktop app, web browser extension, and add-ons for Google Docs and Microsoft Word.
ProWritingAid’s browser extensions—for Safari and Firefox—also integrate with sites like WordPress, Facebook, Gmail, and many others.
There’s one thing that left me unimpressed: The ProWritingAid Microsoft Word plugin is only supported by Word on Windows computers.
There’s some good news for Mac users though, the ProWritingAid desktop app is available for both Windows and Mac.
You can also open and edit Scrivener projects and while retaining your formatting. There are plenty of other formats that the app supports: HTML, Rich Text, Markdown, and Open Office.
Which Is Better?
I’d have given this to ProWritingAid because of the scrivener support (well… scrivener is a big deal for fiction writers) but the missing support for MS Office for Mac kinda canceled that advantage.
So, this is a draw for me. NO winners, and hopefully, there are no whiners.
Design, Interface & Ease of Use
User-friendliness is also an important aspect when considering the utility of a grammar checker (and most software tools). If you are to enjoy the full benefits of a grammar checker, it needs to have a user-friendly interface.
Grammarly
Grammarly has a tidy online editor. You can choose between copying and pasting your texts into the editor and uploading documents.
As already iterated, Grammarly can be added as a web browser extension, add-in for Office, or can be downloaded as a desktop app.
The desktop app has an interface just as clean as the web editor. Grammarly is so easy to use.
ProWritingAid
Unlike Grammarly, ProWritingAid doesn’t have very tidy UIs.
I find it to be a gimcrack app (but it’s still super good, just not that clean).
Which Is Better?
Grammarly also gets my vote in this category. It has an easy-to-use interface and is available as a mobile app (which ProWritingAid doesn’t have).
Overall Winner: Which is Better ProWritingAid or Grammarly?
Grammarly is the outright winner (judging by the vote count, it’s a clear-cut victory). It’s justifiably a bit pricier and outranks its competitor in many categories.
Who wouldn’t want a cleaner, faster, and thorough AI-powered proofreader?
Do Professional Writers Use Grammarly?
Yes. In fact, if I had to take an educated guess, I’d say that 7 out of 10 editors use Grammarly as a proofreading software tool.
No matter how good a writer is, they know that there will always be errors in their writing. Writers usually miss the small ones, but they know Grammarly’s smart algorithms won’t.
My Final Thoughts On ProWritingAid Vs Grammarly
Comparing Grammarly and any other grammar checker always requires exhaustive research and testing.
But… It’s always a trap! Grammarly comes out on top, always.
Grammarly sets the standard. It is faster, has smarter algorithms, and is easy to use.
However, I wouldn’t advise anyone to dump ProWritingAid simply because I like Grammarly better. If you ask around, people will tell you that there are tasks that ProWritingAid does better and more efficiently than Grammarly.
Try them both to see which one is your cup of tea.
