Grammarly Review: How to Avoid Epic Typos Every Time

Frustrated with writing? Consider Grammarly. In this Grammarly review, I’ll explain why I’m a fan. [Full Disclosure: I’m also an affiliate]

As an immigrant, I couldn’t build this blog and send hundreds of emails a week without Grammarly for Chrome.

It’s not for everyone. But if you’re embarrassed by spelling errors or spend too much time proofreading, read and see if you should give it a try!

Is Grammarly Legitimate?

Grammarly is an AI-based grammar and spelling checking app. It has many apps across many platforms, all of which edits your writing in real-time.

Started in 2009, Grammarly began as a self-funded venture between two guys, Alex and Max, from Ukraine.

Eight years later in 2017, Grammarly received $110 million in venture capital and began to dominate the internet.

Today, Grammarly has 6.9 million daily active users, most of them on the free service. But hundreds of thousands of users are on its premium service, paving its path toward earning $100 million a year.

[Full Disclosure: As an affiliate, I receive compensation if you purchase through the Grammarly link.]

Is Grammarly a Good App?

In my view, Grammarly is the most potent spelling and grammar checker.

It has an easy interface and integrates with nearly all of your writing tools.

If you value efficiency, then give Grammarly’s free version a try. It doesn’t hurt to have an extra pair of eyes to proofread!

In particular, I highly recommend Grammarly Chrome; it’s an extension app that highlights writing mistakes directly within text boxes on the internet. Such text boxes include Gmail, Google doc, and Facebook.

Here’s an example of Grammarly in action: it highlights in red critical errors and displays the total number of errors on the bottom right.

Is Grammarly the Best?

While Grammarly is better than every other spell checking tool I’ve tried, it’s not perfect.

Grammarly doesn’t catch all possible writing errors and can sometimes make suggestions that don’t make sense.

But such imperfections should be expected. After all, English is a complicated language with lots of idioms and exceptions to rules. While Grammarly’s AI is pretty powerful, we have a long way to go for an AI to replace a capable human editor.

To fully proofread someone’s work, a human would need to understand the context, tone, and style of the writing. And these factors are impossible for an AI to fully grasp.

So expect a lot from Grammarly, but don’t rely on it to make you a brilliant writer – it can’t replace your English teacher.

Indeed, no tool can save a poorly structured, meaningless writing. But excellent writing can be ruined by careless spelling or grammar errors. And the latter is where Grammarly becomes helpful.

Grammarly Premium Review

Grammarly’s free version catches critical grammar and spelling checks – these are always denoted in red underlines.

The paid, premium version claims to improve your writing and these are always denoted in yellow underlines.

If you’re using the free version, you’ll see yellow underlines but you can’t see the details unless you pay.

The premium version offers advanced checks for:

• Punctuation
• Grammar
• Context
• Sentence structure.

It also claims to provide vocabulary enhancement suggestions and genre-specific tips.

Furthermore, Grammarly premium includes a plagiarism checker that scans your document against the entire internet for plagiarism.

Grammarly Review on Cost

Grammarly’s premium version costs between $139 per year to $30 a month.

$139 per year is cheaper than a human editor and worth it if you use it every day. For me, the price is super generous for my usage.

But honestly, this price point is not affordable for a lot of people, including struggling students and English learners in developing countries.

Is Grammarly Premium Worth It?

The advanced Grammarly checkers sounds super powerful. But my personal experience has been that Grammarly Premium works okay but it’s far from perfect and doesn’t deliver all of its promises.

It’s well worth my money to purchase the annual plan, but may not be worth it for others.

To determine if it’s worth your money, let’s look at an example.

Below is an essay where Grammarly has pointed out six serious errors and three improvements in the document. 

The six errors, in red, are critical mistakes included in the free version. The three errors, in yellow, are improvements only seen in the paid version.

You can see that the premium version advised me to:

• Eliminate repetitive words: changing “tomatoes” to “vegetables” and “growing” to “increasing.”
• Improve context-based grammar: changing “as result” to “as a result.”

The first two suggestions around repetitive words do not make sense, but the third suggestion makes a lot of sense.

Given the help Premium provides, plenty of people find the premium subscription worth it. But plenty more don’t find it a huge help and feel that the free version is enough.

I think Grammarly’s free features are pretty decent at meeting the daily needs of most students and professionals.

While I think Grammarly Premium could still improve to discern more idioms, phrasal verbs, and literary devices, Grammarly premium is worth every penny for me.

If I can catch a few mistakes like “as a result” every week, it’ll save me more than $139 a year given how many emails I write and essays I publish on a weekly basis.

Grammarly Complaints

To help you make your best decision, here are the top Grammarly complaints I hear over and over from its users.

#1 Grammarly Complaint: No Free Trial

Many software nowadays allows users to try out its premium service for a limited time for free. But that’s not the case with Grammarly.

Whenever you purchase a Grammarly premium plan, whether it’s the monthly or annual, your purchase is not refundable.

If you’re not entirely sure, sign up for the monthly trial first before committing to an annual plan.

Pro tip: Buy Grammarly Premium via PayPal and when you do decide to cancel, perform a chargeback so PayPal can get your money back.

