Another grammar checker tussle. Which is better? Which one is the best proofreading tool for you?
This is a fight between giants, a SUMO wrestling match to be precise.
The Grammarly vs Ginger argument cannot be decided purely based on emotions or likes and dislikes. The debate has to be settled with facts and pros and cons weighed for each tool.
That’s why I have dedicated this post to revealing their similarities, showing their key differences, choosing the better grammar checker in a few key categories, and fairly deciding the overall winner.
Let’s get started!
What is Grammarly?
Briefly put. Grammarly is a writing assistant— among many other things; it’s a grammar corrector, your spellchecker, and plagiarism checker.
It’s a versatile tool for proofreading and correcting spelling and grammatical mistakes in your blog posts, social media posts, emails, articles, novel drafts, etc.
There’s a Grammarly for everyone; Grammarly Free, Grammarly Premium, Grammarly Business, and Grammarly@edu.
Grammarly Pros
- The fastest online grammar checker
- It’s powerful and accurate
- Easy to use
- In-depth reports
Grammarly Cons
- Relatively High-Priced
- Can be an insufficient proofreading tool for academic texts.
What Is Ginger
Having been active for 14 years (and counting) in the proofreading software domain, Ginger is one of the oldest grammar checking software tools on the market.
With this tool, you can effortlessly check text for grammatical errors, wrong punctuation, misspellings, and misused words.
Ginger, just like Grammarly, helps writers churn out big chunks of high-quality content faster and better.
Again, just like Grammarly, there’s a Ginger for everyone—whether an individual freelancer, a small business, an enterprise, or an educational institution.
Ginger Pros
- Ginger grammar checker has a relatively powerful free plan
- The virtual writing tutor and translation features make Ginger a very useful tool for non-native English speakers.
- Has a useful personal dictionary.
Ginger Cons
- Not highly accurate
- Doesn’t have a plagiarism checker
Pricing Between The Two
Grammarly Plans
Free
The free version offers basic:
- Spelling checks
- Grammar checks
- Punctuation checks
Grammarly Premium
For Individuals
This is ideal for freelancers or anyone working alone.
- One-time monthly subscription costs $29.95 USD/month
- The quarterly subscription costs $19.98/month ($59.95 in total per quarter)
- The annual subscription costs $11.66/month (total payment of $139.95 per annum)
Grammarly Business
For Business teams
Ideal for people working in groups. Grammarly business accommodates professional teams with members from 3 up to 149.
- 3 to 9 members — $12.50/member/month
- 10 to 49 members — $12.08/member/month
- 50 to 149 members — $11.67/member/month
Grammarly dishes out discounts now and then, so you might be lucky and find rates lower than the ones above.
Grammarly also has a plan—Grammarly@edu—for education institutions.
Ginger Software Plans
Free
Ginger offers a free version that is more versatile than most free packages by other grammar checkers.
It offers:
- Grammar checking
- Definitions
- Synonyms
- Sentence rephraser
Ginger Premium
Although Ginger is cheaper than Grammarly, they still offer discounts now and then. The last time I wrote a Ginger software review they had offered discounts but by the time I published this post, Ginger had slashed the costs of their monthly plan again. Here’s how the plans cost before and after the discounts.
- The monthly pricing had been discounted from $19.99 to $13.99.
- The Annual plan costs $7.49 /month (billed as one payment of $89.88 per annum)
- The Two Year package costs $6.66/month (billed as one payment of $159.84 every two years)
Which One Offers Best Value for Money?
Although Grammarly is obviously more expensive than Ginger, I’d say that they both offer great value for money.
These unique differences are just what make me believe that each tool offers extra utility and value for money.
Grammarly vs Ginger: Key Features
Grammarly’s Features
Here are the features that make Grammarly a monstrous proofreading tool:
- A Customizable Dictionary: Grammarly allows you to add words to the personal dictionary. It lets you add non-English names, slang, or abbreviations so that when you type the word again, it won’t be flagged as incorrect.
- Spelling and Grammar Checking: These features help you to identify and correct misspellings and grammatical mistakes. Once the tool identifies the errors, it offers suggestions for the correct spellings and grammatically correct arrangement of words.
- Plagiarism. Grammarly Checks your writing against billions of published works across the web to gauge how unique your text is.
- Wordiness: This feature helps improve the readability of your writing. It detects long and hard-to-read sentences, then offers suggestions on how to shorten such sentences. The attained succinctness therefrom makes the writing easily readable.
- Passive Voice: Grammarly identifies sentences in which passive voice has been used.
- Punctuation: Grammarly highlights every part of your writing that’s missing a misplaced punctuation mark or has a misplaced one.
- Repetition: If you use a word repetitively in the same text, Grammarly flags it and prompts you to reduce its usage.
- Plugins: Offers MS-Word, MS Outlook, and Google Chrome plugins.
Ginger’s Features
Grammar checker: Ginger’s grammar checking feature provides exhaustive checks for grammar mistakes, English syntax errors, misused words, and punctuation mistakes. Among the many issues that the feature is able to flag and offer solutions to, we have: subject-verb agreement, singular/plural nouns, consecutive nouns, misused words, contextual spelling
Sentence rephraser: Ginger’s sentence rephraser offers synonyms, idioms, expressions, and other sentence blocks to make your sentences sound a bit different.
Text-to-speech: One of the best recommended self-editing techniques/routines is reading your work aloud. Doing this helps you pick out the errors you might have missed but using the app to read your writing has an added advantage: you improve on orthoepy.
The personal trainer: The personal trainer comes with tailor-made lessons, tackling the common mistakes you’re prone to. If, for example, you’re guilty of overusing passive language, the lesson will be centered around that.
