Quillbot vs Grammarly: Which Is Better?

Quillbot vs Grammarly: Which one is worth investing your time and money in? Let’s find out!

Unfortunately, not every reader understands the challenge of writing and publishing consistently. If you publish an article, landing page, or social media post containing a few errors, it’ll lower your credibility with your target audience.

Quillbot and Grammarly are advanced grammar checkers that use machine learning and artificial intelligence to find errors, remove unnecessary words, and increase clarity. So which grammar tool is the best choice Let’s find out!

English grammar contains a plethora of rules that many writers find confusing to follow. As a writer, it’s confusing to follow every rule, especially if you’re in a flow state. However, we can often catch many errors during the editing process, but we’re only human and bound to make mistakes. 

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What Is Quillbot?

Quillbot is a paraphraser tool developed by Rohan Gupta in 2017. He founded Quillbot based on the philosophy that you should focus on what you write, not how you should write it.

Quillbot uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to rewrite content. So whether you’re creating new content for your website, writing a school paper, or summarizing articles, Quillbot is a practical option. It’s accessible via a web browser and add-ons for Word, Chrome, and Google  Docs.

Why Use Quillbot?

Quillbot contains different modes you can use depending on your writing needs. These include:

  • Standard
  • Fluency
  • Creative and Creative+
  • Formal
  • Shorten
  • Expand

For example, if you’d like to paraphrase an article, paste it into Standard Mode. This changes words in your article while keeping the same writing style.

Creative+ is a mode that uses creative artificial intelligence to make changes to common sayings and phrases. It’s helpful for students. For example, if their assignment is a bit bland, they can paste it into this mode and it’ll paraphrase words with an emphasis on creativity.

Quillbot in Standard Mode
If you’d like to paraphrase an article, paste it into Standard Mode

When using Fluency Mode, Quillbot will paraphrase your writing with an emphasis on fluency. The same goes for all the other modes. Once you’ve pasted in your text and paraphrased it, you’ll see that different words are different colors. Black means that a word hasn’t changed. Orange means that a word is changed, and blue highlights the longest length of words without a change.

One of my favorite features on Quillbot is the “Freeze Words” option. Freeze Words allow you to choose which words you don’t want Quillbot to change. This could be for keyword purposes or to maintain the accuracy of your article.

Quillbot in Fluency Mode
When using Fluency Mode, Quillbot will paraphrase your writing with an emphasis on fluency

For example, if you’re writing an article about negative SEO, then you’ll want to freeze that term. If you don’t, Quillbot might use a synonym for negative, like pessimistic, resulting in an inaccurate article

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To learn more, read our Quillbot review.

Grammarly

Grammarly is an online writing assistant available for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android users. Like Quillbot, it scans text for typos and other grammatical errors. I’ve been using it since I started my freelance writing career.

However, Grammarly is more than just a spelling and grammar checker. It makes suggestions on improving your text’s clarity and engagement, which is crucial as a freelance writer. 

Grammarly Vs Quillbot
Grammarly makes suggestions for improving your text’s clarity and engagement

With over 30 million users and 30,000 teams using Grammarly worldwide, they must be doing something right. When you use Grammarly, you’ll see an overall score on top that rates your work based on correctness, clarity, engagement, and deliverability. 

Grammarly Vs Quillbot
You’ll see an overall score on top that rates your work based on correctness, clarity, engagement, and deliverability

It also provides in-depth analysis regarding sentence count, reading time, and speaking time. This is helpful if you’re a video creator and you’d like to know how long it’ll take to read a script. In terms of readability analysis, few other writing assistants come close. You can see the word length, sentence length, and readability score.

Grammarly Vs Quillbot
Grammarly provides in-depth analysis regarding sentence count, reading time, and speaking time

One of the main reasons I use Grammarly is due to its advanced cross-platform features. You don’t have to copy and paste your text into Grammarly to start editing. Simply install the Grammarly extension, and begin making edits in Google Docs, Microsoft Word, or Gmail.

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Who Are Quillbot And Grammarly For?

Quillbot and Grammarly are two helpful tools that’ll improve your writing via their various tools. So who are these tools for?

  • Academics and essayists
  • Bloggers
  • Content marketers
  • Freelance writers
  • Authors
  • Digital marketers
  • Remote workers
  • Small business owners

Let’s cover some of these use cases.

