Grammarly Free vs. Pro (Put to the Test in 2026)

This article may contain affiliate links. Please see our affiliate disclaimer in the footer menu for more information. Thank you for your support!

If you need to decide between Grammarly Free vs. Pro (formerly Premium), I can help you! I tested both versions of Grammarly to see how they perform. As a trained proofreader, I’ll provide insights into which version makes the most sense for you based on your needs.

The free version of Grammarly provides grammar, spelling, and punctuation suggestions. Grammarly Pro includes everything in the free version, consistency checks for spelling and punctuation, plagiarism detection, and AI-generated text detection. It also makes writing clear, concise, and engaging.

Let’s examine the pros and cons of Grammarly’s free and pro versions to see which one makes sense for you. Then, we’ll review their features and get a clear picture of their capabilities by testing them!

The Pros and Cons of Grammarly Free

Pros

• does a good job with grammar, punctuation, and spelling checks
• offers a tone detector to see if your writing strikes the right chord
• lets you adjust writing suggestions based on your audience (general vs. knowledgeable vs. expert)
• allows you to tweak recommendations according to your intended level of formality (informal, neutral, formal)

Cons

• doesn’t make writing more concise or engaging
• unable to check for plagiarism or AI-generated text
• occasionally recommends mistaken suggestions

Who Is Grammarly Free Best For?

The free version of Grammarly is best for anyone who writes casually or does not wish to invest in Grammarly Pro.

You can sign up for the free version of Grammarly here.

The Pros and Cons of Grammarly Pro

Pros

• helps improve concision and word choice
• provides recommendations based on a wide range of criteria
• can detect plagiarism and AI-generated text

Cons

• unable to follow style guides (e.g., The Chicago Manual of Style)
• cannot replace a proofreader
• occasionally gives erroneous suggestions

Who Is Grammarly Pro Best For?

Grammarly Pro is best for proofreaders, editors, writers, college students, entrepreneurs, and anyone needing to produce high-quality documents.

You can sign up for Grammarly Pro here.

Grammarly Free vs. Pro (Feature Comparison)

Note: Grammarly Enterprise (not pictured below) is your best bet if you need Grammarly for a large team. It provides unique features like an analytics dashboard, the option to create a company style guide, and the ability to keep your business’s tone consistent.

Let’s compare the features available with Grammarly Free vs. Pro.

We’ll look at features that fall under the following seven categories Grammarly has established:

1. GrammarlyGO
2. Correctness
3. Clarity
4. Engagement
5. Delivery
6. Citations
7. Customer Support

Complete Feature Comparison of Grammarly Free vs. Pro

	Gram. Free	Gram. Pro
GrammarlyGO
Generative AI assistance	100 prompts per month	2,000 prompts per month
Correctness
Grammar, spelling, and punctuation	✔	✔
Consistency in spelling and punctuation		✔
English fluency		✔
Clarity
Conciseness		✔
Full-sentence rewrites		✔
Formatting		✔
Engagement
Word choice		✔
Word and sentence variety		✔
Delivery
Tone detection	✔	✔
Tone suggestions		✔
Inclusive language		✔
Citations
Auto-citations	✔	✔
Citation style formatting		✔
Plagiarism and AI-generated text detection		✔
Customer Support
Help Center	✔	✔
Priority Support		✔

An Explanation of Grammarly’s Features

Some of the features in the table above are straightforward, while others merit an explanation.

Generative AI assistance: allows you to generate text in your preferred voice based on prompts you supply; rewrites passages to improve clarity, adjust tone, and alter length

English fluency: makes sure you choose words that sound natural; I’ve found this feature particularly useful for ensuring the correct use of prepositions

Full-sentence rewrites: reworks sentences that are hard to read

Formatting: breaks up long paragraphs and puts bullet points in lists

Word choice: enables you to avoid clichés and gives descriptive alternatives to overused words

Word and sentence variety: spices up writing by giving alternatives for repeated words and sentence structures

Tone detection: identifies how your writing comes across—informal, optimistic, concerned, etc.

Tone suggestions: matches your tone to your target audience

Inclusive language: ensures you use respectful and up-to-date language

Auto-citations: automatically generates citations for well-known research websites

Citation style formatting: corrects common errors with formatting citations

Plagiarism detection: compares your writing to over 16 billion web pages and ProQuest’s academic databases to ensure your words are original

More about GrammarlyGO

GrammarlyGO uses generative AI to make the writing process more efficient and effective. As the user, you give Grammarly a written prompt, and it creates what you need.

You can prompt GrammarlyGO to help you generate text, rewrite passages, ensure an appropriate tone, create outlines for writing, and reply to emails.

Grammarly Pro users get 2,000 monthly prompts for GrammarlyGO, and users with a free account get 100 prompts per month.

