has anyone used both and recommend one over the other? One review I read showed a bit lower scores for the quality of ProWritingAid editing recommendations. any confirmation of this or insights?
Thoughts and experiences?
I use grammarly and like it. The best thing is it works well as part of Word, so you can look at the grammarly suggestions right in your Word docx. I wait until Iām finished and then run grammarly and look at its suggestions. Itās not always right, but I like having a āsecondā check.
Anyone else using the free version of Grammarly? Does it drive you as insane as itās driving me?
Putting the manuscript of Book One through it, Iām discovering itās two parts dumb to one part clever.
Rule-based as it is, the pure grammar engine does better than I do. But thereās a problem. Grammarly knows grammar but nothing about style.
It keeps nagging me to add transition phrases, in particular, āinsteadā. Itās driving me f***** insane. There is no āinstead.ā Itās the next action. It also keeps trying to insert āthenā and āunfortunatelyā at the start of sentences.
And inserting āthatā. Yes, the word every writing coach on the planet tells you to go through and delete.
Dumb.
It canāt really cope with informal language, can it?
Itās suggesting āBecauseā in place of 'cause. āMay not be appropriate in this context.ā It clearly knows nothing about context. Itās worse than my drunk English teacher in the 1980ās.
It also doesnāt like repeated words or sentence structures. It knows nothing of rhetoric, of repetition for emphasis.
āIt may be unclear who she refers to.ā Thereās only two people in the dialog, one man āheā, one woman āsheā. Duh.
Spelling: when does the verb āto get awayā become āto getawayā?.
But it is a hip-hop fan. Why else does it want to replace āthe two pack poniesā (ponies carrying packs, two of them) with āthe two-pack ponies?ā Whatās next? Suggest āthe biggest horseā changed to āthe Biggie horse?ā 
I havenāt tried Grammarly, but it sounds like it has similar issues as Prowritingaid, which Iāve found to be pretty frustrating. It doesnāt really like fictional writing at all, even though thatās what itās supposed to be built for.
Iām complaining about Grammarly even though I know itās not designed for fiction; itās aimed at dull corporate reports.
I wrote up some more examples on the blog, it was getting unintentionally hilarious:
It also has the vocabulary of a ten-year old.
However, it has been a useful prompt to get me to look at my prose with a sceptical eye. Instead of accepting or rejecting a lot of the dumb suggestions, Iām looking at the text and re-writing better prose.
Iāve ditched Grammarly this week (partly because itās changed itās behaviour on the free page and the browser extension is rubbish so Iām refuse to pay for it). Iām trying some other equivalent tools.
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Well, itās two years later, but an update might be useful.
Iāve been using Grammarly Pro and Autocrit for a year, and ProWritingAid for about 6 months.
I use all three and intend to continue with that practice because each has strengths and weaknesses.
I write in MS Word. Grammarly and Autocrit have Word Plugins, which I much prefer to internet interfaces. Plus, I donāt like writing things that are important in a web browser, itās far less safe than a local program.
Grammarly makes a bunch of good suggestions and quite frequently makes bad ones. Because itās geared towards Modern Standard Business English, it also makes useless suggestions that are often inappropriate for fiction. I define a bad suggestion as one in which it suggests a different way to write a sentence that completely changes (and often reverses) the meaning. It has a good interface for moving through a document to discover all the suggestions itās made. That part is fast. It suffers from re-adding a suggestion I just rejected, which frankly infuriates me. That said, I make a LOT fewer mistakes in my writing because of Grammarly. It not only catches errors, but the repetitive fixing of them teaches me not to make that type of mistake as often.
ProWritingAid has similar issues. I like the granularity of its reports better than Grammarly, but the interface for working thru a document is bad. For the real-time checker, they swear there are ānext and backā buttons to go directly to the next suggestion, but there arenāt. So I find myself paging thru the document to find the suggestions. I have a long book and that is NOT fun. Reports work differently I this regard and itās easy to just go thru the list of issues. However, some reports have multiple sections of issues, with each section being a different type of issue. An example would be Grammar issues vs Spelling issues. I like to fix all of one type of mistake, then go to the next type of mistake. Why? Because my mind is already primed to handle one type of mistake and Iām not wasting mental time and energy doing context switching between different types of errors. But, letās say a word shows up in the spelling section and is ALSO in the grammar section because itās sentence is. Iāll be toodling through the spelling section and get to a word thatās also in a grammar section. The next thing I know, Iām now working in grammar issues and wherever I was in the spelling list of issues is off screen. Frustrating and disorienting. It does seem to understand different types of writing though, because the real-time checker shows different things depending on what genre I tell it Iām writing.
But both these products have real strengths, so I use them both. The do disagree at times with one another over grammar.
Lastly, I use autocrit. Itās not for grammar checking, itās more for writing style. I have to upload my word doc to Autocritās web interface. It provides a lot of really useful reports to help improve my writing. Itās great. Except for making the changes in word, re-uploading it to Autocrit, and re-running the reports. ProWritingAid has a lot of good reports as well. I particularly like the sensory report.
Autocrit and ProWritingAid both have AI components that attempt to evaluate your story and point out potential issues with the story (as opposed to the spelling/grammar). I find ProWritingAidās <4000 word chapter critique pretty easy to read, and it often has useful insights. The 4000 word limit is a pain, as is the limitation of only running it 1 or 3 times per day, depending on your plan. Theyāve recently added a Manuscript Evaluation that can handle up to 150,000 words, but you have to pay for each one you run. Current pricing is $25 to $50. I heartily dislike both limitations. The first is annoying and the latter I consider money-grubbing. I canāt speak for the quality of the full manuscript eval as I havenāt ponied up for it.
Autocrit can handle much larger manuscripts. Iāve done as much as 250,000 words. It will do an overall analysis and also chapter-level analysis. For this purpose, chapters are limited to 10,000 words. And, you can run these as often as you like, itās part of the program. The printed format of the analysis isnāt as nicely laid out as ProWritingAid. Autocritās evals give much more detailed information though I think they need some fine-tuning. (They seem to be driven to find transformational character arcs whether they are there or not.) In addition, you can ask it to analyze your work in terms of several standard beat sheets. You can also ask it to reverse-engineer a list of plot points from your already existing writing. So, if you are a pantser instead of a planner, you can get the benefit of having an outline to review after you finish your draft version.
Hope you find this useful!