A factual Grammarly AI review: The good, the bad, and the business limitations

Grammarly is a widely used application. It has a solid reputation as a digital editor for correcting typos and grammar mistakes in emails, social media posts, and other forms of writing. Since it works on over a million apps and sites, it has become a dependable tool for day-to-day writing.

However, the capabilities of AI have expanded beyond text correction. A key consideration for businesses is whether an AI tool can understand a company's specific context to create original content.

This article provides a breakdown of Grammarly's features, its new pricing, and where it may not meet all the needs of teams that create a high volume of content. We will also look at specialized alternatives, such as the eesel AI blog writer, which is designed for content generation.

What is Grammarly?

At its core, Grammarly is a cloud-based writing assistant that uses AI to check for mistakes in spelling, grammar, punctuation, and clarity. Its main job is to help you write better by giving you suggestions and corrections as you type.

A big reason it's so popular is that it works almost everywhere you might need to write:

• Browser extensions (Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge)
• Desktop applications (Windows, macOS)
• Microsoft Office add-in
• Mobile keyboard (iOS and Android)

Grammarly is used by a wide range of people, from students and solo professionals to big corporate teams. With over 40 million people and 50,000 organizations using it, the goal is pretty simple: help everyone write more clearly and effectively.

Grammarly's core features

Here’s a factual look at each of Grammarly's main features, based on the latest information about its plans and what they can do.

Spelling, grammar, and punctuation checks

This is what Grammarly is known for. It’s effective at finding typos and tricky grammar mistakes that a standard word processor might not catch. The suggestions pop up as you write, so you can fix errors on the fly. This basic function is solid and a step up from built-in spell checkers.

That said, the suggestions can be a bit rigid sometimes. They might not get the nuance needed for creative or very technical writing, where you might bend grammar rules on purpose. You may find yourself ignoring suggestions that are technically right but would change your intended meaning or tone.

Style, tone, and clarity suggestions (Pro plan)

The Pro plan turns Grammarly from an editor into more of a writing coach. It can rewrite entire sentences to make them clearer, less wordy, and more direct. The tone detector is another handy feature for professional emails, as it analyzes your word choice to help you sound confident, polite, or empathetic, depending on what you're going for.

While the tone suggestions are helpful, they are based on broad categories. The "Style Guide" feature, also part of the Pro plan, lets a company set rules for specific terms or formatting. However, it’s more of a checklist than a deep understanding of your brand's voice. It can flag an incorrect product name, but it can’t write in the specific style of your best content.

The plagiarism checker (Pro plan)

For students, writers, and content managers, the plagiarism checker is a useful tool. It adds a layer of security by scanning your text against billions of web pages and academic papers in ProQuest's databases. This helps make sure your work is original and you haven't accidentally plagiarized something.

It's worth remembering that the plagiarism checker isn't perfect. It might miss content that's behind a paywall, in offline databases, or was just published. It's a good safety measure, but you shouldn't rely on it as the only tool for serious academic or legal checks where you need to be 100% certain.

Generative AI assistance

Grammarly’s generative AI features are there to help you get past writer's block. It can write text from a prompt, help you brainstorm ideas, create an outline, or draft a quick email response. This makes Grammarly feel more like a creative partner than just a proofreader.

How many generative AI prompts you get each month depends on your plan:

• Free: 100 prompts per month.
• Pro: 2,000 prompts per member per month.
• Enterprise: Unlimited prompts.

Because it's a general-purpose AI, the text it generates can sound a bit generic. It has not been trained on your specific business information, so its output is not designed for creating detailed, context-aware business content like technical blogs, in-depth support articles, or market analyses. It gives you a starting point, but you'll need to do a lot of editing to make it align with your brand or topic.

It feels almost insulting that they needed a whole 'AI' system to say 'invoke the 5 senses in writing, make the background relevant, and develop a reason to keep readers engaged.'

Reddit

Limitations of Grammarly for business use cases

While Grammarly is a useful tool for individuals, its limitations can become apparent in a business setting, particularly for teams that create content or handle customer support. A general writing assistant may not be sufficient for all specialized business tasks.