#2 Grammarly Complaint: Slows Computer

Because Grammarly has to process your document via the internet, it takes time and processing power to detect and save errors.

For small documents like emails, this is not a problem. But for longer documents, even with fast internet, Grammarly can significantly slow down your computer.

If you are a fast typer, Grammarly often creates a lag on your computer that causes your typing to slow down or skip a letter.

Also, if you go back and insert words into previously written lines, Grammarly struggles to keep up and tries to underline it as a mistake.

I find this flaw intensely annoying when I write long blog articles like this one. But alas, the annoyance is not enough for me to cancel Grammarly.

#3 Grammarly Complaint: Limited Customer Service

I’ve also seen an unusually high volume of complaints online about Grammarly’s terrible customer service.

The company seems to have a real problem managing communications with its users.

Grammarly’s many apps can be confusing to install and remove. So when things aren’t working, people struggle to find anyone to talk to within Grammarly.

#4 Grammarly Complaint: Fail to Save Changes

It must be difficult inserting Grammarly apps within a myriad of writing editors on the internet. It’s what makes Grammarly so helpful to use. But it’s also what makes Grammarly full of bugs.

For example, you might go through your document choosing to either ignore or correct errors, only to see the same mistakes show up unignored and uncorrected.

This has been my experience using Grammarly inside Gutenberg, the new WordPress editor. I’ve learned to work around these inconveniences, but for some, experiences like these are why they’ve quit using Grammarly.

Grammarly Apps Review

Grammarly apps are available everywhere on a computer as long as it is connected to the internet.

It’s available both on the web, on the phone, and as a downloadable software on your computer. It’s available across multiple browsers, operating systems, and softwares.

All Grammarly apps function the same: they all make your writing and editing more convenient.

Let’s review the top Grammarly apps.

Grammarly’s Online Editor

Grammarly has its internal online editor where you can edit your writings directly within grammarly.com.

Once you sign up, click “My Grammarly” to access it.

You can start working on a new document by clicking the New button. All new documents are automatically saved for you to access and check later.

You also have the option to upload your document directly into this online editor. To preserve the formatting of your original document, only use the Upload then Expoort buttons to send the edited text back to its source document, thus preserving the original text formatting.

Grammarly Extension for Browsers

My favorite Grammarly app is the Grammar Extension app – specifically the Grammarly Chrome app.

The Grammarly extension app checks spelling and grammar anywhere within your browser. And Grammarly extensions exist on all four browsers: Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge.

With my Grammarly Chrome extension, I edit my writings inside Gmail, Google Docs, WordPress, and Shopify all day every day.

I send hundreds of emails a week and publish articles and pages for millions to see.

It’s easy for me to make careless typos and dumb mistakes. Grammarly for Chrome has saved me a lot of time and avoided me many embarrassing errors. Mistakes like these:

With Grammarly for Chrome, I feel less anxious and can better focus on expressing my views with better, bolder content.

I wouldn’t be sharing my affiliate link for Grammarly if it wasn’t for Grammarly Chrome.

As an immigrant who learned English at age 11, I couldn’t be a blogger without using Grammarly Chrome.

I earn a commission if you try Grammarly for free with this link because I’m confident in my recommendation and really believe that the free version will change your life, and if you can afford it, the paid version might transform your productivity.

Grammarly Word and Grammarly Mac

Another big use case for Grammarly is within the Microsoft Office suites, most commonly Word and Outlook.

By installing Grammarly for Microsoft Office, you can use Grammarly directly inside Word as long as you’re connected to the internet.

But note that Grammarly for Mac Word does not exist. Grammarly for Word only works on Windows computers.

However, you can download a native desktop app for Mac to drag and drop your documents within Mac easily.

Grammarly Keyboard for iOS and Android.

Grammarly also recently launched apps on both the iPhone and Android devices in the form of a mobile keyboard.

The keyboard is a personal editor of your typings on your phone, including emails, messages, and social media posts.

However, many people find Grammarly not as helpful on the app because you won’t be writing anything too critical.

Pro tip: don’t give Grammarly full access to your phone if you’re using the app. The keyboards can access all of the data you type, including bank account and credit card numbers.

If you do not enable full access, developers are not permitted to collect and transmit the information you type.

Grammarly Review: Conclusion

If you’d like to check out Grammarly, my referral link is here [Full Disclosure: I’m an affiliate], and if you have any questions about Grammarly, I will be actively looking at this post to reply, so add your question below.

Once again, here’re my pros and cons of Grammarly review. Make the best decision that works for you!

Grammarly Pros:

• Catches critical, embarrassment-inducing errors
• Provides helpful tips to make writing sound better
• Saves time and boost productivity for busy people
• Increases confidence and lesses anxiety toward writing
• Price is fair compared to the alternative of hiring a proofreader

Grammarly Cons:

• Can’t catch all of the mistakes and sometimes provides incorrect suggestions.
• AI is still not there when it comes to providing advice on structure, context, and style. It can’t replace your English teacher!
• Grammarly premium does not have a free trial.
• It can significantly slow down your writing tool due to processing delays when the document is dense.
• Lots of bugs causing Grammarly to fail to save corrections or ignored errors.

What’s Next?

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