Grammarly vs Hemingway Editor
Both are writing tools. Here is what separates them.
| Grammarly | Hemingway Editor | |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Writing | Writing |
| Pricing model | freemium | freemium |
| Price from | Freemium | Freemium |
| Upvotes | 10 | 10 |
| What it does | Corrections and tone suggestions in every text box you type into. | Highlights the sentence you should have cut in half. |
What Grammarly is
Grammarly is a writing assistant that checks and rewrites text inside whatever you are already typing in. It ships browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge, desktop apps for Windows and Mac, integrations for Microsoft Office and Google Docs, and mobile apps for iPhone, iPad and Android. Authorship is the most unusual piece. It colour-codes sentences by their source, separating text that was typed, pasted from a website, taken from a Grammarly suggestion, or pasted from a non-web source, and it can replay how a document was written. It is opt-in, activated by a fingerprint icon, available without paying, and works in Google Docs, Microsoft Word, the Grammarly Editor, Superhuman Go and Canvas. The checking tools reach past grammar. The plagiarism checker compares text against more than 16 billion web pages plus academic papers held in ProQuest databases, drawing on sources including Wikipedia, Frontiers, PLOS One, ScienceDirect, SAGE Journals, PubMed, Elsevier, DOAJ, arXiv and Springer. It returns an originality score, highlights passages that need a citation and surfaces the matched source. A separate AI detector flags text produced by ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Microsoft Copilot. Grammarly puts its detection accuracy at 99 percent, while stating that no AI detector is 100 percent accurate and that human-written text can be flagged as a false positive. Named agents cover AI Grader, Citation Finder, Reader Reactions and Resume Builder. Plans separate mainly by AI prompt allowance. The Free plan carries no charge and includes 100 AI prompts a month. Plus adds full-sentence rewriting, tone adjustment, and detection of plagiarism and AI-generated text, and raises the allowance to 2,000 prompts per member per month, with one style guide, one brand tone and two user groups. Enterprise is quoted by the sales team, makes prompts unlimited per member, and removes the caps on style guides, brand tones and user groups. For organisations, the business feature set adds a style guide, brand tones, Knowledge Share, analytics, admin controls, SAML single sign-on, SCIM provisioning and centralised billing, with Enterprise layering on bring-your-own-key encryption, data loss prevention and an audit logs API. Training on customer data is switched off by default for business customers. The education product integrates with the Canvas, Blackboard and Moodle learning management systems, supports English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese and Italian, and offers inline translation across 19 languages.
What Hemingway Editor is
Hemingway Editor is a writing tool that marks up a draft for readability. Text is highlighted in five colours: red for a sentence far more complex than the chosen target score, yellow for one that is hard to read but less severe, purple for a word that has a simpler exact synonym, blue for adverbs, passive voice and qualifiers, and green for a grammar, spelling or punctuation problem. Green requires a Plus subscription; the other four do not. The target score is adjustable rather than fixed. The default is grade 9, and paying users can switch between three presets named Accessible, Default and Technical, which changes what counts as too complex rather than changing the text itself. An expanded statistics panel reports letters, characters, words, sentences, paragraphs and reading time. The free web editor applies no word count limit to a document, and the free grammar checker can be used without creating an account. That checker flags context sensitive word choice, run on sentences, tense shifts between sentences, missing commas and wrong word usage. Three other free tools sit beside it: a paraphrasing tool, an AI proofreader and a readability checker. Hemingway Editor Plus costs $10 per month on monthly billing, or $100 per year, which the vendor equates to $8.33 a month. Grammar fixes are uncapped for paying users, and on a team plan each user receives 10,000 AI sentences per month. The free trial runs for two weeks and does not ask for a credit card, and no charge is applied when it ends unless you pick a paid plan and enter payment details. The desktop application is sold on different terms. Hemingway Editor 3 costs $19.99 as a single purchase rather than a subscription, runs on macOS and Windows, and works fully offline with no internet connection required. It exports to plain text, PDF, Word .docx, HTML and Markdown, and publishes to WordPress in a single click. The trade-off is that it excludes the AI features found in the subscription product, so the two are companions rather than the same tool at two prices.
We are not affiliated with either product. Upvote counts come from the published formula and neither position was paid for.