Corrects text but does not perform actions

Grammarly is a proofreader, not an automated assistant. It can integrate with tools like Zendesk, but all it does is correct the text an agent is writing. It can make sure a customer email is typo-free, but it can't do things like tag a support ticket, check an order status, or escalate a tough issue. It's a passive tool that improves human output but doesn't lighten the manual workload.

In contrast, an active AI assistant is built to automate entire workflows. A tool like eesel AI connects directly with business systems to do the work for you. It can sort incoming tickets, get rid of spam, and answer common customer questions on its own, which lets human agents focus on more difficult problems.

Enforces brand rules but does not generate deep brand content

The "Style Guide" and "Brand Tones" features in the Pro plan let businesses set rules for words and a general tone. This helps with brand consistency by making sure employees don't use old terms or an off-brand tone. But this is very different from an AI that truly understands and can write in your unique brand voice. A style guide just enforces rules; it doesn't replicate style.

The eesel AI blog writer is made to solve this exact problem. It learns from your website, help articles, and old blog posts to automatically adopt your brand's tone, style, and product knowledge. Instead of just checking for rules, it generates complete, ready-to-publish articles that sound like they came from your team.

It lacks specialized business knowledge

Grammarly is an expert in English, but it does not know anything about your specific business. It has no idea about your company's return policy, product features, or troubleshooting guides. When it generates text, it pulls from general information, not the internal knowledge that makes business content useful and accurate.

A modern business AI needs to have deep knowledge of the company to be useful. eesel AI does this by connecting to all of your company's information sources, like Confluence, Notion, Google Docs, and Slack. This connection allows a tool like the eesel AI blog writer to write accurate, context-aware blog posts that solve real user problems and show off your company's expertise. This visual explains the difference.

Grammarly's pricing structure

Grammarly recently changed its pricing from the old Premium and Business plans to a new three-tier system: Free, Pro, and Enterprise.

• Free Plan

  • Cost: $0.
  • Features: Basic checks for spelling, grammar, and punctuation, plus 100 generative AI prompts a month.
  • Best for: Individuals who need a solid proofreader for everyday writing like emails and social media.

• Pro Plan

  • Cost: $30 per month if you pay monthly, or $144 for the year (which works out to $12 per month).
  • Features: Everything in the Free plan, plus advanced suggestions for style and tone, full-sentence rewrites, a plagiarism checker, a style guide, and 2,000 generative AI prompts a month.
  • Best for: Professionals, students, and small teams who need more advanced writing help and want to keep their brand consistent.

• Enterprise Plan

  • Cost: Custom pricing that depends on the organization's needs.
  • Features: Everything in the Pro plan, plus unlimited generative AI prompts, SAML single sign-on (SSO), advanced security features, and dedicated customer support.
  • Best for: Larger companies that need enterprise-level security, scalability, and admin controls.

Is Grammarly worth it?

Whether Grammarly is worth it really depends on what you need.

For individual users like students, bloggers, and professionals, Grammarly is still a top-notch tool. The free version is a huge improvement over any built-in spell checker, and the Pro plan offers real advantages for anyone serious about making their writing clearer and more stylish. For polishing text written by a human, it's one of the best options out there.

For a detailed breakdown of the premium features and whether they justify the cost, this video review offers a hands-on look at what you get with a paid plan.

This video review offers a hands-on look at what you get with a Grammarly paid plan.

For business teams, especially in content creation or customer support, Grammarly's usefulness is more limited. Because it cannot automate workflows or generate content based on deep business knowledge, it acts as a very good proofreader but not a strategic business tool. Teams trying to scale up their content production or automate support will probably find that Grammarly helps them polish their current work but does not help them create more of it.

If you start offloading parts of your writing to Ai you WILL lose these skills the same way everyone lost the ability to navigate without GPS when they became common place.

Reddit

Alternatives for automated content generation

Grammarly helps users improve their writing. For businesses, a different challenge is generating high-quality, context-aware content at scale.

Tools like the eesel AI blog writer are designed for this purpose. Instead of correcting existing text, it generates complete, publish-ready blog posts from a single keyword. By learning from a company's website and internal documents, it can incorporate business context, include media, and is optimized for SEO. At eesel, we used this tool to increase our blog impressions from 70k to over 750,000 in three months.

If your goal is to generate complete blog posts automatically, you can explore tools like the eesel AI blog writer.