We all know that Grammarly is a very good proofreading tool, but its competition is constantly improving, trying their best to replace it as the market leader.
One of the many tools in this “competition” pool is WhiteSmoke.
It is good, but how good is it?
Is it Grammarly good? Better perhaps?
I have answers to these questions and more. Stay on this page and enjoy a fact-filled potpourri of comparisons between two heavyweight proofreading tools.
It’s WhiteSmoke vs Grammarly!
Let’s go!
What Are They and Their Benefits?
What Is WhiteSmoke?
WhiteSmoke is a comprehensive, feature-packed writing software tool that analyzes your text and checks for grammatical and spelling errors, punctuation, and writing style.
Once it identifies problems with your writing, it offers suggestions on how you can enhance your text and improve your writing (that’s basically what almost every proofreading software does).
WhiteSmoke uses the Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology that employs rule-based and statistical algorithms to analyze texts and “borrow” or adopt the conventional writing rules.
This software tool is more than a grammar checker; it also analyzes your writing style, tone, and the clarity of the passages.
WhiteSmoke supports a lot of platforms: Android and iOS devices, macOS and Windows devices, and many web browsers.
WhiteSmoke Pros
- It offers useful video tutorials. Designed to help users understand what and why mistakes are flagged and in the way that the tool does.
- Provides ready-made documents and letters for users to choose from.
- It’s versatile—the Premium Plan Is Available on Multiple Platforms
WhiteSmoke Cons
- It offers a Limited Web Package
- Has No Free Plan
What Is Grammarly?
This is probably the most talked-about proofreading software, and deservedly so considering that it has around 16 million subscribers.
Grammarly performs exhaustive checks in reference to more than 250 grammar rules. In addition to its usefulness, Grammarly is a versatile tool that is easily accessible in your Gmail, Google Docs, MS Word, Chrome, and WordPress. Plus, it’s available as a desktop app and supports many other platforms.
Coolest thing since ice cream!
Grammarly has a bunch of paid plans, but it also offers a free version which is quite good at checking grammar, punctuation, and spelling.
Just like WhiteSmoke, Grammarly isn’t a basic grammar and spelling checker; it also looks at the tone and phrasing, readability, plagiarism, and a couple of other things. The tool also provides insightful and helpful writing reports to help you perfect your writing.
It’s very fast, so it helps you speed up the editing part of your writing process. All these advanced features make it an indispensable tool for both native and non-native English writers and speakers, authors, bloggers, etc.
The thing I like the most about Grammarly is that it does not disregard context. Conveniently, Grammarly lets you declare extra variables, including audience, style, emotion, intent, and many others.
Grammarly Pros
- Powerful and accurate
- Has nicer UIs and is easy to use
- Provides in-depth writing reports
- It’s versatile—you can use it on various platforms and has a customizable personal dictionary
- It’s fast
Grammarly Cons
- Has a limited free version that doesn’t come with the plagiarism checker
- It’s a bit pricey
- Aggressive marketing campaigns in the free plan
WhiteSmoke Vs Grammarly: Features
WhiteSmoke’s Key Features
Grammar Checker
For your readers, there’s nothing more annoying than reading something littered with grammatical errors. Not only will such text distract the reader, but it also convinces them that you’re somebody who’s not serious about their work.
WhiteSmoke has an excellent grammar checker which uses advanced algorithms to scour your text, looking for grammatical errors. Expectedly and handily, it furnishes you with suggestions that help you stitch a professional and neatly woven written work of art.
This is a comprehensive grammar checking feature; it looks at vital aspects of your grammar like subject-verb agreements, incomplete and run-on sentences, double negatives, tense shifts, comma splices, incorrect punctuation, capitalization, missing words, and many other areas.
Style Checker
A lot of a grammar checker’s features are elements of style—things including punctuation, grammar, and sentence construction.
But the style checking capabilities of a grammar checker go beyond grammar and punctuation. WhiteSmoke looks at things like tense consistency, monotony, and other elements which improve the flow of your text and improves the overall quality of the writing.
For non-native English speakers, this feature rains manna because—usually—they are the ones guilty of most stylistic errors. However, this feature is also helpful for PR firms, universities, and other business businesses operated by native English speakers.
Spell Checker
Spellings mistakes are easy to miss during manual proofreading sessions. But when you have a tool like WhiteSmoke, none of these little bastards will make it to the final draft. The Spell Checker is a thorough and automated scanner for such embarrassing mistakes and ensures you don’t expend much time and effort during the proofreading stage.
WhiteSmoke uses a community-generated spelling database that constantly renews its English language rules to accommodate changes that happen over time.
Punctuation Checker
Punctuations are very important but most of us get them wrong, most of the time. A lot of them are confusing and we, usually, are resigned to using them the way we see fit.
Whatever the case, we need to get rid of such errors in our writing. WhiteSmoke identifies missing punctuations, misplaced punctuation, and other mistakes we usually make when we write against time.
Of course, you’re provided with tips to help you avoid such errors in the future.
Translator and Dictionary
WhiteSmoke’s Translator feature uses the Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) technology to analyze your text and provide “word-to-word” translation between 55 languages.
Apart from the word-to-word translation, it also has a Dictionary, Thesaurus, and usage examples.
You can also add words or phrases that WhiteSmoke doesn’t recognize in the dictionary. When you use it in the future, WhiteSmoke will consider it a real word and ignore it during scanning.
