Grammarly is a well-known grammar checker that helps you correct grammatical errors and spelling mistakes.
But when talking about the cost of Grammarly, you’re really talking about three different products:
- The first version is a free-to-use spelling, grammar, and punctuation checker.
- The second is a paid service called Grammarly Premium.
- The third is a paid service called Grammarly Business.
While all of these tiers fall under the Grammarly umbrella, they differ greatly in terms of service quality.
Grammarly Premium and Business plans come packed to the gills with special features specifically designed to perfect a writer’s work and sharpen their skills. The Premium service is far more customizable and pays special attention to the writer’s overall knowledge.
But will you get your money’s worth? Let’s find out…
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Our Verdict
Yes, the price of Grammarly is well worth it. Upgrading to the Premium version will unlock a slew of new features, like one of the best plagiarism detectors we’ve tested. If you’re going to pay for a grammar or plagiarism checker, Grammarly is the best option on the market. You can also save 20% with our exclusive link.
Grammarly Ranked #1 Best All-Around
PROS
- 86% out of 86% accuracy
- 16+ billion database
- 150k+ word limit
- Includes plagiarism support
- Responded within an hour
CONS
- Only supports English
- Expensive without our link
Grammarly Premium Review: Video Overview
TABLE OF CONTENTS
What is Grammarly? And how does it work?
Grammarly is an online editing tool that’s great for reviewing almost any kind of writing. This includes long-form content, social media posts, emails, and even creative writing.
The tool’s AI analyzes your content and offers suggestions on how you can improve it. Examples include correcting verb tenses, finding spelling mistakes, and offering clearer sentence structures.
As mentioned earlier, Grammarly currently has a free version that offers basic spelling and grammar checks, as well as two paid versions with more advanced features, like tone suggestions and plagiarism detection.
The good news? Similar to our MasterClass review, the value you get from using Grammarly Premium or Business is well worth the cost.
How Grammarly’s Pricing Works
Grammarly Premium and Grammarly Business are subscription-based services.
Grammarly Premium offers many features that are perfect for writers, editors, and entrepreneurs. These include grammar and spelling suggestions, state-of-the-art plagiarism detection (not offered in the free version), tone review, and vocabulary enhancement.
Grammarly Business comes packed with all of the features of Grammarly Premium while also offering additional features — which is ideal if you have a business with a team of writers. The additional features include analytics, setting company style guides, as well as choosing account roles and permissions.
Both options can be paid for on a month-to-month basis, or it can be pre-purchased for up to a whole year.
The longer your commitment period is, the lower the monthly rate will be. Just keep in mind that you’re paying one lump sum that’ll last the entire year to get these discounted rates.
Grammarly Premium costs
The best value comes from Grammarly Premium’s annual plan. They charge one payment of $144. That breaks down the Grammarly price to $12 per month.
If you’re looking to subscribe quarterly, it’s a one-time payment of $60, and that covers you for three months. At the end of that time period, you’ll be charged again. If you break it down by month, it’s $20.
The most expensive option is their month-to-month plan that’s $30 per month. It’s the least amount paid at one time, but you pay more in the long run.
Here’s how those would compare:
- A full year of the month-to month plan comes out to a whopping $360 in all.
- Four quarterly memberships come out at $240.
- When you look at it like that, paying $144 for a full year seems pretty tempting.
Unless you only need the service for one month, Grammarly’s month-to-month pricing doesn’t make much sense. Even if you’re using it for only two months, it’d be more cost-effective to purchase a quarterly plan, as it comes out to the same price.
The good news is that you can pay even less when you make use of our Grammarly Premium exclusive link.
Grammarly Business costs
Similar to Grammarly Premium, Grammarly Business offers different pricing options: monthly or annually.
The best value comes from the annual subscription, where you’ll pay $15 per member per month. Therefore, if you have three team members (which is the minimum requirement for this plan), you’ll pay $540 per year.
If you’re looking to get the monthly subscription, you’ll pay $25 per member per month, which comes out at $75 per month (for a three-member team) and a whopping $900 per year.
What do you get for the cost of Grammarly?
There’s a huge difference between Grammarly’s free plan and Grammarly Premium. While the Premium service is stuffed with useful features, the free version is, understandably, a lot simpler.
✅ Advanced readability analysis
✅ Enhanced vocabulary suggestions
✅ Set writing goals and measure your progress
✅ Best-in-class plagiarism detection
✅ Business write off (yes, really)
Free users will be able to make use of Grammarly’s critical grammar and spelling check system, and that’s it. But for the average writer, that’s all you really need.
Free Grammarly is a fantastic way to police your correspondence with friends, family, and professional contacts. If you tend to make mistakes when writing a blog post and need a simple proofreading tool, free Grammarly has you covered.
Using Grammarly’s Chrome browser extension, you can bring their critical grammar and spelling system into your email messages, social media posts, Facebook statuses, and more!