Now that you’ve seen what you get with both versions, let’s see how much the pro version costs.

The Price of Grammarly Pro

You can pay for Grammarly Pro annually, quarterly, or monthly.

You’ll save the most by choosing the annual subscription.

Annually	Quarterly	Monthly
$12.00 / month (save 60%) – billed as a single payment of $144.00 per year	$20.00 / month (save 33%) – billed as a single payment of $60.00 every 3 months	$30.00 / month

However, Grammarly Pro goes on sale for 50% fairly often. Here’s my receipt after getting this deal.

Advantages of Grammarly Pro Over Grammarly Free

As a website owner and proofreader, I use Grammarly Pro to improve my writing and my clients’ writing. The only other software I use to clean up documents is PerfectIt (recommended for proofreaders and editors).

I used the free version of Grammarly before upgrading to Grammarly Pro, and I still maintain a free account for testing when writing articles like this.

Grammarly Pro Helps Improve Writing Quality

For most people, the biggest advantage of Grammarly Pro over the free version is its ability to elevate writing quality.

The writing issue I’ve worked hardest to overcome is a lack of concision.

Grammarly Is a Game Changer, but It’s Not Perfect

Grammarly will save you time by pointing out errors so you don’t have to hunt them down. But it’s not foolproof!

For example, when I had finished proofreading a client’s blog post about marketing, Grammarly let me know that tone-deaf should be hyphenated. Oops! I had left it as two words. Thanks, Grammarly! 😊

However, Grammarly is not immune to making mistaken suggestions. Following it blindly will likely lead you to introduce a mistake into your text. Yikes! 😐

That’s why tools like Grammarly should be used to assist proofreaders but not replace them.

If I only used Grammarly Pro to proofread my clients’ texts, I would quickly find myself out of a job.

The most obvious reason proofreaders are still needed, based on the specific test I ran, is that Grammarly failed to detect a misspelling of someone’s name. That’s a big oops!

The stronger your grasp of English grammar and mechanics, the more effectively you can use Grammarly. You’ll be able to accept the many helpful suggestions and reject the occasional mistaken ones.

A Special Note to Those Who Speak English as an Additional Language: Unless you’re an advanced English speaker, I’d advise you to use Grammarly with caution. If you accept every suggestion it offers, you’ll make several mistakes in your writing. But if you investigate each recommendation to see whether it’s correct, Grammarly could be a valuable tool to help you improve your English.

Grammarly’s Accuracy Has Improved over Time

Over many years of using Grammarly, I’ve noticed it has become more accurate. Grammarly Pro can now identify far more homophone hiccups (e.g., affect vs. effect) than before.

And I’ve been especially impressed by how much Grammarly Free has improved over the past three years.

The Test: Microsoft Editor vs. Grammarly Free vs. Grammarly Pro

On to the details of how I tested the software!

I decided to include Microsoft Editor in my testing since people who work in Word likely use it. Microsoft Editor is Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checker.

I wanted to see how Microsoft Editor compares to the free and pro versions of Grammarly.

After all, if Microsoft Editor can catch as many mistakes as Grammarly, why bother using Grammarly?

The paragraphs I used for testing are written in US English (as opposed to UK English, Canadian English, etc.).

While proofreading the paragraphs manually, I used The Chicago Manual of Style.

The Test Paragraphs I Used

The paragraphs I used to assess Grammarly have a Flesch-Kincaid grade level of 5.1, meaning you need at least a fifth-grade reading level to understand the text.

It’s important to note that the more complex a document, the more likely Grammarly Pro is to make incorrect suggestions.

Altogether, the test paragraphs were 225 words long and contained 24 errors.

Below are the three paragraphs I used to test the software.

Errors are shown in red, and the two underlined words also represent errors since a comma should come before those words. 

Hi! My name is Lindsay. I’ve worked in a button factory for seven years. Before that, I was a babysitter for 6 year’s. In the morning, I like to email people at 7:00 am, right after I wake up. I like to e-mail folks because it’s a fast way to communicate. Also, I love to go to the beach on vacation. My friend Mary usually comes with me.

Mazy works at Dunkin‘ Donuts and she says enjoys working at dunkin’ donuts. She likes to customize the coffee drinks for for each customer. Anyway, we encountered enormous waves the last time we went to the beach. While Mary and me were in the water we felt like we were in eminent danger of drowning. Where I work, Catherine is the president of the company. I don’t know who the President is where Mary works.