Plagiarism Checker
When writing a blog post, a dissertation, or some other professional text, we usually use a lot of texts from various sources.
But we should always make sure that the borrowed doesn’t end up in the final product, at least not as they originally wrote it.
The WhiteSmoke Plagiarism Checker tasks itself with checking your text against billions of other online sources to see if your text is an exact match to one of those sources.
It helps you avoid using someone else’s content verbatim.
WhiteSmoke Templates
WhiteSmoke comes with templates for different writing styles such as cover letters, business letters, resumes, legal writing, finance writing, and other styles.
Writing Review
The Writing Review feature provides various scores such as average sentence length, complex words, negative sentences, informal expressions, and passive verbs.
Grammarly’s Key Features
Grammar Checker
This is one of the many features that make Grammarly a monstrous proofreading tool. No tool is better at checking misspellings, grammatical errors, misused words, and punctuation than Grammarly.
With this AI-powered writing assistant, you learn how to write better as it brings to your attention things like sentence structure issues, typos, and many others.
Grammarly always considers context when providing suggestions or corrections—it offers solutions tailor-made for that particular context.
Tone Detection
Taking it from where we left (context), the tone that the text carries matters a lot. We write to effectively communicate to our audience, and there are different kinds of audiences. Different types of audiences require different types of tones.
For example, say you’re writing a Facebook post to friends and family; you’d generally use a friendly tone. However, there are times and occasions you’re required to use formal or polite tones.
Grammarly’s got you covered!
It classifies the tone of your text by reviewing your word choice, punctuations, and capitalization. This way, it is able to offer you suggestions or ways of improving your text to fit the intended tone.
A Personal Dictionary
Just like WhiteSmoke, Grammarly is a flexible tool; it lets you add non-English names, slang, or abbreviations to the dictionary.
This is especially essential for fiction writers, who, more often than not, create words to use in their stories. But, grammar checkers usually flag these, and to avoid this, Grammarly lets users add such words to the dictionary.
Writing Style and Readability
Grammarly recognizes that good writing embodies clarity and a seamless flow of ideas.
In light of that, it analyzes your writing and identifies long wordy sentences, suggests synonyms for complicated words, suggests solutions for improving weak sentences, et cetera.
Overall it helps you to be economical and efficient with your sentences.
Plagiarism Checker
This feature is only available in Grammarly’s Premium plans. Grammarly gropes the web for text similar to the one under analysis, looking for writing that matches it verbatim.
The plagiarism feature ensures that your writing is unique and original.
Grammarly’s plagiarism checking tool checks about 15 billion sites, comparing the web content with your text.
Passive Voice
To make your writing carry a bolder message, you’re encouraged to avoid the use of passive voice as much as possible. Grammarly detects the instances or sentences in which passive voice has been used.
You can replace it with an active voice where necessary.
WhiteSmoke vs Grammarly: Pricing
Grammarly Pricing
Free
The free version offers basic Spelling, Grammar, Punctuation checks.
Grammarly Premium
This is ideal for individuals.
- One-time monthly subscription costs $29.95 USD/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 Business
Ideal for 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 also has a plan—Grammarly@edu—for education institutions.
WhiteSmoke Pricing
- The annual Desktop Premium plan costs $79.99
- The one-off payment for the three-year Desktop Premium is $199.95
- The one year WhiteSmoke Web plan is at $49.95
- The one-off payment for a three-year WhiteSmoke Web plan is $99.95
- The Mobile App plan costs $9.95 per year
- The one-off payment for the lifetime Mobile App plan is $30
- The business package for one year is $137.94
- The business package for three years is $317.5
Grammarly Vs WhiteSmoke: Similarities & Differences
Let’s look at the things that Grammarly and WhiteSmoke have in common and others that make them unique.
| Grammarly | WhiteSmoke | |
| Grammar Checker | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Spell Checker | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Plagiarism Checker | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Dictionary | ✔️ | ✔️ |
| Translator | ❌ | ✔️ |
| Style checker | ❌ | ✔️ |
| Tone detector | ✔️ | ❌ |
| Document templates | ❌ | ✔️ |
| Supported Languages | English (British, American, Canadian, and Australian) | Over 55 Languages |
| Supported Platforms | Desktop, Web Browser, Mobile, | Desktop, Web Browser, Mobile, |
| Character limit | 50,000 words/24 hrs. | 3000 words/session |
| Pricing plans | FreePremiumBusinessEdu | WebPremiumBusiness |
My Verdict: Which Is Better WhiteSmoke Vs Grammarly?
Looking at WhiteSmoke’s pricing, I’d be tempted to choose it over Grammarly. But that would be at face value.
In real terms, Grammarly is the best here—way better than WhiteSmoke and any other grammar checker. Grammarly is more than just a basic grammar checking tool. It has an intuitive UI, It’s easy to use, considers context when providing suggestions on your writing, and has an excellent plagiarism checker.
My Final Thoughts on WhiteSmoke vs Grammarly
WhiteSmoke and Grammarly are both great proofreading tools, no doubt about that.
But it’s obvious that Grammarly is the best grammar checker there is. It offers much more than a basic grammar checker; it supports many platforms, has an efficient free plan, and is very fast.
This is a professionals tool, and I DOUBT whether we’re going to be talking about a better grammar checking software than this in the near future.