For a social media writer, that’s what you need. If you’re not creating long drawn-out reports, or any kind of professional writing, you could get away with this simplistic no-cost option.
You can even use the Grammarly browser for Chrome across Mac devices, plus both Microsoft Word and Outlook apps, too. Grammarly for Microsoft is quite convenient. If you’re a MS Word user, you’ll love it. Grammarly is currently beta testing for Chrome in Google docs.
But if you’re writing for school or your job, then the features of Grammarly Premium start to look awfully enticing.
For starters, they have the same critical grammar and spelling system that free users enjoy. So right away, you know that you’re getting everything offered in the free plan. But the list goes on and on.
Grammarly employs an advanced system that checks not only grammar and punctuation but sentence structure and context as well. The grammar checker makes your writing free of mistakes.
Vocabulary enhancements allow you to spice up your writing style with differing language choices. The ability to set genre-specific goals helps Grammarly provide a more personalized experience, tailoring its recommendations to the type of content you’re trying to create.
One of Grammarly Premium’s greatest gifts is a built-in plagiarism checker which compares your writing to more than 16 billion websites from all over the world to ensure that you’re not accidentally copying the work of someone else.
On the other hand, if you have a business, Grammarly Business might be ideal. With it, you get all the features of Grammarly Premium, plus additional security and team features.
Below we’ll take a more in-depth look at what you get with Grammarly Premium and Grammarly Business.
What you get with Grammarly Premium
Let’s take a look at Grammarly Premium features one at a time to get a better sense of what you’re getting.
#1. Grammar and Spell Checker
Grammarly does a great job catching the spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes that the casual eye would overlook. But the true value in this service lies not in the corrections of mistakes themselves, but in the detailed information that it includes to help educate users.
Grammarly seems to work on the understanding that correcting a mistake with no context does no one any favors. But when you take the time to educate your users and explain why they made a mistake, you’re helping them improve their writing skills and enhancing content all over the world.
As you can see above, Grammarly identifies a sentence fragment. In the document itself, it gives suggestions on how to change it up and fix the issue.
Then, in this sidebar, Grammarly walks you through what a sentence fragment is, why they’re bad, and how you can avoid them in the future. That’s some incredible service, and it goes above and beyond what most other competing programs would offer.
That’s one of the main reasons I say Grammarly is worth the cost. It’s like a virtual English tutor.
#2. Improve your vocabulary
A strong vocabulary is the backbone of a good writer. The ability to vary up your writing helps keep your readers engaged as you take them through whatever piece of content you’ve created.
Reading the same words over and over again will make your readers tune out. If their brains go to sleep, the point you were trying to make with your content will fall off.
That means poor reviews for authors, a low conversion rate for web content, and a lower closing rate for sales proposals.
Trust me: it adds up to hundreds of thousands of dollars each year for our content marketing agency.
That’s what makes Grammarly’s vocabulary checking software so beneficial. The words that you’re using might be correct, both grammatically and from a spelling standpoint. But if there’s a better word to put there that could help you overcome a passive voice and vary up your content, Grammarly will let you know.
In this example, Grammarly has flagged the word “huge,” which is a fairly common word. They recommend a sharper and more specific synonym like “tremendous” which makes for a more dynamic sentence.
Varying up vocabulary is one of the hardest lessons that all writers have to learn to improve their writing style. Having a built-in virtual assistant to help you solve this annoying issue heaps a ton of value onto this service, making Grammarly’s cost all the more worthwhile. The desktop app or the Grammarly Chrome extension, for example, can help make your writing style sharper.
#3. Get suggestions based on your writing goals
Editing isn’t a one size fits all process.
No human editor would approach a work of fiction in the same way they’d grade a term paper. They’re completely different animals that require a different approach.
That’s why Grammarly allows you to set certain goals for yourself. The program then takes your selections into account when making suggestions.
Your goals are set in five different categories: intent, audience, style, emotion, and domain.
As far as intent goes, you have to let Grammarly know what you’re trying to accomplish.
Informational pieces are judged differently than descriptive accounts. If you’re trying to convince someone to purchase a product, that has to be written in a different way than a story that you are recounting.
The audience is important to identify, as that’ll dictate your overall wording. If you’re speaking to experts in plumbing, you’re not going to explain the basic intricacies of the industry. They know it already. If you’re trying to explain computer science to a general audience, you don’t want to load your content up with technobabble and jargon.
Style and emotion go hand in hand. Are you being conversational, or is this a very formal piece? Knowing that’ll also help you decide if your emotions should be mild or strong.
Domain speaks to where this piece is going to be featured. Is it technical? Is it a creative story? Knowing that gives Grammarly even more insight into how it should police your copy.
That level of personalization and intelligence is yet another area in which Grammarly injects value into its services.
#4. Checking (and fixing) plagiarism
Grammarly’s plagiarism detection app is one of the most advanced and accurate that we’ve seen. It examines your copy and compares it to 16 billion web sources in an attempt to find out if your content matches anything else out there.
