Grammarly Premium Review
Still the most polished proofreader on the market, and the free tier is still the best free writing tool there is. The Premium question has gotten harder: general AI assistants now do much of the rewriting work, leaving Premium's case resting on always-on convenience rather than unique ability.
- Type
- Writing assistant, browser and app integration
- Best for
- People who write all day in many different tools
- Free tier
- Yes — covers core grammar and spelling
Reasons to buy
- Lives in every text box — the always-on presence no chatbot matches
- Tone and clarity suggestions are consistently sensible
- Excellent free tier to test how much you'd actually use it
- Catches the small errors tired eyes skip
Reasons to avoid
- General AI assistants now cover much of Premium's rewriting territory
- Pushes prose toward one safe, corporate register
- Subscription price sits oddly high against what chatbots include
- Cloud processing of everything you type deserves a privacy pause
Grammarly's real product was never grammar-checking — it was presence. It sits inside your email, your browser, your documents, and catches the dropped word or doubled 'the' at the exact moment you type it, with no copy-pasting into a chatbot and no breaking stride. That ambient quality is still unmatched, and it is the honest core of the Premium case.
The problem is what has grown up around it. Rewriting a clumsy sentence, adjusting tone for a difficult email, tightening a paragraph — the marquee Premium features — are now things general AI assistants do well, often better, and bundled with everything else they do. Premium has responded by adding AI drafting of its own, but a proofreader bolting on generation is competing on the giants' home turf with a narrower toolkit.
There's also a quieter cost we weigh more heavily than most reviews: sameness. Follow every Grammarly suggestion and your writing converges on one inoffensive, LinkedIn-flavoured voice. The suggestions are individually defensible and collectively flattening — fine for a status report, corrosive for anything meant to sound like you. Good writers use it as a spellcheck with opinions and decline half of what it offers.
So the recommendation forks. If you write professionally across many tools all day, the always-on convenience still earns Premium's fee, no chatbot workflow matches it. If your writing happens in bursts, in one or two apps, keep the excellent free tier for typo patrol and let the AI assistant you already pay for handle the heavy lifting. That combination now beats Premium for most people.
How we tested
The Grammarly Premium was scored against the same written rubric we apply to every Writing & Productivity product — real-world performance, build quality, ease of use, upkeep and value. Full protocol on our How We Test page.
