I know not everyone uses a grammar checker.

And honestly, that’s fine. There are plenty of writers who just write, read it over once or twice, fix what they see, and move on. And if that works for you, great. You don’t need another tool (because goodness knows we have enough of them to juggle as it is).

But on the other hand, there are writers who want a bit of a safety net. Something that catches the obvious stuff like misspellings, weird sentences, and things that just don’t read right. Basically, a second set of eyes before you hit publish.

And then there are writers who actually want to get better at their craft. Not just fix mistakes, but understand the stuff they keep doing over and over again without realizing it.

For them, tools like ProWritingAid can be genuinely useful.

For me, it’s a little different

I’m dyslexic. So editing has never really been the easy part for me. I can read something multiple times and still miss the same mistake. It’s just how my brain works. (My high school English teacher and editor could tell you a few stories there.)

So for me, using a tool like this isn’t really optional. It’s just part of how I write.

Over the years, I’ve tried a few of them. Grammarly, ProWritingAid, Hemingway, a couple others here and there. Some are faster. Some are simpler. Some are better if you just want to clean something up quickly and be done with it.

ProWritingAid isn’t really that. It’s a bit more involved. Which, depending on what you want, can either be helpful or overwhelming. If you’re just looking for something quick to clean up a few sentences before you hit publish, it can feel like more than you need.

But it’s also the one app I’ve stuck with the longest.

I’ve been using it for… I don’t know, probably over a decade at this point. Mostly on blog posts, emails to subscribers, book drafts. Stuff where I actually care about how it reads. Not all the time. Quick stuff usually doesn’t go through it. It’s more for the pieces I actually want to take a second look at.

After a while, you get a feel for how these tools work.

ProWritingAid can do a lot, especially now that it has reports, Sparks, Chapter Critique, Manuscript Analysis, and other add-on-style features. But if you’re like me, you’ll probably settle into a few things you use all the time and ignore the rest unless you need them.

ProWritingAid has changed quite a bit recently

Before diving in, I should note…

A lot has changed since I first wrote this review. ProWritingAid used to be pretty easy to describe as an editing tool. That’s still a big part of what it does, but they’ve expanded well beyond that now.

The new menu is organized around three areas: Plan, Write, and Edit. Plan is where you’ll find tools like Story Canvas for working through your story before or during the draft. Write gives you a cleaner place to work, along with things like Session Timers and progress tracking. And Edit is where the grammar checker and all those reports live, along with the bigger story tools like Plot Analysis, Character Analysis, Manuscript Analysis, and Virtual Beta Reader.

They’ve also wrapped all of this into something they call the ProWriting Method, which is built around improving your craft, building better writing habits, and dealing with the mindset stuff that can keep you from finishing. That’s more philosophy than feature as far as I’m concerned, but it does explain where they’re taking the software.

For someone like me, this doesn’t mean I suddenly use every part of ProWritingAid. I don’t. The grammar checker is still what I use most. But if you’re writing fiction, especially a full book, there’s a lot more here now than there was when ProWritingAid was mostly known for editing and writing reports.

What matters to me

There’s a lot I don’t touch.

I know that sounds a bit strange, especially since ProWritingAid has a lot of cool features. Reports, suggestions, different ways to analyze your writing… there’s a lot there if you want to dig into it. And to be fair, some people really like that. They’ll go through everything, tweak every sentence, try to optimize their writing as much as possible.

For me, there are really just a couple things I care about. And honestly, one of them matters more than everything else.

The lifetime deal is a big part of it

I don’t like subscriptions. I know that’s how most software works now, but I’ve never been a big fan of paying every month or every year for something if I can avoid it. It adds up. And after a while, you’re paying for a bunch of tools you don’t even think about anymore.

ProWritingAid lets you buy a lifetime plan once and not worry about monthly or yearly renewals for that plan.

If you’re writing regularly, that one-time cost ends up being cheaper than most subscriptions pretty quickly.

In fact, if Grammarly ever offered a lifetime plan, I’d probably have to sit down and really think about which one I’d use long-term.

Because while I do like ProWritingAid, not having another subscription hanging over my head is a huge part of why I’ve used it for so long.

