Grammar checking in 30+ languages for a fraction of the price
Grammarly leaned into generative AI and priced accordingly — Pro is $12 per month on an annual plan but $30 month-to-month, and the assistant increasingly nudges you toward paid AI rewrites. LanguageTool does the core job — grammar, spelling, punctuation and style across 30-plus languages — for $4.99 a month on Premium, and its checking engine is open source, so you can run the whole server yourself for nothing.
LanguageTool catches the mistakes you actually rely on a checker for: grammar and agreement errors, spelling, punctuation, commonly confused words, and tone and clarity suggestions. It works through browser extensions, a web editor, and add-ins for Google Docs, Word and major email clients, so it sits in the same places Grammarly does. For everyday writing in English — and far better than Grammarly across other languages — the suggestions land in the same spots.
Grammarly’s generative-AI rewriting and its aggressive full-sentence suggestions are still stronger and more polished, and its English tone analysis is more opinionated. LanguageTool’s most advanced AI features sit on Premium, and while the core server is open source, the official browser extensions are not. Self-hosting gives you privacy and zero cost but means running a Java server and forgoing the cloud-only premium niceties.
Grammarly Pro: $12/user/mo on annual billing (~$144/yr), or $30 month-to-month. LanguageTool Premium: $4.99/mo (~$60/yr) — less than half — for one polished cloud experience across 30+ languages. Or run the open-source server yourself for $0 in software on a small VPS, keeping every sentence you check entirely private. Either route roughly halves the bill or eliminates it.
Under an hour. Install the LanguageTool browser extension and the Google Docs or Word add-in, create an account, and you’re checking immediately — there’s nothing to export from Grammarly, since your text lives in your documents. Privacy-minded users can instead deploy the open-source server with Docker and point the extension at it. Disable the Grammarly extension, write for a few days, and cancel once LanguageTool covers your workflow.