Grammarly Free vs Premium: Which Version is Right for You?
Discover the crucial distinctions between Grammarly’s free and premium versions. While the free plan offers fundamental grammar checks, the premium subscription elevates writing with advanced features like fluency enhancements, tone suggestions, and plagiarism detection, making it indispensable for professional and academic contexts.
Grammarly offers both a free and premium subscription for its AI writing assistance. The free version provides limited but essential grammar and spelling checks, while the premium subscription aims to take writing accuracy and clarity to the next level. The Premium plan offers additional checks for writing style, vocabulary enhancement, plagiarism detection, and more.
In this blog, we will dive deep into the differences between Grammarly Free vs Premium. We will do a head-on comparison between the free plan and the paid plan to see the worth of the Grammarly premium plan.
What are the differences between Grammarly Free vs Premium?
Grammarly’s free version offers basic grammar checks, while the premium subscription provides advanced features like fluency enhancements, tone suggestions, and plagiarism detection, essential for professional and academic writing. Explore the detailed comparison to choose the plan that suits your needs best.
Correctness
Both the free and the paid versions help to correct the write-up.
Grammar, spelling, and punctuation
The Grammarly free version helps identify and correct grammatical spelling, and punctuation mistakes. It tells you the proper use of grammar including subjects and verbs, pronouns, prepositions, and articles.
It spots issues like wrong verb tenses, disagreement between subjects and verbs, pronoun errors, and other grammatical mistakes. The spelling check identifies misspelled words and typos, with corrections. The punctuation check ensures proper use of commas, periods, apostrophes, hyphens, colons, and semicolons across sentences and phrases.
Consistency in spelling and punctuation
Grammarly Premium checks for consistent spelling of words across your document and makes sure you are using the right punctuation. It will spot instances where you have spelled the same word differently or used inconsistent punctuation. It allows you to clean up your document so it is perfectly consistent. This helps ensure your writing looks professional.
English Fluency
It provides many suggestions to help improve the fluency in your writing. It includes
- Conciseness checks to reduce wordiness
- Makes suggestions when sentences are unnecessarily complex
- Flags unclear phrasing
- Gives you alternative wording suggestions to help improve clarity.
These next-level fluency checks ensure your writing flows smoothly and clear communication of your ideas.
Clarity
Clarity is important while writing. The free plan has limited suggestions regarding clarity in the sentences, paragraphs, and the whole text. But the premium offers better suggestions.
Conciseness
The free plan offers clarity improvement by making texts concise. It removes unnecessary use of words that make things lengthy and unattractive, It helps remove words or phrases to make sentences clear and concise.
Full-sentence rewrites
The full-sentence rewrite capability looks at entire sentences in your writing that can be better with alternate words for clarity or conciseness. It then provides an alternative rewrite suggestion to help improve the syntax, structure, and flow of longer sentences. This helps polish lengthy or wordy sentences in your writing.
Formatting
The premium version of Grammarly also checks for proper formatting of the text. It breaks up long chunks of text into smaller paragraphs. It makes reading better and easier to comprehend. Premium also suggests using bullets and numbers to make texts more reader-friendly.
Engagement
The free plan doesn’t offer any suggestions to improve the engagement of the text. However, the premium plan helps choose words and variety in the sentence structure to improve the engagement of the writing.
Word choice
Grammarly Premium also analyzes vocabulary usage and provides word choice suggestions. It will highlight words that seem out of context, provide alternatives for commonly confused words, and suggest ways to avoid repetition. Precision in vocabulary is key in articulating ideas clearly and Grammarly checks help you choose the best words.
Word and sentence variety
To help make your writing more engaging, Grammarly Premium looks at your use of words and sentences. It spots sentences that start the same way and provides suggestions to vary sentence structure. On the vocabulary side, it identifies cases where you overuse the same words and gives alternative wording recommendations to help add more variety. This improves readability.
Delivery
Understanding the delivery is critical to make the texts more reader-friendly. The Grammarly free version has very limited usage as far as delivery is concerned. It will only help you with the tone detection. You can set your favorite tone as formal, professional, friendly, or optimistic. But the premium version has more than only tone detection. It offers tone suggestions and inclusive language suggestions.
