An always-on grammar checker against a deliberate readability editor, with verified 2026 pricing.
| Grammarly | Hemingway | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | Real-time grammar and style checker | Readability and clarity editor |
| Where it runs | Browser extension, desktop, mobile, most apps | Free web editor plus a paid desktop app |
| Free tier | Yes, core corrections plus 100 AI prompts a month | Yes, the full web editor is free |
| Paid entry price | Pro at $12 per member per month billed annually | Plus at $8.33 per month billed annually ($100 per year) |
| Month-to-month price | $30 | $10 |
| AI writing | 2,000 AI prompts per member per month on Pro | AI sentence corrections, quota depends on plan |
| Plagiarism and AI detection | Included with Pro | Not offered |
| Readability grade | A side metric | The core feature |
| Works offline | No | Yes, with the desktop app |
| Team option | Enterprise, custom pricing, SSO and style guides | Team plan with 10,000 AI sentences per user per month |
Grammarly's numbers, checked against its plans page in 2026: Free costs nothing and includes core grammar and spelling checks plus 100 AI prompts a month. Pro runs $12 per member per month when billed annually, which is $144 a year. Paying month to month costs $30, so the annual commitment amounts to a 60 percent discount. Pro adds full-sentence rewrites, tone adjustment, plagiarism and AI-text detection, and 2,000 AI prompts per member per month. Enterprise is custom priced and adds SSO, data controls, and unlimited AI prompts.
Hemingway is far cheaper. The web editor is free with no account. Hemingway Editor Plus, which adds AI fixes for the issues it highlights, starts at $100 per year ($8.33 a month) or $10 billed monthly, with a two-week trial. Team plans allot 10,000 AI sentences per user per month. There is also a classic desktop app sold as a one-time purchase of about $20, useful if you want offline editing without a subscription.
The practical takeaway: a year of Grammarly Pro costs more than a decade of Hemingway's desktop app. That only makes sense if you use what Pro adds.
Pick Grammarly when your writing is scattered across tools all day: email, CRM notes, support replies, documents, chat. Its value is coverage. The browser extension and desktop apps catch errors in the moment, in whatever field you happen to be typing into, and that is something Hemingway does not attempt.
It is also the right pick for teams that need consistency. Pro and Enterprise support style guides and brand tones, and the plagiarism and AI-detection checks matter for agencies and content teams shipping work under their own name. The free tier is genuinely useful, so I would start there and only upgrade once you find yourself wanting the rewrite and tone features several times a week.
Pick Hemingway when the problem is not typos but bloat. Paste in a draft and it grades the reading level, highlights sentences that are hard to follow, and flags passive voice and adverbs in color. It gives you a concrete editing task list instead of inline autocorrect. For blog posts, landing pages, and cold emails, that pass is worth more than another grammar check.
It is also the budget pick by a wide margin. The web editor is free, the desktop app is a small one-time purchase, and the Plus subscription costs a third of Grammarly Pro. There is a quieter benefit too: because Hemingway shows you the pattern behind each highlight, it tends to train the habit out of you. Grammarly fixes your sentence; Hemingway nudges you to write it tighter the first time.
These tools disagree about what good writing is. Grammarly optimizes for correct and polished, and if you accept every suggestion, prose drifts toward a safe, uniform register. Hemingway optimizes for short and blunt, and taken literally it can flatten nuance. Both are advisors, not authorities, and the skill is knowing when to ignore each one.
Privacy is the other quiet difference. Grammarly is a cloud service, so your text is processed on its servers, which some employers restrict. Hemingway's desktop app works entirely offline, which makes it the safer choice for sensitive drafts.
Finally, almost nobody mentions that the free tiers cover most people. Grammarly Free catches the embarrassing mistakes, and Hemingway's free editor does everything except auto-fix. I would exhaust both before paying for either.
Use both, in different roles. Keep Grammarly's free tier running everywhere as error insurance, and run finished drafts through Hemingway's free editor before publishing. If you pay for one, match it to your actual bottleneck: pay for Grammarly Pro if your risk is mistakes at volume across a team, pay for Hemingway Plus if your risk is wordy drafts nobody finishes reading. For my own writing, the Hemingway pass changes more.