Grammarly Alternatives That Correct Instead of Rewrite

Short Answer

LanguageTool is the Grammarly alternative we recommend for a writer who wants sentences corrected rather than replaced. In the guides we publish here, we rate a product on its behaviour out of the box before we look at what its settings allow. LanguageTool finds mistakes by matching written rules against your text, and its source code is public on GitHub.

The free Basic plan checks 2,000 characters at a time. Premium raises that to 150,000 characters, according to the LanguageTool pricing page. Neither plan replaces a paragraph of your writing with its own until you click a suggestion.

None of that makes LanguageTool free of artificial intelligence (AI). Basic includes three AI-powered sentence rephrases a day and Premium removes the cap.

You have to press the button to get one. Grammarly's suggestions arrive without you asking.

Grammarly wins one job outright. Grammarly Pro at $12 a month writes better replacement sentences than anything else here. Take it if you want finished prose handed back and nobody is going to ask how the draft was written.

The Three States of a No AI Grammar Checker

Nearly every grammar checker sold in 2026 carries a machine-learning component somewhere, so a straight yes or no on AI tells you almost nothing useful. Sort them into three states instead, using a sharper cut of the four-level scale in our guide to AI free apps. Two questions settle the rating: what happens when you install it, and whether you can change that permanently.

• Generative features stay off until you press a button. The free Hemingway Editor marks long sentences, passive voice and adverbs, and proposes no replacement text at all. LanguageTool Basic belongs here too, with a rephrase button capped at three uses a day.
• Generative features are present and switchable. Grammarly puts generative AI behind a toggle in the Feature customization tab of account settings. Microsoft lets you clear the Enable Copilot checkbox in Word on Windows and Mac, which stops Copilot appearing in the ribbon.
• Generative features you cannot remove. Grammarly's support article on turning AI off says its foundational AI "is integral to the suggestions our product provides" and "cannot be turned off separately from Grammarly product offerings".

Grammarly sits in the second and third states at once. Its own support article says generative AI can be turned off and the foundational AI cannot. An "AI off switch" is therefore true of one layer and false of the other.

Labels mislead in the other direction too. LanguageTool's homepage calls it an AI-based grammar checker. Its developer documentation says a rule "is basically a pattern which shows an error message to the user if the pattern matches".

Grammarly Alternatives Compared on Five Criteria

Six checkers cover almost every English-language option worth installing: LanguageTool, Hemingway Editor, ProWritingAid, Antidote, Grammarly itself, and the checkers already inside Microsoft Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice Writer and your browser.

Prices in this category move without notice. Every figure in that table comes from the named company's own pricing page, read on 3 September 2026.

Will I Get Flagged for AI if I Use Grammarly?

Nobody can promise you will not be flagged, and Grammarly publishes that limitation itself. Its help article on turning AI off states that "none today can reliably and conclusively determine whether AI was used to produce text". The AI Detector user guide adds that the feature "is not 100% accurate and should not be used as a definitive assessment".

Grammarly does offer one piece of practical guidance on that same page. It suggests that a writer worried about an AI flag should stop using its agents to rewrite content, and use them for feedback they then apply by hand. That applies to every checker named above, not only Grammarly.

Grammarly also ships Authorship, which records how text arrived in a Google Docs file, a Microsoft Word document, or Grammarly's own docs surface. It separates text you typed from text you pasted and from AI-generated text, and it labels pasted material by source where it can identify one. If your school or publisher accepts a record of the writing process, Authorship is worth weighing against every option below.

Detector scores are weak evidence in every medium. We reached the same conclusion about image detection in our guide to AI art detectors, and text detection carries the same false-positive problem. Your institution's written policy decides the outcome, and you control only your drafts and version history.

LanguageTool, the Rules-Based Grammarly Alternative

LanguageTool detects mistakes with patterns that describe what an error looks like, which means a human can read the rule that flagged a sentence. Its developer documentation says LanguageTool's rules "describe what errors look like, not what correct sentences look like". Anyone can open those rule files, because the core is released under version 2.1 or later of the GNU Lesser General Public License.

The free Basic plan covers most readers. It checks 2,000 characters per text field for spelling, grammar and punctuation, and it works as a browser add-on across most sites you write in. LanguageTool says on its homepage that no text is stored by that add-on.

Premium raises the ceiling to 150,000 characters per field and makes sentence paraphrasing unlimited. Basic caps paraphrasing at three a day.

Both numbers come from the LanguageTool pricing page. The current subscription cost is listed there too.

The LanguageTool macOS app is not an offline checker, whatever a comparison chart tells you. Its own macOS product page says an internet connection is required to use the advanced spelling, grammar and style checker.

The route to local checking is the open-source HTTP server, run on your own machine. By default it is not reachable from other hosts.

Hemingway Editor for Sentences You Wrote Yourself

The free Hemingway Editor highlights hard-to-read sentences, passive voice and adverbs, and it proposes no replacement wording. You read the highlight, you decide whether it is fair, and you rewrite the line in your own words. For a writer avoiding an AI flag, a checker that cannot write leaves nothing to explain.

Editor Plus is the paid version at $10 a month or $100 a year, per the Hemingway billing help page. It adds an advanced grammar checker plus a monthly allotment of AI sentences, which are generated rewrites of lines you highlight. The team plan allots each user 10,000 AI sentences a month, so the paid version is built around generated rewrites.

