Grammarly vs Hemingway Editor: pricing, features and which to choose

Grammarly is a writing-assistance product made by Superhuman, the company formerly known as Grammarly. The company says Grammarly was founded in 2009 and serves more than 40 million people and 50,000 organizations. On October 29, 2025, it announced a name change to Superhuman while retaining Grammarly, Coda, Mail, and Superhuman Go as products in the broader suite. Grammarly therefore remains focused on writing support rather than becoming a separate foundation-model vendor. In May 2025, the company announced $1 billion in growth financing from General Catalyst and said revenue had exceeded $700 million. It also announced Coda’s acquisition in January 2025 and an agreement to acquire Superhuman in July 2025, placing Grammarly inside a larger product family.

Grammarly works inside supported applications, websites, browsers, and documents. A typical session involves writing text, reviewing inline spelling and grammar suggestions, and applying recommendations for tone, clarity, fluency, inclusive language, or citation consistency when the plan supports those capabilities. Pro adds full-sentence rewrites, tone adjustment, plagiarism detection, and AI-generated-text detection. Team features include style guides, brand tones, knowledge sharing, snippets, and analytics, helping organizations make writing more consistent. Grammarly says the product works across more than 1 million applications and websites. Docs provides a dedicated writing space, while newer agents can help users draft, revise, research, and receive audience feedback without opening a separate application. This broad coverage is central to its everyday writing-assistance approach.

The main limitation is the need to allow an AI service into many writing contexts. For individual accounts, Product Improvement and Training is enabled by default, although users can opt out. Microsoft Editor and Copilot fit organizations centered on Microsoft 365, while Google Docs with Gemini fits teams working mainly in Google Workspace. LanguageTool and ProWritingAid focus more narrowly on correction and style assistance. Grammarly is a strong choice for people who want correction, rewriting, tone guidance, detection features, and broad application coverage in one service. However, organizations should review account controls and content policies before using it for confidential work. Users seeking an open-source or self-hosted checker may also find Grammarly unsuitable, since the profile identifies it as neither.

Hemingway Editor is a focused readability editor built around clear, concise prose. Its web editor highlights difficult sentences, passive voice, adverbs, and wording that may weaken a passage, then reports a readability grade. The free version supports diagnosis, while most corrections remain manual. Hemingway Editor Plus adds cloud-based AI features, and the separate Mac and PC desktop app preserves the classic editor as a one-time purchase. The desktop application costs $19.99 and works without an internet connection. It can save work locally, import and export common formats, and publish to WordPress. The desktop license does not include newer AI features. This makes the product a focused editing tool rather than a general writing workspace for storage, organization, and drafting.

A typical workflow starts with pasting or importing a draft, then reviewing color-coded highlights for long sentences, passive constructions, adverbs, weak language, and grammar issues. Writers can set a target reading level and use feedback to consider clarity, structure, tone, and flow. Plus users can ask the service to rewrite selected sentences or paragraphs, fix grammar, simplify wording, adjust tone and formality, change length, and suggest synonyms. Import and export support includes HTML, Markdown, and Word documents. The desktop app adds offline writing, local saving, PDF export, and direct publishing. Hemingway's approach is opinionated: it treats readability as an editing target, while leaving the writer responsible for deciding whether each suggestion fits the intended audience, subject, meaning, and voice.

Hemingway is strongest when the goal is clearer, shorter prose, although its rules can conflict with deliberate complexity, technical precision, or literary voice. AI credits count by sentence, so rewriting a paragraph consumes multiple credits, while grammar fixes are unlimited under Plus. Compared with Grammarly, Hemingway offers a more focused readability workflow. Compared with ProWritingAid, it presents a smaller and more direct set of readability signals. Compared with LanguageTool, it is more centered on sentence clarity and reading grade. These are editorial fit judgments rather than claims about competitor features. Pick Hemingway when readability feedback is the primary need, and choose Plus only when its AI allowance matches your editing volume.