Grammarly's free plan covers basic spelling and grammar catches, but a lot of the features people associate with Grammarly — full sentence rewrites, tone adjustment, plagiarism checking, AI detection — sit behind its Pro plan. If you're looking for an alternative because you hit that wall, here's exactly what's free versus paid, and what a good alternative should cover instead.
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Grammarly's own pricing page lists its free tier as: core spelling and grammar mistake detection, a tone-visibility feature that shows you how your writing reads, and a limited 100 AI-generation prompts per month. That covers catching a typo or a basic grammar error, but it stops there.
Pro (Grammarly's own site lists it starting at $12/month billed annually) adds full sentence rewrites with one click, the ability to actively adjust your writing's tone rather than just see it, unlimited personalized suggestions, plagiarism and AI-generated-text detection, expanded AI generation (2,000 prompts/month), and team features like shared style guides. In plain terms: the free plan tells you something's off; Pro is what actually rewrites it for you and adds the plagiarism/AI-detection layer.
The features that get paywalled are specifically the ones that matter most for essay writing: catching an awkward or unclear sentence is one thing, but Grammarly's free plan won't rewrite it for you, adjust its tone toward more formal or more concise, or check it against published sources for plagiarism — all of that sits behind the $12/month-and-up Pro tier. For a student who needs an occasional plagiarism check or a tone pass on one essay, a full monthly subscription for infrequent use is a real mismatch.
That's the gap worth knowing about going in, separate from whether Grammarly's core grammar-checking itself is any good (it generally is) — the free plan is genuinely useful for catching typos and grammar slips, it just isn't the full toolkit a lot of people expect from the Grammarly name.
StudyPilot's grammar checker catches grammar, spelling, punctuation, word choice, sentence structure, passive voice, run-ons, and comma splices — with a one-click fix and a plain-English reason for each — free every day, with no word limit on those checks and no credit card required to start.
It doesn't match Grammarly Pro's full feature set on its own — Grammarly's tone-rewrite engine and its dedicated AI-writing-detection feature (Grammarly Authorship) go further in that specific lane. But StudyPilot bundles the adjacent tools most students actually reach for around an essay anyway — an AI detector, a plagiarism checker, and a paraphraser — as separate free tools rather than paywalling them behind one subscription, which covers the same practical gap from a different angle.
No word limit on grammar and spelling checks, no credit card required — get one-click fixes with a plain-English reason for each.
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