Hemingway Editor will not catch a subject-verb disagreement the way LanguageTool does. Pair the two if you can: LanguageTool for correctness, Hemingway Editor for length. If you would rather learn the cutting by hand, our guide to rewriting without a paraphrasing tool walks through the method.

ProWritingAid and Antidote for Long Documents

ProWritingAid runs style reports across a whole manuscript, which is the job Grammarly and Hemingway Editor both handle badly. Its free plan runs each line-editing report on 500 words of text, twice a day.

Premium is $30 a month, or $90 a year during the sale running as we write, against a $120 list. Premium Pro is $36 a month or $108 on sale, both on the ProWritingAid pricing page.

ProWritingAid's generative features are per click rather than automatic, so nothing rewrites a chapter while you sleep. Free accounts get 10 Rephrases and 3 Sparks a day, and the paid tiers raise or remove those caps. On its responsible AI page, ProWritingAid states: "We will never use your writing to train our algorithms."

Antidote, from Druide informatique, is the outlier on where processing happens. Antidote 12 installs locally on a Windows or Mac computer and runs its corrector, dictionaries and language guides from there. A draft can be checked with the network switched off.

Druide sells it per edition rather than as one flat monthly fee, and the current figures sit on the Antidote store page.

Antidote's reformulation feature is the exception, and Druide's offline help page confirms it needs a connection while the spell checker, dictionary and guide do not. For a lawyer, a therapist or a researcher writing something that must not leave the laptop, that split is the reason to buy Antidote instead of a subscription checker.

Free Grammarly Alternatives Already on Most Computers

Microsoft Word, Google Docs, LibreOffice Writer and every major browser already check spelling at no extra cost, and for a 400-word email that is usually enough. Using them also removes the question of whether a third party is reading your draft. The tradeoff is that the AI sitting beside those checkers is harder to strip out than a subscription you can simply cancel.

Microsoft Editor is described by Microsoft as an AI-powered service, with basic spelling and grammar free and the style refinements behind a Microsoft 365 subscription. Copilot in Word can be switched off on the desktop through File, then Options, then Copilot on Windows, or Preferences, then Authoring and Proofing Tools, then Copilot on Mac.

Microsoft's own page adds that you cannot turn Copilot off in the iOS, Android or web versions of Word. A draft written on a phone or tablet has no switch to reach for.

Microsoft Edge gives a cleaner privacy answer than several paid checkers. Selecting Basic under Writing assistance means, in Microsoft's words, that data "will be processed locally on your device instead of on Microsoft's cloud".

Choosing Microsoft Editor in that same setting sends your typed words to a Microsoft cloud service instead. The option carrying Microsoft's name uploads what you type. Our guide to browsers without AI covers the rest of those settings.

LibreOffice Writer is the fully local option, free under version 2.0 of the Mozilla Public License, with spell checking built in and no account to create. It catches less than LanguageTool does. It also never sends a sentence anywhere, which for a sealed court filing or an unpublished manuscript is the only requirement that counts.

Where Your Text Goes When You Type It

Every checker named above except Antidote and LibreOffice Writer sends your text to a server in order to check it. That single fact decides the answer for anyone drafting something confidential, and price comparisons rarely include it. A free plan that uploads your divorce filing can cost you more than a paid program that keeps it on the laptop.

The published positions differ in ways worth reading. LanguageTool's privacy policy says its parent company Learneo does not use inputs from LanguageTool Individual or Team Plan users to train its language algorithms or models. ProWritingAid makes the equivalent commitment on its responsible AI page.

Grammarly covers a wider product, with agents, a plagiarism checker and an AI detector attached. Its privacy policy covers all of those surfaces at once, so a summary written about the writing assistant will not tell you what the agents do. If your employer has a written no-AI policy, that document decides whether you can paste work text into any of these, whatever LanguageTool or Grammarly promises.

Who This Is Not For

LanguageTool is the wrong recommendation for a non-native English speaker who wants a finished sentence handed back. Rule matching flags the error and often suggests the correction, but it will not restructure an awkward paragraph the way Grammarly Pro does. If that restructuring is what you are paying for, pay Grammarly and turn on Authorship so you can show how the draft was built.

It is also wrong for a novelist working across 90,000 words. LanguageTool Premium checks 150,000 characters per field, which at roughly six characters a word is about 25,000 words, and it produces no manuscript-level reports. ProWritingAid Premium at $120 a year is the better spend for a book.

And it is wrong for anyone on a managed work laptop who cannot install a browser extension. Microsoft Word's built-in checker plus Microsoft Editor is the realistic option there, with Copilot cleared in File, Options, Copilot. That combination costs nothing extra if your employer already pays for Microsoft 365.

What Would Change Our Answer

Three changes would move our pick off LanguageTool.

• Rephrasing switched on by default. If LanguageTool applied generative suggestions without a click, it would sit in the same state as Grammarly's foundational AI, and we would move the recommendation to the free Hemingway Editor.
• A genuinely offline LanguageTool build. A desktop app that checked text with no internet connection would take the privacy row outright, and Antidote would lose its main reason to exist for English-only writers.
• Reliable AI detection. If detectors became accurate enough for a school or publisher to act on a score alone, proving authorship would matter more than which checker you used. Grammarly Authorship would become the more useful purchase.

None of the three has happened as of 3 September 2026. Install the LanguageTool browser add-on on the free Basic plan, run something you already wrote through it, and see what it flags before you pay for any Grammarly alternative.