Now I will precede to tell you more about our much needed vacation. At the beach, most of the umbrellas was already taken. I felt badly that we never got an umbrella because while we were laying on the beach, Mary turned as red as a lobster. By the way, are you use to talking to someone who goes back and fourth between topics as much as I do. Well, to give you piece of mind, I’m not going to talk any more.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Here are a few abbreviations I use to explain the test results:

• ✔ (the software detected and corrected the error)
• > (read this as “should be”)
• sent. (sentence)
• parag. (paragraph)

The Test Results

All the Errors within the Test Paragraphs	Microsoft Editor	Gram. Free	Gram. Pro
1) 6 > six
2) year’s > years	✔	✔	✔
3) am > a.m.
4) e-mail > email (to match email in prior sent.)
5) Mazy > Mary
6) Dunkin’ > Dunkin’ (the apostrophe faces the wrong way in the test parag., but I can’t make it go the wrong way in this table, lol!)
7) comma before and (2nd parag./1st sent.)		✔	✔
8) enjoys > she enjoys		✔	✔
9) dunkin’ donuts > Dunkin’ Donuts		✔	✔
10) for for > for	✔	✔	✔
11) me > I		✔	✔
12) comma before we (2nd parag./4th sent.)		✔	✔
13) eminent > imminent		✔	✔
14) President > president
15) precede > proceed		✔	✔
16) much needed > much-needed		✔	✔
17) was > were		✔	✔
18) badly > bad	✔	✔	✔
19) laying > lying	✔	✔	✔
20) use to > used to		✔	✔
21) fourth > forth	✔	✔	✔
22) . > ? (3rd parag./2nd-to-last sent.)		✔	✔
23) piece > peace	✔	✔	✔
24) any more > anymore		✔	✔
Total Number of Errors Identified (out of 24 total errors)	6	18	18

Screenshots of the Test Results (Editor vs. Free vs. Pro)

The screenshots below show how the test paragraphs looked after I ran the software. You can see the date I ran the test (5/22/2026) in the bottom right-hand corner of each image.

I also conducted this (100% identical) test on 5/27/2023. I think you’ll be interested in how the results have changed over the past three years.

Running the Test with Microsoft Editor

Running the Test with Grammarly Free

Running the Test with Grammarly Pro

A Discussion of the Test Results

To fairly determine how each program performs, I included a well-balanced mix of errors in the test paragraphs.

Also, since there can be some overlap with how mistakes are categorized, I’ll include the numbers from the chart above that correspond with each type of mistake.

For example, I classified the year’s > years (#2) error as a grammar error instead of a punctuation error. For this test, it was considered a noun that was miswritten in its possessive form. The breakdown of mistakes in the test paragraphs is as follows:

• six grammar errors (#s: 2, 11, 17, 18, 19, & 20)
• six punctuation errors (#s: 4, 6, 7, 12, 16, & 22)
• six spelling errors (#s: 5, 13, 15, 21, 23, & 24)
• two capitalization errors (#s: 9 & 14)
• one repeated word (#10)
• one omitted word (#8)
• one numeric inconsistency (#1)
• one inconsistent abbreviation (#3)
• = 24 total errors

Note: I counted an error as corrected only if the software made the correct suggestion to rectify it. For example, Microsoft Editor underlined the words Dunkin‘ Donuts but didn’t correct the apostrophe that faces the wrong way. Instead, it suggested not leaving space between the words Dunkin and Donuts.

The Test Results (and How They Have Changed from 2023 to 2026)

We’re going to discuss the differences in results over the course of three years.

Microsoft Editor’s Performance

Microsoft Editor corrected only 6 errors this time, compared to 8 errors in 2023.

The fact that Microsoft Editor didn’t correct quite as many mistakes this time is surprising but not too noteworthy. After all, Microsoft Editor isn’t well known for its ability to fix grammar and spelling slipups.

It did detect one of the more egregious errors (laying > lying) this time, though.

Grammarly Free’s Performance

Grammarly Free corrected 18 mistakes this time, compared to just 12 mistakes in 2023. It gets the award for most improved on this particular test!

This time around, Grammarly Free corrected errors with the following:

• punctuation (fixed two errors involving commas)
• a missing subject
• missing capitalization of proper noun
• incorrect subject pronoun
• laying > lying error that we discussed above

Although Grammarly Free no longer makes writing more concise like it used to do, it now does significantly better with detecting and correcting errors with grammar and mechanics (e.g., punctuation, capitalization, spelling). Specifically, it does a much better job of detecting punctuation mistakes.

Grammarly Pro’s Performance

Grammarly Pro corrected 18 errors this time, just like it did in 2023. I found that a bit surprising. However, I think its performance has improved slightly. The reason is the types of errors it corrected this time as opposed to last time.

This time it didn’t correct 6 > six or e-mail > email like it did last time. However, it did correct dunkin’ donuts > Dunkin’ Donuts and me > I. I think a proper noun that requires capitalization and an incorrect subject pronoun are more egregious errors than a number needing to be written out or a hyphenation inconsistency.

