An honest Grammarly review 2025: Is it right for you?

If you’ve spent any time writing online, you’ve probably met Grammarly’s little green sidekick. It’s that pop-up that has saved millions of us from embarrassing typos in everything from thesis papers to last-minute emails. It’s everywhere, and let’s be honest, it’s pretty good at its job.

But the AI landscape has changed a ton. We’re past asking "can it fix my typos?" Now, the real question for businesses is, "can this AI actually understand how we work and help us move faster?" While Grammarly is a powerhouse for general writing, a new wave of specialized AI tools has emerged, especially for jobs like customer support, that do a whole lot more than just flag a misplaced comma.

So in this Grammarly review, we’re going to break it all down, the good, the bad, and where it fits in today’s world. We’ll help you decide if it’s still your best bet, or if your team might need something a little more specialized to get things done.

What is Grammarly?

At its heart, Grammarly is your on-the-fly digital editor. It’s a cloud-based assistant powered by AI that checks your writing for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and even things like clarity and tone. Think of it as that eagle-eyed friend who always catches your mistakes before you hit send.

A screenshot of Grammarly's AI writing assistant providing suggestions on an email draft, which is a key topic in many Grammarly reviews.:

The best part? It shows up everywhere you do. Grammarly works across a ton of different platforms, including:

• Browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge

• Desktop apps for Windows and macOS

• An add-in for Microsoft Office

• A mobile keyboard for iOS and Android

It’s built for pretty much everyone, from students to bloggers to corporate teams. The goal is simple: help you write better, wherever you happen to be writing.

A review of Grammarly’s core features

Let’s get into the nitty-gritty. What does Grammarly actually do, and how well does it do it?

Spelling, grammar, and punctuation checks

• Pros: This is Grammarly’s home turf, and it absolutely nails it. It catches all those sneaky little typos and grammatical errors that programs like Microsoft Word or Google Docs tend to miss. The real-time feedback is a lifesaver, letting you fix mistakes on the fly and avoid looking sloppy in important documents.

• Cons: It can be a bit of a stickler for the rules.

  

  As plenty of people have pointed out in online discussions, it sometimes doesn't get the nuance, offering 'fixes' that would completely change what you're trying to say.

  Reddit
  This is especially true if you’re a creative or technical writer who intentionally bends the rules. You’ll find yourself dismissing suggestions that would flatten your voice or alter your meaning.

Style, tone, and clarity suggestions (Premium)

• Pros: This is where the paid version starts to feel less like an editor and more like a writing coach. The suggestions on clarity and conciseness are genuinely helpful for cutting down on wordy sentences. The tone detector is also surprisingly useful for making sure your email sounds confident instead of demanding, or friendly instead of stiff.

• Cons: The advice can feel a bit cookie-cutter. It might suggest swapping one common word for another that’s just as common. More importantly, it can’t learn your specific brand voice. For a business trying to maintain a consistent personality across all customer communication, this is a major drawback. It can tell you if you sound "formal," but it can’t tell you if you sound like your brand.

The plagiarism checker (Premium)

• Pros: This is a fantastic feature for anyone who publishes content online. It’s a must-have for students, content managers hiring writers, and anyone who needs to ensure their work is original. It scans billions of web pages and gives you peace of mind before you hit publish.

• Cons: The plagiarism checker isn’t perfect. Some reviews note that it sometimes misses content from sources behind paywalls or in offline academic journals. It’s a great safety net, but probably shouldn’t be your only tool if you’re dealing with serious academic work.

Generative AI (GrammarlyGo)

• Pros: GrammarlyGo can be a decent starting point when you’re staring at a blinking cursor. It’s helpful for brainstorming a few ideas, creating a quick outline, or drafting a simple reply when you’re not sure where to begin.

A screenshot showing GrammarlyGo's generative AI suggestions within Slack, a feature often discussed in Grammarly reviews.:

• Cons: The AI-generated text can feel a little… clunky. It often sounds like a machine wrote it, because, well, one did. This really gets at the core limitation of a general-purpose AI: it hasn’t been trained on your specific business context, so its output will always be generic. For something as important as answering a customer’s question, you need an AI that learns from your team’s real-world conversations to sound helpful and human.

