Grammarly

Grammarly is the writing assistant most people have already tried, but the 2026 version is a different product than the spell-checker you remember. With GrammarlyGO baked into every tier and serious team management features in Business and Enterprise, it’s now competing with dedicated AI writing tools — not just grammar checkers. If your team writes a lot of professional communication (emails, support tickets, internal docs), Grammarly earns its cost. If you’re looking for a long-form content generator, you’ll hit its ceiling fast.

What Grammarly Does Well

The single biggest thing Grammarly gets right is distribution. It works in your browser, your desktop apps, your phone, Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Slack, Notion — basically anywhere text goes. You don’t need to copy-paste into a separate tool. You don’t need to switch windows. You install it once and forget about it. That sounds minor, but it’s the reason Grammarly sticks where competitors don’t. I’ve recommended ProWritingAid for fiction writers and Jasper for marketing copy, but neither lives everywhere you type the way Grammarly does.

The grammar and clarity engine is genuinely excellent for professional writing. It catches things that basic spell-check misses: dangling modifiers, wordy phrases, inconsistent tone shifts within the same email. The full-sentence rewrite suggestions — where it offers an entirely restructured version of your sentence — have gotten notably better in the last year. They used to feel robotic. Now they actually sound like something a competent editor would suggest. For business emails and client-facing docs, the suggestions are right about 85-90% of the time in my experience.

GrammarlyGO is where things get interesting. It’s not a ChatGPT competitor, and Grammarly doesn’t pretend it is. Instead, it’s tightly scoped: you highlight text and ask it to adjust tone, shorten, expand, or rewrite for a different audience. You can compose from a prompt, but the sweet spot is transformation — taking a rough draft and polishing it. For quick replies, status updates, and professional correspondence, GrammarlyGO saves me 15-20 minutes a day. That’s not hype; I timed it over two weeks.

The tone detection feature deserves specific mention. It reads your text and tells you how it’s likely to land: “sounds confident,” “sounds accusatory,” “sounds uncertain.” For anyone managing client relationships or writing to executives, this is more valuable than catching a misplaced comma. I’ve watched it prevent at least a few emails that would’ve started unnecessary fires.

Where It Falls Short

GrammarlyGO struggles with anything longer than a few paragraphs. Ask it to draft a blog post or a detailed proposal and you’ll get something that reads like it was assembled from LinkedIn posts. The output is grammatically correct and structurally sound, but it lacks specificity, voice, and the kind of insight that makes content worth reading. If long-form content creation is your primary need, Jasper or Copy.ai will serve you better. Grammarly knows this — the whole product is designed around short-form assistance — but Marketing doesn’t always make that distinction clear.

The suggestions engine gets aggressive with creative and technical writing. If you’re writing fiction, poetry, or highly technical documentation, expect to dismiss a lot of suggestions. Grammarly flags sentence fragments that are intentional. It questions jargon that’s standard in your field. It wants everything to read like a business memo. There’s a “set goals” feature where you can specify audience and formality level, but it only partially solves the problem. ProWritingAid handles creative writing contexts better.

The offline limitation is a real annoyance in 2026. Everything runs through Grammarly’s servers. If you’re on a plane, at a conference with spotty Wi-Fi, or just in a dead zone, the tool goes completely dark. Your text sits there unchecked. For a product this mature, local processing for at least basic grammar checks should exist by now.

There’s also the privacy question. Every word you type flows through Grammarly’s servers for processing. They’ve been transparent about their data handling policies and have SOC 2 Type II certification, but if you’re in a regulated industry (healthcare, legal, government), your compliance team might have opinions. The Enterprise plan offers more control, but it comes at Enterprise pricing.

Pricing Breakdown

Free — This tier handles the basics: spelling, grammar, punctuation, and a handful of GrammarlyGO prompts each month. It’s legitimately useful for personal email and casual writing. You won’t get clarity suggestions, tone detection, or the full rewrite engine, but you’ll catch embarrassing typos. Honestly, most individuals who write fewer than a few emails a day can stay here comfortably.

Premium ($12/month billed annually, $30/month billed monthly) — This is where Grammarly becomes a real writing tool. You get the full suggestion engine: clarity, engagement, delivery, and word choice. Plagiarism detection unlocks here, which matters for content teams and academics. GrammarlyGO bumps up to 1,000 prompts per month, which is more than enough for daily use unless you’re processing high volume. The monthly-to-annual price difference is steep — they really want you on annual billing.

Business ($15/user/month billed annually) — This is the team tier, and it’s where Grammarly starts competing with tools like Jasper for team writing workflows. You get everything in Premium, plus custom style guides, brand tones, a snippets library, and an admin dashboard. The style guides are the real selling point: you define rules (don’t say “utilize,” always capitalize “Platform,” our brand voice is direct and warm) and Grammarly enforces them across every team member in real time. The admin analytics show you team-wide writing stats, adoption rates, and suggestion acceptance patterns. Minimum of 3 seats.

Enterprise (Custom pricing) — Adds SAML SSO, advanced security controls, priority support, dedicated customer success manager, and custom GrammarlyGO configurations. If you need the tool deployed across hundreds of users in a regulated environment, this is the path. Expect pricing north of $25/user/month depending on seat count and requirements. They’ll negotiate, especially for 500+ seats.

The gotcha: Pricing jumps are real. A 20-person team on Business runs $3,600/year. That’s reasonable for what you get. A 200-person team hits $36,000/year, and at that point you’re comparing against enterprise content platforms. Make sure your team will actually use it before committing.