Note: I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that my affiliate link for ProWritingAid gives you a 10% discount on their lifetime plans and a 20% discount on the yearly plans. I’ll receive a small commission if you use it and decide to sign up, but there’s no extra cost to you.

The grammar checker is the other big one

That’s the part I actually use a lot.

So catching grammar issues, proofreading, missing words, awkward phrasing… that’s always been something I need help with. I can read something multiple times and still miss things that are right in front of me.

And this is where ProWritingAid has been really helpful.

I’ve used Grammarly quite a bit too, and it’s good. It’s fast, it’s simple, and for a lot of people it’s probably enough. But for me, ProWritingAid tends to catch more. It’s a bit more thorough, especially for big pieces of content. It’ll point out things I would have missed otherwise.

It’s not perfect.

But it’s been reliable enough that I trust it to catch what I don’t see. And honestly, that’s the bare minimum for something like this. If a writing tool can’t catch the obvious stuff, nothing else it does really matters.

After that, it’s more about how I use it

Most of the time, I’m writing in Google Docs. Articles, blog posts, books… that’s where I spend most of my time. My process is pretty simple. I’ll write a section, then run it through ProWritingAid, then move on to the next section. And once I’m done, I’ll usually run the whole thing through again for a final pass.

That second pass is usually where it helps the most, because it starts noticing stuff. Things like repetition, overused words, sentences that all start to sound the same. The kind of stuff that’s hard to see when you’re in the middle of writing, but becomes obvious once something points it out.

Repetition is the big one. It’s really easy to fall into using the same words or phrases over and over without realizing it. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it. ProWritingAid does a good job of surfacing that.

Same with word choice. There’s a feature in there called Word Explorer, which I don’t use all the time, but when I’m stuck on a sentence or I know something isn’t quite right, it helps me find a better way to say it. Sometimes it’s just swapping out a word. Sometimes it’s reworking the whole sentence. Either way, it helps clean things up.

There’s also a rephrase feature that I’ve used quite a bit, especially for sentences that are technically fine but just feel a bit clunky. You can select the sentence and it’ll give you a few different ways to rewrite it. I don’t listen to all of it. In fact, if you try to follow everything it tells you to do, you’ll probably make your writing worse. That’s probably the biggest thing to understand going in. But it’s good for those moments where you know something isn’t working and you just can’t quite fix it yourself.

Another thing I didn’t expect to use much, but ended up liking, is the writing style settings. You can tell it whether you’re writing something more casual, more technical, more formal… and it adjusts its suggestions based on that. So it’s not constantly trying to make everything sound overly polished if you don’t want it to.

When I’m writing for Kindlepreneur, I usually keep it more casual. When I’m working on something else, I might change it depending on who it’s for. It’s a small thing, but it helps.

And over time, you do start to pick up on your own habits. That’s probably the nicest thing. It doesn’t just fix your writing… it shows you what you tend to do. The mistakes you repeat. The habits you fall into. And once you see those enough times, you start catching them on your own.

But again… most of that is optional.

For me, it really comes down to those two things, the lifetime pricing and the grammar checker.

I want something that catches what I miss… and something I don’t have to keep paying for every month.

Everything else is a bonus.

Where it can get frustrating

There’s just… a lot going on.

The new menu helps a LOT with this because ProWritingAid now splits everything into Plan, Write, and Edit instead of putting dozens of tools in front of you at once. But once you start digging into it, there are still a lot of reports, suggestions, and different ways to analyze your writing. If you’re the kind of person who wants something simple and fast, it can still feel like overkill.

Grammarly is more of a “fix it as you go” kind of tool for me. You write, it underlines a few things, you clean them up, and you move on. ProWritingAid can do that too, but there’s a lot more sitting behind those suggestions if you want to use it.

And that’s where I think the difference comes in. ProWritingAid keeps giving you ways to dig deeper into what you wrote, whether that’s a report on your prose or feedback on the story itself. That can be helpful, but you definitely don’t need to use all of it.

I don’t follow everything it suggests

I mentioned it earlier, but this is probably the biggest mistake people make with it.

They try to fix everything.

If you do that, you’re going to end up rewriting your entire piece… and it probably won’t even sound like you anymore.

It flags a lot of things. Some of it’s helpful. Some of it you can ignore. And part of using it well is learning what to ignore. That takes a bit of time.