Academics and Essayists

Arguably, Quillbot is the best choice as an essay checker for academics and essayists. That’s because it enables users to correctly generate citations for a range of styles including Chicago, MLA and Harvard. It also contains a plagiarism checker that’s specifically built for checking academic papers and works. In fact, we tested a research paper PDF and this tool quickly found the original source for us.

Bloggers and Freelance Writers

If your copy contains spelling errors or doesn’t read well, it can affect your relationship with readers. Luckily, Quillbot and Grammarly use advanced artificial intelligence to reduce the number of grammar mistakes.

As a freelance writer, these tools helped me improve the clarity of my writing, engage my audience more, and reduce the amount of time spent editing.

Authors

Writing a book takes a lot of discipline. You’ll need to develop a storyline and characters and learn how to grab the reader’s attention from cover to cover. This takes patience and motivation. However, the most tedious part of publishing a book is editing. You’ll need to ensure that there are no spelling errors or plot holes.

Most authors hire editors to proofread their work. However, Grammarly can help you catch small mistakes and formatting errors before you send your first draft to an editor. It’s not a replacement for a professional editor, but it can help polish up your work before sending it to your editor.

Content Marketers

A big part of content marketing involves building profitable relationships with readers and followers through the written word. It involves writing landing pages, social media ads, blog posts, and emails for a target audience.

However, if you can’t structure sentences properly and communicate your value, nobody will buy from you regardless of how unique your product is.

Luckily you can paste your content into Grammarly to spot errors. Work on the deliverability, readability, and engagement of your writing. This ensures that you communicate your value to your audience through concise writing.

With Quillbot’s Premium Plan, you can copy and paste your work to optimize for SEO and paraphrase specific sentences that might be difficult to read.

Remote Workers

Since the pandemic, many people have started working from home. Although this is a dream for most, it presents unique challenges. Instead of walking up to your boss’s office, knocking on their door, and talking to them about a project you’re working on, you’ll need to send an email. Depending on the complexity of the topic, this email can range from a few sentences to several paragraphs.

Without any software checking your writing and paraphrasing your work, you’ll have to edit the entire email yourself. But with a writing assistant, make corrections while you type, which saves time editing.

Free Plans

Quillbot and Grammarly offer limited free plans, and although they’re a good option if you want to get a feel for the platform without spending money, the features are limited. Quillbot doesn’t allow you to use different modes on the free plan, and you can only paste 400 words at a time.

Grammarly is more flexible with its free plan since you get access to many helpful features, but I’d like to see both platforms allow people to use more features.

Premium Pricing

Both Quillbot and Grammarly offer free plans to try out if you don’t want to invest money right away. When using the free plan, you can get a feel for the platform. With Quillbot’s premium version, you can choose between three plans:

  • A monthly plan costs $4.95 per month
  • The semi-annual plan costs $24.96 for six months
  • An annual plan costs $39.95 per year

With Grammarly Premium, you can also pick from three pricing plans:

  1. The monthly plan costs $29.95 per month
  2. A quarterly subscription costs $59.95, which is billed every three months
  3. An annual subscription costs $139 per year

Quillbot is clearly the more affordable option. However, Grammarly provides advanced grammar checking that Quillbot can’t match. If in doubt, avail of our Grammarly coupon.

Winner: Quillbot (if only for the price), Grammarly for functionality

After using Quillbot and Grammarly to improve my writing for a few years now, some features stand out.

Grammar Checker

Grammarly desktop app
Grammarly fixes grammar errors faster than Quillbot

In our tests, both tools caught more grammar errors and issues than a basic grammar checker in Google Docs or Microsoft Word. However, Grammarly excels because it provides context to these mistakes. You can find and fix grammar mistakes in a single click with Grammarly and it will even improve sentence structure. That’s all down to its AI-powered writing assistant.

Paraphrasing

Quillbot paraphrasing text
Pick from different modes when paraphrasing text in Quillbot

Quillbot excels at rewriting existing content. You can pick from different modes when paraphrasing text. If you want your text to be more formal, select the formal mode. If you want to shorten or expand text, these options are available too. Quillbot’s modes allow you to paraphrase text to your liking. It contains a hand article or essay summarizer, useful for writing abstracts. Grammarly doesn’t provide anything like this.

Plagiarism Checker

Grammarly plagiarism checker
With Grammarly, you can check your writing against billions of pages on the web

Quillbot contains a great plagiarism checker. It’s better for checking academic works and essays than Grammarly. However, it’s less suitable for freelance writers and content publishers. That’s because it works on a per-page basis. It costs $7.50 to check 20 pages, about 250 words per page. So if you’re checking lots of articles it could get expensive. Grammarly’s plagiarism checker is included with the premium subscription at no extra cost.

