What is the best online tool for editing written content? Is it better to use Grammarly, or is it wiser to use ProwritingAid? What are the differences between the two? And what are the similarities? What are the costs for each, and which tool offers better value for money?
This article will explore the differences and similarities between ProwritingAid vs Grammarly to help you decide which one you should use. First, let us take a quick look at why you should use a grammar checking tool in the first place.
Why use a grammar checking tool?
You might be wondering, ‘Why use an online grammar checker at all? Can’t I use google docs to check for spelling and grammar mistakes?‘ Sure, Google Docs, and even Microsoft Word, allow you to see spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors in your content. Still, they miss the mark regarding comprehensive grammar correction.
Even when you have used Google Docs or Microsoft Word’s built-in grammar checker tool, you are likely to find at least a few mistakes unresolved. Often, the culprits are commas instead of full stops, lower case letters at the start of a sentence, and unnecessarily complex sentence structures. These tools are great for putting your content together, but you should not rely on them to fix it and make it ready for publishing. Whether you are writing your own blog, working for a team, or engaging in any type of writing that requires clarity, readability, and zero tolerance for mistakes, Google Docs or Microsoft Word simply will not cut it.
If you want to create engaging, immersive, and concise content—three key ingredients for great content—then it is wise to use a grammar checker tool like Grammarly or ProwritingAid. These tools do far more than spell-check—they assess your writing for readability and engagement and offer corrections and alterations to your content that will improve it overall.
Both Grammarly and ProwritingAid are available for free online, and both come with premium options that help you improve your writing style even further. So, as a writer, which one is best? Why choose one over the other?
Prowritingaid vs Grammarly
Grammarly
Grammarly is a household name for writers—it has a wide reach for a good reason. There is no doubt that Grammarly is one of the best grammar-checking tools available today. Founded in 2009, Grammarly improves your content by not only highlighting writing errors such as spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and complicated syntax but also offering suggestions to help you correct them.
Grammarly Review: What does Grammarly do?
You can write your content in Grammarly’s text editor or paste it from another document. The layout of the text editor is basic and similar to that of Microsoft Word and Google Docs, so it offers a sense of familiarity for first-time users. Grammarly comes with a host of features that make you a better writer and help you create content that succeeds. Some of its best features include:
Correct grammar and spelling mistakes – Errors in your writing negatively impact your content’s success. Readers who notice these mistakes lose trust in your content because these mistakes demonstrate a lack of professionalism. Grammarly highlights grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors in your text and offers suggestions to help you correct them.
Set goals – When you paste your content into Grammarly’s text editor, you are presented with the option to set goals for your content based on what you want it to achieve. These goals include:
- Your audience’s existing understanding of the topic (general, knowledgeable, or expert).
- Formality (informal, neutral, or formal). This allows you to permit or restrict slang and colloquialisms to your preference.
- Intent. How do you want to relate to the reader? Do you want to tell a story? Do you want to inform and educate? Are you trying to convince the reader? Grammarly allows you to set your intent to craft a more successful piece of content.
- Domain. You can choose the domain you want to write; is it academic or business-oriented? Creative or casual? Notice that this part of the goal-setting feature is not available with the free version—it requires a subscription to Grammarly Premium (more on pricing later).
Clarity – Grammarly’s clarity checker helps you make your writing easier to understand for the reader. This feature uses the ‘audience‘ goal mentioned earlier—general, knowledgeable, and expert—and offers suggestions based on your chosen setting. Again, content success is primarily based on how clearly you can convey your message.
Delivery – Great content is not just about what you say but how you say it. Grammarly’s ‘delivery‘ feature tells you how well your message has been delivered. If you want to sell a product through a blog or article, this makes the difference. The delivery feature helps you pack a punch and make a real impact on the reader.
Engagement – The ‘engagement‘ feature helps you make your content more specific and engaging. It highlights lengthy, run-on sentences and offers suggestions to help you be more concise. This feature is only available on the premium version.
Pros and cons of Grammarly
Grammarly is one of the best editing tools available today, but it has cons and pros.
Pros:
- Comprehensive editing is available in the free version. You can still see areas of potential improvement regarding engagement and delivery, but suggestions are only available for spelling, grammar, and clarity.
- High speed
- Improves user vocabulary
- Extensions for all browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari)
- Cloud storage to save documents
Cons:
- No personal dictionary. You have to ignore or delete suggestions instead of adding a word to your dictionary and avoiding later corrections on the same word.
- No free trial for the premium version
- Some limits for Mac users
- Plagiarism checker only available on the premium version
- Text editor is only available in English
ProwritingAid
ProwritingAid entered the game a few years later than Grammarly. Founded in 2012 by Chris Banks, ProwritingAid is becoming an increasingly popular grammar checking tool for fiction and non-fiction writers alike.
ProwritingAid Review: What does ProwritingAid do?
ProwritingAid offers many of the same features as Grammarly, such as grammar and spell-checking, writing style, and readability and engagement. Though similar, ProwritingAid also provides a wealth of ‘writing reports,’ like messages and suggestions regarding your content, more than any other writing and text editing software. ProwritingAid’s features include:
Grammar checker – spelling mistakes, punctuation errors, and repetitive words are caught and highlighted on ProwritingAid, and corrective suggestions are offered in their place.
Writing style – Similar to Grammarly’s goal-setting feature, ProwritingAid allows you to set a writing style or tone for your content. Once you set a style, ProwritingAid’s AI-powered writing assistant helps you tailor your content to meet your readers’ needs and boosts your content’s overall likelihood of success.