Once you figure that out, it becomes a lot more useful. But at the beginning, it can feel like it’s just constantly telling you everything you wrote is wrong.

It doesn’t really fit a mobile workflow

This is probably the biggest gap for me personally.

ProWritingAid still does not offer an iOS or Android app for smartphones or tablets. So if you’re someone who writes a lot on your phone or tablet, it’s not going to fit into your workflow very well.

You can use the Web Editor in a mobile browser as a workaround, but it’s not the same thing as having something built directly into your keyboard or apps.

That’s one area where Grammarly definitely has the advantage. You can use it almost anywhere, including on your phone.

For me, most of my writing happens on a computer, so it’s not a dealbreaker. But if you’re someone who writes a lot on the go, it’s something to think about.

It’s still more than I need for quick writing

To its credit, ProWritingAid is putting more emphasis on the writing part now, not just what happens afterward. The new Write section includes things like Session Timers and progress tracking, so if you want to use ProWritingAid while you’re drafting a book, you certainly can.

For me, though, the basic tradeoff hasn’t changed much. If all I want is something to catch a few mistakes in a quick email or short piece of writing, there are simpler tools that will do that just fine. That’s usually where something like Grammarly makes more sense.

Where ProWritingAid gets more interesting is when you’re working on something longer and want to dig into it. That might mean cleaning up the prose with its editing reports, or stepping farther back and looking at the story itself.

For example, there’s a Manuscript Analysis feature where you can run an entire book through it and get a developmental-style breakdown of things like plot, characters, setting, and story structure. It uses credits, so it’s not the same as running a normal grammar report whenever you want, but if you’re working on a full manuscript, it can be helpful to step back and look at everything as a whole.

ProWritingAid also states that it doesn’t use your writing to train its AI or other algorithms, which is definitely nice to hear if you’re pasting unpublished books into it.

If you want to see how Manuscript Analysis works, Kevin did a full breakdown of that here if you want to dig into it.

How I think about ProWritingAid vs Grammarly

Basically, I don’t really think of these as “better” or “worse.”

They’re just different.

I use them for different things.

If I’m just writing something quick, Grammarly is usually easier. It runs in the background, catches obvious things, and I don’t really have to think about it.

ProWritingAid is more something I use when I’m actually editing. When I’ve written something and want to go back through it and clean it up a bit so that it’s good to go.

If you want a quick side-by-side, here’s how I usually think about it.

	ProWritingAid	Grammarly
Best for	Long-form writing, especially books and fiction	Quick writing and everyday use
Style	More detailed, more in-depth	Simpler, faster suggestions
Grammar checking	More thorough, especially long-form	Fast and accurate for most use
Speed & workflow	Broader Plan, Write, and Edit workflow	Fast, runs in the background
Mobile use	No native mobile app	Full mobile support
Integrations	Strong for authors	Very broad for everyday writing
Pricing	One-time lifetime option available	Subscription only

Who I’d actually recommend ProWritingAid to

If you’re mostly writing shorter content… emails, social posts, quick drafts… I still think ProWritingAid is probably more than you need. There are simpler tools that will handle that just fine.

But if you’re working on a book, especially fiction, ProWritingAid makes a lot more sense to me. You can use it for the basic grammar and style stuff I rely on, but now you can also use it while you’re planning and drafting, then dig into things like plot, characters, pacing, and the manuscript as a whole when you’re ready to edit.

You don’t have to use all of that. I certainly don’t. But that’s probably the biggest difference between ProWritingAid and most of the grammar checkers I’ve used over the years. There’s a lot more room to grow into it if you want to.

So if all you need is something quick running in the background, I’d probably go simpler. But if you’re writing books and want something that can go a lot deeper, that’s where I’d give ProWritingAid a look.

If you want to test it, you can check out ProWritingAid here with my discount code. They have a free version, Premium, and Premium Pro, with monthly, yearly, and lifetime options depending on what you need. If you can afford it and you know you’ll use ProWritingAid long-term, I recommend the lifetime plan so you don’t have to think about renewals again.

And if you’d like to dig a bit deeper before deciding, we have a video that goes over the full list of ProWritingAid features (but minus the updated Plan, Write, and Edit menu). Check it out below.