Only Grammarly Pro Made Additional Suggestions

Grammarly Pro offered a few suggestions to improve the test paragraphs.

Below are the two suggestions (out of three) that I found most helpful.

Suggestion #1: Cut out three words to make a sentence more concise. I agree with this recommendation.

Suggestion #2: Change the phrase Where I work to At my workplace. I think this recommendation depends on the tone you’re aiming for. If you’re going for a more casual tone, like I was here, I think the phrase Where I work is suitable. However, if you wanted a more concrete phrase, I think At my workplace would be preferable.

More Details about Grammarly

Now that you have a good idea of the capabilities of both versions of Grammarly, let’s look at a few other details.

Grammarly Works in Many Locations

You can let Grammarly go to work for you in documents, emails, and social media sites.

It has browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari. It provides a Microsoft Word and Microsoft Outlook add-in that functions on PCs and Macs, and it offers Google Docs support.

Finally, Grammarly has native apps for Windows and macOS, and you can install a mobile keyboard that’s compatible with Android and iOS.

My Favorite Grammarly Feature

I love how Grammarly not only makes recommendations but also explains them with pop-up cards. To see these cards, you click on the tiny circle icon with the “i” inside (not pictured below). This feature is available in both the free and pro versions.

You can see how Grammarly explained that my sentence contained a subject-verb mismatch. Then it offered additional example sentences to help me learn.

The pop-up cards help you learn grammar so you can avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

How Grammarly Compares to Other Writing Software

In reading numerous comprehensive reviews about the most reputable editing tools on the market, Grammarly was repeatedly mentioned as the best software for proofreading.

It came out ahead of ProWritingAid, Ginger, Hemingway Editor, WhiteSmoke, and other software.

I authored an article about Grammarly’s accuracy if you’d like to learn more. The post discusses the amount of time, effort, and money that have gone into improving the accuracy of Grammarly’s algorithm.

Since Grammarly is often compared to ProWritingAid, let’s briefly compare these two programs.

Grammarly vs. ProWritingAid

Both Grammarly and ProWritingAid detect grammar, punctuation, and spelling errors.

However, Grammarly has a more complete database for identifying these errors, so it catches more slipups. It’s also the most accurate grammar and spelling checker on the market.

Grammarly also excels at ensuring your writing’s tone is on point for your intended readers.

Both tools check for clarity, concision, consistency, and overused words.

But ProWritingAid provides more comprehensive recommendations in these areas.

ProWritingAid also detects more stylistic problems than Grammarly. A few examples include ProWritingAid’s reports for issues like redundancies and clichés, lack of transitions, and faulty pronoun use.

Bottom Line for Choosing Grammarly or ProWritingAid

• Grammarly excels at correcting grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes, making it ideal for use with nonfiction. It’s also useful for fiction when accuracy and error detection are the primary concerns.

• ProWritingAid shines when it comes to stylistic considerations (e.g., clarity, concision, word choice, pacing, dialogue tags). Therefore, it makes more sense to assist with fiction writing.

Finally, if you’re a proofreader or editor, you may wonder how Grammarly compares to PerfectIt, a consistency-checking software.

The Final Verdict

Whether you use Grammarly Free or Grammarly Pro depends on your needs.

The 2026 test shows that Grammarly Free now does an excellent job of correcting many grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes.

If you only write casually, the free version should suffice.

But if writing is an integral part of your job or you want to become a better writer, Grammarly Pro is probably worth the investment.

I hope this article has helped you effectively compare both versions of Grammarly.

I wish you success with your future endeavors—whether they involve proofreading, editing, writing, or a combination of the three!

Frequently Asked Questions

Is it worth upgrading to Grammarly Pro in 2026?

Considering the additional value Grammarly Pro provides, I think it’s worth upgrading if you do more than casual writing or if you’re aiming to become a better writer. It’s an ideal investment for proofreaders, editors, writers, and entrepreneurs.

I’ve been using the pro version for over six years because I appreciate how it improves both my writing and my clients’ writing.

It goes beyond the free version to make documents correct, consistent, clear, engaging, and appropriate for the target audience.

Does Grammarly offer a free trial?

Grammarly occasionally offers free trials of Grammarly Pro for individuals and teams.

Does Grammarly offer a discount for students?

If you’re a college student, your university may provide Grammarly Pro for free through its Grammarly for Education program. Thousands of educational institutions have decided to purchase a license that allows students to access the Pro version since it helps them become stronger writers.

Can I use Grammarly Free for business?

You can use Grammarly Free for business; however, you won’t have access to the features specifically designed for companies. For example, Grammarly Enterprise provides an analytics dashboard, lets you create a company style guide, and helps keep your business’s tone consistent across documents.

Best wishes to you!

“Kindness is always fashionable and always welcome.”

– Amelia Barr