Grammarly Free vs. Premium: Main Differences Compared for 2024

There are lots of differences between Grammarly Free vs. Premium. Both Grammarly plans offer different levels of features and support for grammar-checking functions.

In this Grammarly Free vs. Grammarly Premium comparison, I will walk you through the advantages and disadvantages of both Grammarly plans and show what is better for you, depending on the situation.

Grammarly Free vs. Premium

Pricing Differences between Grammarly Premium vs. Free

Grammarly has three plans. Free, Premium, and Business. Unless you are a business owner managing a team of writers, the Business plan is unsuitable for you as it’s more aligned with team-based businesses.

Grammarly Free plan delivers basic functionalities such as basic grammar & spell correction.

Grammarly Free account includes:

Basic suggestions
Browser Extensions
Basic tone detection
Basic conciseness checking on limited sites

If you are not actively posting on social media or doing any writing-related business activity, Grammarly’s FREE plan is best for you for some reason.

You will save $30.00 per month.
Grammarly Free plan can make basic grammar suggestions and fix basic spelling and punctuation errors.

But, if your writing is related to business activity or essential activity such as proofreading a book you wrote and completing a college project, you need to consider Grammarly Premium over Free.

Here is the Grammarly Premium Pricing based on subscription duration.

When considering the financial impact of Grammarly Premium, you need to look again at the objective of Grammarly subscription. For example, why do you need Grammarly Premium? How long will you use your Grammarly subscription?

It would help if you asked those questions before purchasing any Grammarly paid plan, either Grammarly Premium or Business.

When comparing paid plans, the yearly plan is most beneficial for any subscriber:

Grammarly’s Yearly plan is only $144.00. That is very cheap compared to a $30.00 monthly Grammarly Premium plan.
You will be locked at the same price even if Grammarly increases pricing for Grammarly Premium in the future. I know people who have gotten Grammarly Premium Lifetime accounts for one low cost and never paid more.
You will receive constant updates and never worry about your Grammarly subscription because Grammarly takes care of Premium customers better than others.

Grammarly Writing Suggestions

Although there are many Grammarly alternatives, there is one reason why Grammarly is still the #1 grammar-checking tool.

Why? Because of high-quality AI-based writing suggestions. I have never seen an automatic grammar checker app that can replace Grammarly’s writing assistant.

Comparing Grammarly’s Writing Assistant’s performances between Grammarly Free vs. Premium, the Premium plan is the clear winner.

Here are some features that only Grammarly paid customers are getting.

Complete grammar & punctuation corrector – Grammarly checks and corrects over four hundred minor to advanced grammar rules. Also, the AI-based writing assistant helps you craft and fine-tune content to match your writing style.
Consistency in spelling and punctuation – Grammarly Premium checks for comma errors, misspellings, and consistency better than the Free plan.
Fluency – Grammarly Premium ensures your word choices sound natural and fluent. An essential feature for content writers and email users.
Clarity – Conciseness and readability are two key factors that make your content rich in readers’ eyes and brains. Grammarly’s readability-checking capabilities help you write better content for people, not robotics, making your content more natural.
Engagement – Writing a piece of content is easy. However, writing engaging content is not that easy. You need to know various English words and their uses at the right moment to write compelling content. Grammarly’s Lively sentence varieties and synonym suggestion tools make writing engaging content easier than ever.
Delivery – Delivering output content so that it doesn’t confuse, get mad, or hate you is crucial in today’s world. People are less patient nowadays and have only a few seconds for marketers to steal people’s attention. Grammarly Writing Assistant does a good job of providing word suggestions to make your writing polite, less confusing, confident, and well-formatted.
Plagiarism – One key difference between Grammarly’s paid vs. free plans is that paid customers can check for plagiarism in the content they write inside Grammarly Editor.
Phrasal Predictions – Another advanced feature to help you out in writing content. Only available for paid users.
GrammarlyGO – The generative AI assistant helps you complete incomplete content, rephrase articles, and more.