Why is this such a big deal? Glad you asked!
Plagiarism comes with some steep consequences. Students have been expelled from universities for copying their term papers and businesses have been sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars for copying their competitors.
Remember, online content is usually copyrighted, and stealing it isn’t allowed. You can pull from sources, so long as they’re properly cited and linked. A lot of writers don’t know how to do that correctly, so a lot of plagiarism happens by mistake.
That’s why Grammarly’s plagiarism app is so useful, both for writers to check their work for accidental plagiarism, and for business owners and editors to ensure that their writers are using integrity in their assignments.
We took a piece of sample content that was loaded with plagiarism and ran it through Grammarly’s checker.
Grammarly deduced that 86% of this content was plagiarized. It occurred in 60 fragments from 11 different web sources.
To add some more value to Grammarly’s cost, I’ll let you know that we tested a number of different plagiarism detectors, many of which claimed to pull from databases that were far larger.
Most of those services ranked this piece somewhere between 60–65%. That’s a whole lot of plagiarism that was just glossed over, opening the writers and businesses that hire them to potential legal action.
#5. Business expense (aka tax write off)
Yes, Grammarly costs money, as most services worth having do. The question that we’re trying to answer here is, does Grammarly’s price equate to its value?
Everything we’ve discussed up to this point shows that Grammarly is worth the $12 per month that the yearly subscription costs.
But thankfully, there’s a way to save a little more money when using the service for business purposes.
A Grammarly subscription in the hands of a professional writer or editor can be considered a business expense or a reimbursable expense.
And as anyone who has ever done their taxes can tell you, business expenses can be written off, saving you money on your annual income tax amount.
What you get with Grammarly Business
In addition to the above-mentioned features that you get with Grammarly Premium, you’ll get the following with Grammarly Business:
1. Account roles and permissions
If you have a team of writers, Grammarly Business allows you to control who can manage administration tools and settings by assigning permissions and roles to different members.
There are three roles:
- Users: Members of your team who are only allowed to use your Grammarly account. They’ll have access to the full range of writing suggestions but limited view-only access to account analytics. They also won’t be able to change most settings.
- Contributors: Ideal for department heads, team leaders, or managers of your company. People in this role can manage and maintain certain aspects of your Grammarly Business account, including style guides and viewing analytics.
- Owners: This role is designed for members who need complete control over all aspects of your Grammarly Business account. These members will have access to everything under the contributor role and can also manage IT configurations and subscription details.
You can choose how many people you want in each role. Luckily, you’re not limited since Grammarly Business allows you to have 150+ users.
2. Customized style guides and brand tones
Consistency is important when writing for your own or your clients’ businesses. Grammarly Business makes this easy by providing useful features such as style guides, brand tones, and snippets.
With the help of the style guide feature, your team will be able to write consistent and on-brand pieces of content.
The brand tones feature will help your team use the right brand voice. Finally, the snippet feature will allow you to create and insert reusable sentences, paragraphs, or phrases to help your team members save time.
3. Analytics dashboard
The analytics dashboard will help you and your team leaders drive continuous improvement by identifying team writing trends and possible growth areas.
The dashboard will show you:
- How many team members are actively using Grammarly to optimize content.
- How often team members are applying suggestions — which indicates their improvement over time.
- Teams’ usage of Grammarly and how it’s affecting productivity.
Final Verdict: Is Grammarly Worth the Price?
Yes, I think Grammarly’s wealth of services are worth the $12 per month that you’d pay for a year-long subscription.
There are some good alternatives on the market.
But I don’t think any of them beats Grammarly as an all-around grammar, plagiarism, and writing app.
For just over $10, you’re getting virtually unlimited use of:
- Advanced grammar and spell checking with detailed educational instructions
- Vocabulary suggestions
- Personalized writing goals
- A top-notch plagiarism checker
That being said, I also feel that a quarterly subscription could be useful for anyone looking to try Grammarly out in the short term.
I’d advise against their month-to-month plan. Spending $30 for a month of service seems very steep to me. Two months at that price are almost the same as paying for an entire quarter.
If you have a team of writers working with you, getting Grammarly Business can be a great asset to your business. For only $15 per user per month with the annual plan, you can ensure consistent and precise communication.
I’d recommend people give Grammarly’s free service a try. The free version has a lot to offer. If you like it, you’ll definitely think the annual Premium value is worth it, especially if your work involves lots of writing.
If you’re in the market for an app that allows you to export from Google Docs to WordPress in 1-click, then we recommend checking out Wordable. This tool not only formats each HTML element, but also compresses images, automatically sets featured images, creates tables of contents, and more.
As for students, there’s no Grammarly student plan or Grammarly student discount, so just stick to the free version — unless you can afford the premium plan.
(And remember to make sure that you’re writing off the cost at the end of the year on your taxes if you’re using it for business purposes.)