Citation Manager

Quillbot includes a handy citation manager. Basically, paste in a link to any research paper, document or source and it will correctly generate citations, saving academics and essayists hours of time formatting papers. Grammarly doesn’t contain anything like this.

Ease of Use

Compared to other paraphrases and proofreading tools like Wordtune and Ginger, Quillbot and Grammarly are the easiest to use. Signing up takes a few seconds, and once completed, you’ll get a tutorial on using the software. 

Google Chrome extensions are also available for both tools that allow you to check your work while writing. However, Grammarly also enables you to accept its suggestions with a single mouse click via the app and add-on. 

What I Dislike About Quillbot And Grammarly

Although both platforms are super helpful for writers, they can improve in some areas:

  • There’s a 10000-word limit when using Quillbot
  • You can’t summarize text with Grammarly
  • Both free plans are limited

Even if you signed up for the paid version of Quillbot, there’s still a 10000-word limit. This might not be a dealbreaker, but if you’re writing a novel, you’ll have to copy and paste 10000 words at a time. 

Unlike Quillbot, Grammarly can’t summarize long walls of text. It mainly focuses on fixing spelling errors and making your writing more concise. So if you’re looking for a tool that’ll summarize your work, opt for Quillbot instead.

Testing Criteria

When writing this article, I compared the free and paid versions of Quillbot to the free and premium versions of Grammarly. I also worked with another writer who tested Quillbot extensively using previously published academic papers and essays. I looked at the following criteria to judge whether these tools are practical options for students and essayists.

  • Accuracy
  • Affordability
  • Flexibility

Quillbot and Grammarly both meet these criteria since most of their changes are correct and accurate. They also help you with readability by suggesting how to move words around to increase clarity.

In terms of affordability, Quillbot and Grammarly won’t break the bank, even if you’re just starting out as a freelance writer. They are also super flexible because they contain SEO tools and a plagiarism checker.

Why Trust Us?

I’ve been using Quillbot and Grammarly since I started my career as a freelance writer, and it helped me save a lot of time and money. In the beginning, I didn’t understand a lot of the principles of grammar and structure, so my articles were a mess.

When I started using Quillbot and Grammarly, I noticed my writing quality improved almost immediately. I like these tools because they’ll tell you why and how to avoid this mistake in the future when they suggest changing something. I made a list of common mistakes and when writing, I aimed to avoid them. Now I have confidence in my writing skills to avoid most of the errors I once made. When I make spelling mistakes, I have peace of mind knowing that Quillbot and Grammarly will notice them.

Although Quillbot and Grammarly can’t replace a human editor, both tools can help streamline the self-editing process. Writing assistants like these are effective at spotting spelling errors and unclear writing. They also give advice on how to fix mistakes.

Both Quillbot and Grammarly are worth investing in since they’ll improve your writing skills overnight and help save a lot of time editing your work. After using both tools for a few years now, I can safely say Grammarly is more accurate and feature-rich. The spell checker and plagiarism tools make it a must-have for all freelance writers, content marketers, and small business owners.

If you feel like you’re spending too much time editing, I suggest using Grammarly. It helps you spot typos, structural mistakes, and overused words. These are all crucial when posting content online.

Quillbot is the cheaper of the two (at least compared to Grammarly Premium), but it has fewer features. Quillbot is a good choice if you repurpose content, are an academic or need a budget-friendly writing assistant. It’s also a good choice if you want to paraphrase longer text.

Grammarly Premium is more expensive. Use it if you need advanced artificial intelligence to edit your work and check for plagiarism issues. It’s also a good choice if you work with other writers and want to check their work for plagiarism or missing citations. I also like the free version, even if its reports are limited.

In short, use Quilbot if you write essays or academic papers. Otherwise, pay a little more for Grammarly.

Resources

Authors

  • Yaseen is a personal trainer turned professional writer and he’s obsessed with everything health, fitness, and business-related. If he isn’t at the gym, you can find him playing video games or spending time with friends and family.

  • Bryan Collins is the owner of Become a Writer Today. He's an author from Ireland who helps writers build authority and earn a living from their creative work. He's also a former Forbes columnist and his work has appeared in publications like Lifehacker and Fast Company.

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