Grammarly’s limitations for businesses

This brings us to a critical point: a great tool for individual writers isn’t always the right tool for a business team, especially in support. Teams handling customer service or internal help desks have needs that go way beyond cleaning up text.

It corrects text but can’t take action

Here’s the fundamental difference: Grammarly is a proofreader, not a doer. It can polish a support agent’s reply, but it can’t actually do anything for them. It can’t tag a support ticket, check on an order, or escalate an issue to another team.

This is where an active AI assistant comes in. A tool like eesel AI, for example, doesn’t just sit on the sidelines. It plugs directly into your helpdesk, whether you use Zendesk or Freshdesk, and automates entire parts of the job. It can sort incoming tickets, apply the right labels, and even resolve common questions on its own, freeing up your human agents for the tricky stuff.

It offers a generic voice, not a unique brand persona

Like we mentioned, Grammarly deals in generalities. It knows "formal" and "friendly," but it can’t learn the specific way your company talks to customers. It doesn’t pick up on the in-jokes, the empathy phrases your team has perfected, or the unique terminology you use.

In contrast, a purpose-built tool like the AI Agent from eesel AI is designed to soak up your company’s communication style. It learns from all your past support conversations and automatically adopts the right tone and phrasing for your brand. Plus, you can customize its persona with a prompt editor, giving you complete control over how it sounds.

It lacks specialized business knowledge

Think of Grammarly as an expert in the English language, but a complete newbie when it comes to your business. It has no idea what your return policy is or how your latest feature works.

Support teams today need an AI that knows the company inside and out. eesel AI does this by connecting to all your knowledge sources, from help articles and internal wikis in Confluence or Google Docs to product info in e-commerce platforms like Shopify. This allows it to give customers fast and accurate answers that actually solve their problems.

Grammarly pricing

Alright, let’s talk about the price tag. Grammarly keeps its pricing pretty simple, with a few tiers for different needs.

The free plan

• Cost: $0

• Features: The basic checks for spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

• Best for: Anyone who just wants a solid proofreader for day-to-day writing like emails or social media.

The pro plan

• Cost: $30 per month, or $144 for the year (which works out to $12/month).

• Features: Everything from the free plan, plus suggestions on style and tone, sentence rewrites, vocabulary ideas, the plagiarism checker, and 2,000 generative AI prompts a month.

• Best for: Professionals, students, and anyone who writes a lot and wants that extra layer of polish.

The business plan

• Cost: Starts at $15 per person per month (when billed annually).

• Features: Everything in Pro, plus team features like a central style guide, an analytics dashboard, and single sign-on for security.

• Best for: Companies and teams that want to make sure everyone is writing in a consistent, on-brand way.

Is Grammarly worth it?

So, what’s the final word? For individuals, Grammarly is a fantastic tool. If you’re a student staring down a term paper, a blogger trying to sound sharp, or just someone who wants to avoid typos in important emails, it’s a no-brainer. The free version is a huge upgrade from any built-in spell checker, and the Pro plan can seriously level up your writing.

But for teams, especially in customer support, you’ll likely hit a wall. When your job is less about perfecting prose and more about solving problems quickly and efficiently, you need more than just a writing assistant. If your goal is to automate workflows, give customers instant, accurate answers, and have AI work inside your existing tools, Grammarly just isn’t built for that.

That’s where a specialized tool like eesel AI comes into play. It’s not about writing better, it’s about working smarter. While Grammarly helps your team sound good, eesel AI helps them be good at their jobs by automating the repetitive stuff.

From writing better to working smarter

Grammarly absolutely raised the bar for what a writing assistant can do, making us all a little better at communicating. But the problems businesses face today aren’t just about grammar. They’re about speed, accuracy, and giving teams the right information at the right time.

For teams handling customer service or internal support, the work goes way beyond spelling. You need an AI that knows your business cold, works with the tools you already use, and takes repetitive tasks off your plate so your team can focus on what they do best.

Ready to see what an AI built for support teams can actually do? eesel AI connects to your helpdesk and knowledge bases to automate your frontline support. You can be up and running in minutes, not months. Start your free trial today.