Key Differences between Grammarly and Ginger
Although Grammarly and Ginger are similar grammar checkers, they are different in so many ways. I picked out some of these differences to help you decide which proofreading software to use.
| Grammarly | Ginger |
| Grammarly is available as a Mac desktop app. | Ginger Also has a Mac desktop app. |
| Comes with a plagiarism checker. | Doesn’t offer a plagiarism checker. |
| Grammarly can identify incorrect usage of numbers. | Ginger isn’t programmed to recognize incorrect use of numbers. |
| Gives you the option of uploading already written documents. | NO upload option available. |
| Has a Wordiness feature | Doesn’t have a wordiness detection feature |
| Grammarly doesn’t have a text-to-speech feature | Ginger has a text-to-speech feature |
| Only supports variations of the English language. | Supports more than 40 languages. |
| Doesn’t have a mobile app | Ginger is available as a mobile app and keyboard |
| Grammarly has pricy packages | Ginger is relatively cheap |
| Grammarly is fast | Slower compared to Grammarly |
Grammarly vs Ginger: A Head-to-Head Match
Category #1. Accuracy & Database Depth
Grammarly claims to have more than 16 billion sources in its proofreading database.
Very impressive!
Grammarly does rank your writing’s grammar and style against tons of other users. And it has lots of them!
Grammarly’s very smart algorithms exhaustively spell check every part in your text before providing you with helpful descriptions or suggestions, making you a little more literate in the process. It is programmed to use more than 200 grammar rules and is also able to catch sentence fragments.
For non-native speakers, Ginger’s multilingual support is very tip-top. And then there’s that the English Personal Trainer’ feature, which in my opinion, is a legit software tutor (and it’s very handy for amateur writers).
However, I’ve got a problem with Ginger: I don’t know if they want us to believe that they are not show-offs or they simply have a shallower database; they’ve not come forth to say how good their database is.
So, I cannot come here and start claiming—on their behalf—that they have an impressive database whatsoever.
Winner
I’ll give this round to Grammarly, better database (as per Grammarly’s claim), thorough writing reports, and better accuracy.
Category #2. Multilingual Support.
Well, this one ends before it even starts.
We all know that Grammarly only supports the most popular English language variations.
Ginger, on the other hand, is freakishly versatile with the languages it supports.
With support for over 40 major languages, you’re likely to find your home language on the list and translate the text into another supported language.
Or if you’re like me, it’s just a matter of changing “labour” to “labor,” so the other languages don’t matter, for now.
Winner
Ginger. It’s obvious that with those many supported languages, Ginger obliterates Grammarly in this round.
Category #3. Plagiarism Checking
This one is also a straightforward issue; Grammarly has a plagiarism checker, Ginger doesn’t!
Winner
Incontestably, Grammarly.
Category #4. Extensions, Apps, and Integrations
Ginger was only available as a Windows desktop app last year when I reviewed it. But it’s now available as a desktop application for Mac as well.
It’s also accessible using web browser extensions, an add-in for MS Word, and GInger mobile apps and keyboards.
Grammarly is available on almost anything except as a mobile app. It’s available as a desktop app, as browser extensions (including chrome and Firefox), and has add-ins for MS Office and Google Docs.
Winner
Ginger. Last year, when I reviewed Ginger, I would have given this round to Grammarly. However, since Ginger is now available as a Mac desktop application and has a mobile app, I think it’s that it wins this round.
Category #5. Design and Ease of Use
Grammar checkers are tools associated with convenience, so it’s essential that a grammar checker’s user experience and usability have higher ratings.
For me, Grammarly has the best design of all grammar checkers.
Its features and integrations share an intuitive design that is simply meant to give users a satisfying experience.
Ginger is also excellent. But Grammarly is Grammarly, and it’s easy to notice that Ginger is a bit less intuitive than Grammarly.
Winner
The two tools can go toe to toe but ultimately, Grammarly’s design is better and easier to use.
Category #6. Pricing
The good thing is that they both have free options. But as you can see, Grammarly offers relatively high prices.
You could get Ginger for as low as $6.66, but even $10 won’t get you one month of using Grammarly.
Winner
Ginger wins this round. I was not looking at value for money in this category. I was looking at crude prices (something like the nominal value).
Overall Winner
The head-to-head comparison votes were a tie (3-3), But after weighing the major pros and cons of each tool, it’s quite apparent that Grammarly reigns supreme!
Grammarly is faster, more versatile, and… easier to use than Ginger.
Simply, the BEST of the BEST!
Is Ginger the Top Alternative to Grammarly?
Yes, and no.
Yes, I regard Ginger as one of the top alternatives to Grammarly, but it is just one pace behind ProWritingAid as the best alternative to Grammarly.
So, yeah, I’d have to say it’s the third best grammar checking tool on the market right now.
How To Effectively Use A Grammar Checker
I always say that Grammar checkers are like software tutors or knowledgeable AI-powered writing buddies.
If you think you’re not that good of a writer, you have to observe the errors identified by Grammar checkers and learn from the provided solutions. Grammar checkers subtly point out which areas of your writing needs brushing up and by observing and learning you realize tremendous improvements.
If you think you’re good enough and you treat Grammar checkers as complementary tools at best, just remind yourself not to be too cocky—you can always learn one or two things from the grammar checks or the writing reports.
Lastly, you should know that they’re good but not sufficient as editors. Solicit the services of a human editor when necessary.
Final Words on Grammarly vs Ginger
Grammarly and Ginger are undoubtedly two of the best Grammar checkers right now. They both bring extra utility to your editing toolset and have a lot of differences on top of their similarities.
But choosing which tool to use shouldn’t be based on gut feeling. As I always do when comparing two writing tools, I recommend trying both of them before choosing one.
