Being able to communicate effectively is a vital part of any content strategy. When trying to reach as large of an audience as possible, you need to clearly articulate your ideas, whether they are business strategies, engaging fiction writing, attention-getting blog posts, thoughtful essays, or marketing techniques. Advancements in technology have made these tools much more than a simple spell checker.
Writing tools like Grammarly and ProWritingAid can help with a range of writing skills, from identifying and correcting passive voice or an overused word to determining the best sentence structure. Both tools are widely regarded as easy to use and highly efficient. Both come with free and paid versions, but is there a superior choice among them?
This comparison of ProWritingAid vs Grammarly aims to break down what makes these tools tick. While they seem interchangeable, a few variations would be helpful for anyone to note. What kind of writing you’re doing also might impact your choice. If you’re a business that’s trying to sell yourself to a specific clientele, it will help to know which tool is more effective at refining business language and adopting your voice. Alternatively, if you’re a fiction writer, blogger, or independent journalist, a writing tool can help you flesh out your unique sound while avoiding grammatical or spelling errors. In this guide, we aim to lay out the strengths and weaknesses of both tools. Let’s get started!
What You Get With Grammarly
Grammarly is one of the most popular online writing tools, appearing almost any time someone makes a “best-of” article detailing writing aid options online. There’s an obvious reason for this, and that is it’s a comprehensive tool that doesn’t charge you for the basics. One of Grammarly’s biggest draws is how it makes the simple stuff free – you can count on it to fix any basic spelling mistakes and grammar errors in various languages. Unsure about the spelling of superfluous or coherent? It’ll clock your spelling error automatically, underline it in red, and offer you a word choice for what it thinks you’re trying to spell. There’s no limit on how many words or articles you can have proofread with a free account.
Grammarly is also quite an effective tool. If you have ever used the free version of Grammarly, then you’re probably familiar with its vague “advanced suggestions” and “additional writing issues” that it underlines in yellow. Any serious writer knows how tempting it is to indulge in at least a trial membership to see what recommendations Grammarly will make. And, if you take the bait and pay for a membership, here’s the kicker – you won’t be disappointed!
Grammarly Premium and Grammarly Business give concise suggestions that never feel judgmental and almost always improve your writing. Sometimes, however, Grammarly can make a mistake regarding advanced grammatical rules, so we would never recommend relying on it to fix everything for you. These pieces of software are never 100% correct, as they often fail to capture nuance within human writing, especially when it comes to character dialogue, stylistic metaphors or prose, or poetic language.
Now, What About ProWritingAid?
While Grammarly is an all-encompassing writing partner that will make suggestions for all aspects of your writing, ProWritingAid is a little more specialized. It makes fewer suggestions and focuses deeply on your overall writing style. It helps ensure that your tone is focused throughout most of your content instead of taking things sentence by sentence. This is enormously helpful if you’re trying to write something that genuinely flows together.
If you look out at the landscape of SEO-focused clickbait articles and mass-produced content strung together by content mills, many writers need help maintaining a consistent voice throughout their writing. Tools like ProWritingAid work to identify what voice is most prominent through your writing and sculpt the bulk of your text to make your writing style as consistent as possible. It can handle the basic proofreading, but it’s ideal if you’re not just trying to make your listicle presentable.
Another great feature that ProWritingAid offers is the identification of roadblocks in your writing. The Grammarly app does some of these as well, but it’s a real selling point for ProWritingAid. One such example is clearly labeling issues that it might routinely come across in your writing. One of these issues is the “sticky sentence.” This is a sentence that, while maybe being grammatically correct, doesn’t flow very well with the rest of your writing. While many writing tools will just gloss right over it since there’s nothing technically wrong, ProWritingAid won’t. This kind of issue identification is another big selling point for ProWritingAid, as it shows just how in-depth and specific writing tools can get when they’re well-designed.
But How Do They Compare?
Now, you might be wondering how these tools stack up against each other – after all, we haven’t made a direct comparison, have we? However, if you’ve been paying attention, there have been plenty of indirect comparisons regarding Grammarly vs ProWritingAid.
In our view, Grammarly is the better option if you’re hopeless at proofreading and have a limited understanding of complex grammar rules. If you need software that will catch all of the basic mistakes and do a rough but capable job of analyzing and polishing up your piece, Grammarly is a great option. This is especially the case if you feel that the main problems with your writing aren’t your voice or style or the content itself. In our eyes, Grammarly is about fixing something that already works pretty well, but it won’t be able to help if the foundation of your writing needs work.
ProWritingAid is a different beast altogether, offering much more than a grammar check. If you need help defining your unique voice or have a disconnected piece of writing, ProWritingAid will be your best friend. It will be able to identify stylistic inconsistencies while delivering on all the basic grammar and spelling mistakes. While Grammarly will offer dozens and dozens of suggestions to make individual sentences sound better, ProWritingAid focuses on the big picture. What is the big picture? In our mind, it is figuring out if your thesis and ideas flow from paragraph to paragraph and page to page. Grammarly closely examines specific instances, while ProWritingAid helps you with the big picture.
So, Which Should I Go With?
We recommend you go with a paid version of Grammarly if you’re trying to find a writing tool to fix all the little mistakes in your writing. If your main problems are superficial, then Grammarly will be able to help.
If you need assistance figuring out a piece’s direction or overall feeling, then ProWritingAid is the better choice. To put it more succinctly, if you care about connecting with your audience, go with ProWritingAid. If you want a well-written and understandable piece that most people can grasp without thinking too hard, go with Grammarly. We hope this comparison was able to help you make your decision – good luck!