Tone detection
Understanding how the tone of your writing comes across can be incredibly difficult. Even if you think you have written in a professional, friendly voice, readers may interpret COMPLETELY DIFFERENT TONE. Grammarly analyzes aspects like vocabulary, sentence structure, punctuation, and formality in language to determine your current tone.
Grammarly offers suggestions to revise word choice, vary sentences, and change formatting to better align with the tone you intend to achieve. This tone analysis makes your writing more aware of its impact on readers.
Tone suggestions
Understanding how tone comes across in your writing is difficult for most writers. Grammarly Premium solves this by providing adjustable tone goals – from casual or friendly to formal or authoritative. Based on the tone you select, you will get suggestions on word choice, sentences, formatting, and more to ensure the overall tone aligns with your intent.
Grammarly can help you sound confident, friendly, diplomatic, constructive, sincere, and formal. You can set these in the tone settings tab to allow Grammarly to identify and fix them accordingly.
Inclusive language
Grammarly Premium promotes the use of inclusive language by identifying language that might deprecate or diminish groups of people. It gives suggestions to help avoid ableism, ageism, racial bias, sexual orientation bias, and more. This helps writers communicate in a way that makes all groups feel comfortable.
Citations
Properly formatting citations for sources, references, and bibliographies is tedious work open to human error. Grammarly Premium takes care of this by checking citations are formatted correctly in whichever style you need – APA, MLA, Chicago, etc. Grammarly identifies any inconsistencies, missing elements, or formatting issues and suggests corrections so your citations are publication-ready.
Plagiarism detection
The free version misses the use of Plagiarism detection. Plagiarism is a critical element when it comes to digital publishing. Grammarly Premium has a strong plagiarism detection tool. It scans based on over 8 billion web pages to check that your writing avoids copying or inadequately paraphrasing other sources. Any unoriginal text is highlighted and Grammarly provides a rewrite suggestion to put it in your own words. This protects you from accidental plagiarism during the writing process.
Security
With Grammarly, your data is completely safe irrespective of free or premium accounts.
Account roles and permissions
If you are using Grammarly premium for a team or groups of people like an institution then you can see different user roles. These account roles and permissions can allow people to manage specific features in the team.
SAML single sign-on
You can allow your teammates, students, or participants to create their separate login credentials as a provider.
Here is a head-on comparison between the Free and Premium plans of Grammarly in a table,
| Feature | Free | Premium |
| Grammar | Spots all Grammatical Mistakes and suggestions for correction | Spots all Grammatical Mistakes and suggestions for correction |
| Spelling | Spots all Spelling Errors and suggestions for correction | Spots all Spelling Errors and suggestions for correction |
| Punctuation | Spots all Punctuation Errors and suggestions for correction | Spots all Punctuation Errors and suggestions for correction |
| Consistency in spelling and punctuation | Not provided | Rewrite hard-to-read sentences |
| English Fluency | Not provided | Helps your English sound natural and fluent. |
| Conciseness | Helps concise text | Helps concise text |
| Full-sentence rewrites | Not provided | Helps make text more reader-friendly |
| Word choice | Not provided | Helps with formatting the text to make it reader-friendly |
| Word and sentence variety | Not provided | Helps make better word choices. |
| Formatting | Not provided | Assign roles and permission to users or team members within the plan |
| Tone detection | Helps detect the tone and suggest accordingly | Helps detect the tone and suggest accordingly |
| Tone suggestions | Not provided | Helps sound confident, friendly, diplomatic, constructive, sincere, & formal |
| Inclusive language | Not provided | Heps use words that are respectful and current. |
| Citations | Automatically generates citations for popular research websites | Automatically generates citations for popular research websites |
| Plagiarism detection | Not provided | Deep Plagiarism detection for the text. |
| Account roles and permissions | Not provided | Assign roles and permission to user or team members within the plan |
| SAML single sign-on | Not provided | Individual login for different members |
Conclusion
After comparing the free and the premium plan I can definitely say that the Grammarly Premium plan is worth the investment. The free version offers a solid foundation of grammar, spelling, and punctuation checks to improve writing quality.
However, for those seeking to take their writing skills to the next level in academic and professional contexts, upgrading to Premium is essential. It provides robust vocabulary enhancement, style adjustments for consistency, an expansive citation database, inclusive language prompts, similarity checks to avoid unintentional plagiarism and even assistive rewrites.
While the free version helps fix basics, Premium’s suggestions target eloquence and precision best for publishing.
