Writefull vs Grammarly: what's the difference?

Let’s be honest: we get this question quite a lot. And we understand. Both Writefull and Grammarly are language checking tools, and both are popular among students and researchers. So how do they compare? We give you five key differences.

1. Quality

Writefull outperforms Grammarly (its academic ‘mode’ included), in both the number and accuracy of the language suggestions offered. This has been confirmed by six (!) independent analyses carried out by publishers and copy-editing companies over the last year.

2. Focus

Grammarly focuses on fixing general English, such as emails. Writefull’s focus is research writing. As Writefull’s language models have been trained on published papers, they give feedback tailored to academic writing, and are familiar with technical, discipline-specific terms.

3. Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Grammarly relies, to a large extent, on grammar rules. Rules are built to find and replace common errors, like 'researches are > research is'. The good thing about rules is that they are predictable. The downside is that they don’t fix all errors, and fail to perform in long, complex, or broken sentences. As Writefull does not use rules but AI-driven models only, its feedback is more flexible.

4. Features

Both Grammarly and Writefull offer automated language feedback on your text. However, Writefull offers a set of other features too. The Sentence Palette, Language Search, Title Generator, and Paraphraser all use AI and big data to speed up the research writing process.

5. LaTeX / Overleaf

While Grammarly cannot be used in Overleaf, the Writefull for Overleaf extension gives language feedback within your Overleaf LaTeX source, even around the LaTeX syntax.

About the author

Hilde van Zeeland is Chief Applied Linguist at Writefull.