Key Features Deep Dive

GrammarlyGO

GrammarlyGO is Grammarly’s generative AI layer, and it’s deliberately constrained in a way that actually makes it more useful. Instead of giving you a blank prompt box and hoping for the best, it integrates into your existing writing flow. You highlight a paragraph, click the GrammarlyGO icon, and choose from contextual options: make it shorter, more formal, more friendly, rewrite completely, or compose a reply. The context-awareness is strong — if you’re replying to an email, it reads the thread and generates a response that actually addresses the sender’s points.

Where GrammarlyGO shines is speed. Drafting a polite decline to a meeting request takes 5 seconds instead of 3 minutes of deliberation. Rewriting a blunt Slack message into something more diplomatic happens in one click. The quality isn’t perfect — you’ll want to review everything before sending — but the starting point is solid 80% of the time.

Style Guides (Business/Enterprise)

This is the feature that justifies the Business tier for any team larger than five writers. You create rules in plain language: “Don’t use the word ‘synergy.’ Always write ‘pick AI tools’ in lowercase. Our company name has a capital T in Tools.” Grammarly then flags violations across every team member’s writing in real time.

I’ve set up style guides for three different organizations, and the impact is noticeable within weeks. Fewer style edits in review cycles. Less time arguing about capitalization in Slack. New writers onboard faster because the style guide is enforced automatically, not sitting in a Google Doc nobody reads. You can create multiple guides for different contexts — internal communication vs. customer-facing content, for example.

Tone Detection

Tone detection reads your full text and provides a summary of how it’s likely to be perceived. It goes beyond “positive” and “negative” — it identifies specific tones like “direct,” “concerned,” “empathetic,” “disapproving,” and “diplomatic.” It also flags shifts within a single piece: “Your opening sounds warm, but your third paragraph shifts to formal and distant.”

This is quietly one of Grammarly’s most impactful features. I’ve watched it change how people write emails to clients. One operations manager told me her customer complaint responses improved noticeably after she started using tone detection — not because the grammar changed, but because she started catching unintended coldness in her phrasing.

Snippets

Snippets are shared text templates that expand from shortcuts. Type “/refund-policy” and it fills in your company’s standard refund response. Type “/meeting-follow-up” and you get your team’s standard follow-up template. This sounds simple, but the team-wide sharing is what makes it valuable. Everyone uses the same approved language. Updates propagate instantly. It’s like TextExpander built into your writing assistant.

Admin Dashboard and Analytics

The Business tier includes reporting on how your team writes: average clarity scores, most common errors, suggestion acceptance rates, and GrammarlyGO usage stats. This isn’t about surveillance — it’s about identifying where your team needs support. If 80% of your writers struggle with passive voice, maybe that’s a training opportunity. If adoption drops after month two, you know your rollout needs attention.

The dashboard also tracks ROI metrics: estimated time saved per user, number of suggestions accepted, and communication quality scores over time. These numbers are Grammarly’s estimates, so take them with appropriate skepticism, but they’re useful for justifying the subscription to budget holders.

Plagiarism Checker

The plagiarism detection scans against 16 billion web pages and academic databases. It’s not as thorough as Turnitin for academic use, but for content teams checking that freelancer submissions are original and GrammarlyGO outputs aren’t duplicating existing content, it’s solid. Results come back in seconds, with highlighted passages and source links.

Who Should Use Grammarly

Teams that write a lot of professional communication. If your people send dozens of emails, Slack messages, and support responses daily, Grammarly Premium or Business pays for itself in time savings alone.

Marketing teams with multiple writers. The style guides feature alone is worth the Business tier. Enforcing brand voice across a team of 5-15 writers — including contractors and freelancers — is a genuine problem that Grammarly solves well.

Non-native English speakers in professional roles. Grammarly’s suggestions go beyond grammar into idiom, tone, and professional convention. It builds confidence in a way that basic grammar checkers don’t.

Customer support teams. The combination of snippets, tone detection, and GrammarlyGO’s reply drafting creates a noticeable improvement in response quality and speed. If your CSAT scores need a bump, this is a lower-friction intervention than retraining.

Individuals who write for their livelihood. Freelance consultants, solo founders, anyone who sends proposals and client updates regularly. Premium at $12/month is an easy justification.

Who Should Look Elsewhere

Long-form content creators. If you need a tool to draft 2,000-word blog posts, case studies, or whitepapers, GrammarlyGO won’t cut it. Jasper is purpose-built for that workflow. Copy.ai handles marketing copy at scale better too.

Fiction and creative writers. Grammarly’s suggestion engine fights against creative voice. It wants to “fix” intentional fragments, stylistic repetition, and informal dialogue. ProWritingAid has dedicated modes for fiction that understand narrative craft.

Highly technical teams. If your writing is full of code snippets, medical terminology, or legal language, you’ll spend more time dismissing wrong suggestions than accepting right ones. Specialized tools for your domain will serve you better.

Privacy-sensitive organizations. If your compliance requirements don’t allow text data to be processed on external servers, Grammarly is a non-starter for anything beyond the Enterprise plan — and even then, verify the specifics with your legal team.

Budget-constrained large teams. At 100+ seats, the annual cost becomes significant. If your team primarily needs grammar checking without the AI writing features, open-source alternatives like LanguageTool offer decent basic coverage at a fraction of the cost.

The Bottom Line

Grammarly has evolved from a grammar checker into a genuine AI writing assistant, and the team features in the Business plan make it one of the better investments for organizations that care about written communication quality. GrammarlyGO adds real value for short-form writing, even if it falls short on longer content. The price is fair for Premium and reasonable for small Business teams — just do the math before scaling to larger deployments.

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