Readability – ProwritingAid’s readability report lets you know how accessible and engaging your work is for the reader, thus allowing you to make edits and use alternative words, syntax, and grammar that improve the reader’s experience and successfully convey your message.
Readability is one of the most important SEO measures to consider if you are a blog writer and want to reach a wide audience. Google punishes articles with low readability scores, and readers are likely to bounce from a site in seconds if they see the text is unorganized and hard to read.
Writing reports – ProwritingAid offers an impressive 20 writing reports to help you understand errors and issues in your writing and correct them. Compared to Grammarly, ProwritingAid’s writing reports are far more in-depth. As such, it is a popular choice for fiction writers. Other than grammar, style, and readability, these reports also include, but are not limited to:
- Overused (repeated) words
- Clichés and redundancies
- Dragging sentences
- Pronoun misuse and overuse
- Transition words
- Thesaurus
- Diction
- Plagiarism checker
Pros and cons of ProwritingAid
If you are thinking about using ProwritingAid, consider the following pros and cons.
Pros:
- User-friendly
- Premium feature makes it easy to edit long-form text
- Twenty writing reports offer in-depth editing options
Cons:
- Slower editing
- No options for mobile use
- Plagiarism checker only available for premium users
Pricing: Grammarly vs ProwritingAid
Both of these grammar checkers offer free and paid versions. The free versions have valuable features that can help you craft great content easily, so you do not need to fork out your hard-earned cash to reap their benefits. However, the premium versions come with extra features that can make a big difference to your content’s quality. Moreover, with more use and familiarity, the premium versions ultimately help you improve your writing skills.
So, if you want to spend your money on a grammar checking tool, which option is best? Let’s consider the costs of each.
Grammarly Pricing
Grammarly offers three account options: free, premium individual, and premium business.
Grammarly (Free version) $0 – Grammarly’s free version provides basic writing suggestions such as spelling, grammar, and clarity.
Grammarly Premium (Individual) $12.00/mo – Grammarly’s premium for individuals offers all the basic writing suggestions and tools included in the free version, with additional features to improve your content even further. With premium, Grammarly provides suggestions for greater engagement. It suggests alternative word choices, consistency, fluency, formatting, and inclusive language. Premium users pay $12.00 per month, billed annually at $144.00.
Grammarly Business (varying price) – Grammarly Business offers even more comprehensive writing corrections and suggestions than the free version. Its defining feature is the ability to add multiple users to the account, making it a wise option for teams working on shared projects. Grammarly Business allows users to pay monthly or annually. Monthly, the subscription costs $25.00 per member. Annually, the subscription cost varies depending on how many team members use the account.
- 3 – 9 members — $12.50/mo per member ($150/year)
- 10 – 49 members — $12.08/mo per member ($145/year)
- 50 – 149 members — $11.67/mo per member ($140/year)
ProwritingAid Pricing
ProwritingAid also offers three account options: free, premium, and premium plus.
ProwritingAid (Free version) $0 – With ProwritingAid’s free account, you can easily correct basic spelling and grammar mistakes. As mentioned earlier, one of the major cons with the free version is that you are limited to 500 words per edit. Of course, you can still edit 500 words, copy the corrected text, then delete and enter the next 500.
ProwritingAid Premium $20/mo or $79/year – With ProwritingAid Premium, users have access to all the features available on the free version, as well as:
- Desktop app
- Full-length text editing (no 500-word limit)
- Writer’s resources
- More comprehensive editing features
You can choose to pay ProwritingAid Premium on a monthly or annual basis. Monthly, the premium version costs $20.00. If you choose to pay annually, you can save almost half of what you pay with a monthly subscription. The annual cost of ProwritingAid Premium is only $79.00. Users can also pay a once-off lifetime subscription cost of $399.00.
ProwritingAid Premium Plus $24/mo or $89/year – With ProwritingAid Premium Plus, you get all of the features included in the Premium, with an additional 60 plagiarism checks per year. Monthly, Premium Plus costs $24.00. Annually, users pay $89.00. Al lifetime subscription to Premium Plus costs $499.00.
Suitability: Grammarly vs ProwritingAid
Grammarly Premium is a wise choice for blog content, non-fiction articles, and email newsletters. It is fast, which saves you time and money, and helps you adjust the tone and style of your writing to more effectively reach and impact the reader. Grammarly Business is an excellent tool for teams on shared projects. It is pricey at around $12 per member, but it is hard to put a price on the difference in content quality achieved through this team-oriented tool.
ProwritingAid is also a viable option if you want to correct basic text. The biggest problem with the free version is that it limits users to 500 words per document. It is not a huge problem, and you can work around it, but it can be frustrating when you have a lot of text to edit. The premium options eliminate the 500-word limit, making them a wise option for long-form text. Fiction writers will benefit significantly from ProwritingAid Premium and Premium Plus, not just for the ability to edit the long-form text but for its in-depth, comprehensive writing reports.
Conclusion
Overall, both grammar checkers will help you drastically improve your writing. If you do not want to pay for either, you can still use the free versions available on the web. Both free versions are easy to use and, though limited, offer a much greater chance to create great, professional-looking content. They are a much wiser choice than the basic text editing features found in Microsoft Word or Google Docs.
Before you purchase a premium subscription for either, try both free versions. The layout of the text editor is different for both, and despite the differences in cost, features, and suitability, sometimes the right choice simply comes down to the user experience. As a writer, the more comfortable you are with a text editing tools layout, the less mental energy you have to spend on navigation.
On a final note, whether you use Grammarly or ProwritingAid, free or premium, do not rely on these tools to completely fix your text. You still need care and diligence, so read through your text carefully, even after editing it with a tool or using a human proofreader.