Here is an example of the plagiarism checker inside my Grammarly Premium account. As you see, Grammarly detected the 37-word paragraph is already in use! In fact, I wrote and published this Grammarly Alternatives post a few days ago! That is a good sign of how well and often Grammarly checks for content on the World Wide Web.

If you are a blogger like me, you need to consider getting on Grammarly Premium over Grammarly Free because duplicate content is harmful to your site’s SEO performance.

Human-oriented grammar checking cannot be neglected when comparing Grammarly Free vs. Premium in 2024. Let’s be honest here. Even Grammarly is not tailored 100% to correct grammatical errors as a human read proofreader does.

But if you have read my Grammarly review, you would know that Grammarly focused better on Artificial Intelligence in 2019. Hence, in 2024, you could see their implementation to make grammar checking better.

The later addition to Grammarly Editor is Setting Up Goals.

If you want to compare Grammarly Free and Paid plans such as Premium based on the ability to tailor writing suggestions, paid plans get most of them. In fact, Grammarly paid customers to receive a complete suite of defining writing suggestions.

Domain – There are significant differences between an academic whitepaper and a casual blog post. You can define which content is focused on with this option. Again, this feature is wholly given only for Grammarly paid over free.
Intent – What is the intent of your writing? Is it to describe something, convince something, or tell a story?
Audience – For whom is your content written? Depending on the audience type, people may need to focus on reading and understanding.
Formality – A critical setting, especially for college students and business people who write more formal letters and documents.

When comparing Writing Assistant’s performance between Grammarly Free vs. Premium, you can clearly see that Grammarly’s paid plans are designed for high performance and accurate grammar checking. In contrast, a free Grammarly plan allows you to accomplish basic grammar, spelling, and punctuation checking.

Also, Grammarly’s generative AI, GrammarlyGO, will be helpful in generating content or rephrasing existing paragraphs using artificial intelligence.

Comparing Grammarly Free vs Premium Grammar Checking

I uploaded the same errorful document to both accounts to compare both Grammarly Free and Premium plans. One is paid, and another is a free account. Let’s take a look at how well Grammarly Writing Assistant performs under a free account.

Grammarly suggested that my article has 41 overall errors under the Correctness category. No rephrasing suggestions are made.

Now, let’s take a look at how Grammarly Writing Assistant on the Premium account performs.

According to my Grammarly Premium account, there are 65 alerts under the Correctness category. That is +24 more grammatical errors that I would have missed on Grammarly’s free account.

Many of those extra suggestions are to make my content more readable and human-friendly.

As a non-native English speaker, those suggestions are very important to me.

Verdict on Grammarly Free vs. Premium

What is better, Grammarly Premium or Free?

Grammarly’s paid plans are designed for professional writers, marketers, students, teachers, and people who want to improve their knowledge of English.

Yes, Grammarly Premium offers extra features such as Plagiarism checking. But, basically, Grammarly Premium is for serious writers. If you are a serial marketer or a serious learner, Grammarly Premium or Business plan is for you.

But, if you are a person who is not very keen on posting content on the internet or do not want a Writing Assistant app to ease your grammar corrections, then maybe Grammarly Free is for you.

Grammarly Free vs other products

Although there are dozens of apps like Grammarly, I firmly believe that Grammarly’s Free plan is better than most other free grammar checker tools.

Grammarly’s free plan is to stay ahead of others by comparing Grammarly vs. Hemingway, Turnitin, or even Grammarly vs. Ginger. It provides many tools, such as an online editor, browser extensions, and mobile keyboard apps, but its basic features are enough for most tasks.

Grammarly Free or Grammarly Premium?

If you are a professional marketer, blogger, content marketer, working for a media company, teacher, student, or just a person who wants to improve your English knowledge, go for Grammarly Premium.

If you want a tool to do basic checking on grammar, spelling, and punctuation, go for Grammarly Free. As we saw in this Grammarly Free vs. Premium comparison, the Free plan is enough for simple tasks.

So, what are your thoughts on Grammarly Free vs. Premium? Which plan would you like to choose? Grammarly Free or Premium?

FAQ