An in-depth overview of Quillbot: Features, pricing, and alternatives

Writing can be a real grind. Whether you're a student trying to start an essay, a marketer crafting the perfect email, or a blogger just trying to make a point, a little help goes a long way. AI writing assistants are everywhere now, all promising to make writing quicker and less painful.

One of the biggest names out there is Quillbot. It’s built to work alongside you to improve text you've already written, acting like a very clever editor. It helps you rephrase sentences, catch grammar mistakes, and generally sound better.

But is it the right tool for every single task? This post will give you a straightforward look at what Quillbot does, who it’s for, and what its limitations are. We'll also explore the difference between a tool that helps you edit and a platform like the eesel AI blog writer, which is designed to create entire, SEO-ready articles from the ground up.

What is Quillbot?

Quillbot is an AI-powered writing platform focused on improving existing text. It's less of a ghostwriter and more of a writing partner. Its main function is to help you paraphrase, check for grammatical errors, and summarize long documents so you can get your message across more effectively.

The company’s philosophy is "AI that writes with you, not for you." It’s not designed to create content from a blank slate but to help you refine your own words until they're polished and professional. It's also quite convenient. You can access it through a web app, mobile apps for iOS and Android, and browser extensions for Chrome and Microsoft Word, so it can easily fit into how you already work.

Understanding Quillbot's core features

Quillbot isn't a single tool, but a collection of eight different AI-powered features packed into one platform. Each one is meant to help with a specific part of the writing process. Let's look at what they are.

Paraphraser tool

This is the heart of Quillbot. The Paraphraser tool is all about rewriting text. You can use it to make your writing clearer, change the tone, or just find another way to say something. It's handy for overcoming writer's block or ensuring your content doesn't sound repetitive.

It offers several modes, but your access depends on your plan:

• Free Modes: You can use Standard and Fluency. These are good for basic rephrasing, but you're limited to 125 words at a time.
• Premium Modes: Upgrading gives you access to a lot more, including Humanizer, Formal, Academic, Simple, Creative, Expand, Shorten, and a Custom mode to create your own rules. Premium users can also paraphrase an unlimited number of words.

Grammar checker and translator

The Grammar Checker does what you'd expect. It reviews your text for grammar, spelling, and punctuation mistakes and offers corrections. It works in over six languages and is free for basic fixes. If you opt for the Premium plan, you get more advanced suggestions for clarity and even tone insights to make sure your message is received as intended.

The Translator is also quite useful, allowing you to translate text into 52 different languages. The free plan has a 5,000-character limit, which is pretty generous, while the Premium plan offers unlimited translations.

Summarizer and citation generator

If you're facing a huge article or report, the Summarizer tool can be a real time-saver. It boils down long texts into their most important points, presenting them as either a paragraph or a simple bullet-point list. Free users can summarize up to 1,200 words, and premium users can handle up to 6,000 words.

The Citation Generator is a great feature, particularly for students. It's a completely free tool that helps you create correctly formatted citations in over 1,000 styles, including APA, MLA, and Chicago. No more worrying about citation rules.

Plagiarism checker and AI content detector

These two tools focus on originality and authenticity. The Plagiarism Checker is a Premium-only feature. It checks your document against billions of online sources to ensure your work is original. Premium subscribers can check up to 25,000 words per month in over 100 languages.

The AI Content Detector, on the other hand, helps you identify AI-written text. This is available on the free plan with some limits, but Premium users get unlimited scans. It's a useful tool in an era where the origin of content isn't always clear.

Who is Quillbot for?

Quillbot is a solid tool, but it's not meant for everyone. It's most effective for people who are already writing and just need some help polishing their final draft.

For students and academics

This is a primary audience for Quillbot. The free Citation Generator is incredibly useful for research papers, and the Grammar Checker helps make sure essays are polished and free of errors. For those who can afford the premium plan, the Plagiarism Checker is a key tool for maintaining academic integrity.

If your writing is messy, repetitive, or just too 'I wrote this at 2 AM,' Quillbot can clean it up pretty nicely. The Grammar and Fluency modes are genuinely useful for tightening sentences without changing the meaning.

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For professionals and marketers

In the business world, clear communication is key. Quillbot helps professionals write sharp, polished emails, reports, and presentations. The Paraphraser's "Formal" mode is well-suited for corporate communication, and the advanced tone insights in the Premium Grammar Checker help you maintain a professional voice. It's perfect for those small pieces of writing that need to be just right.

For content creators and English language learners

For bloggers and social media managers, Quillbot can be a helpful tool for rephrasing content for different platforms or finding a new way to express an idea. For non-native English speakers, it’s a fantastic learning aid. The "Fluency" mode and continuous grammar corrections act like a patient tutor, helping you write more naturally and with greater confidence.

Quillbot pricing plans

Quillbot has a simple pricing structure with two main options: a free plan that gives you a sample of its capabilities, and a premium plan that unlocks everything.

The Free Plan is good for occasional use. You get the basic paraphrasing modes (Standard and Fluency) but are limited to 125 words at a time. You can also summarize up to 1,200 words and use the grammar checker for basic mistakes. You won't have access to the Plagiarism Checker, though.

The Premium Plan is where Quillbot really shines. You get unlimited words in the Paraphraser, access to all 9+ modes, advanced grammar and tone suggestions, and the Plagiarism Checker (up to 25,000 words per month). The official price is $19.95 for the Monthly plan, but the Annual plan is a better value at $8.33 per month, billed as $99.95 once a year.

Here’s a quick comparison:

User perspectives: The pros and cons

So, what does user feedback suggest? The feedback is mostly positive, but a few common points come up repeatedly.

The Positives: Most users love Quillbot as an editing and proofreading assistant. They appreciate how well it catches simple grammar errors, smooths out awkward sentences, and helps them rephrase things to sound more natural. For anyone who finds the final polish challenging, it's considered a big help.

As an editor, it worked really well. The spell check worked like any other spell checker and it was accurate. I did have a sentence in one of the paragraphs that felt clunky, but Quillbot gave a few suggestions that helped me figure out what the issue was, that was causing it to feel that way. Overall, if you view it and use it as a helpful editing tool, I cannot see an issue with it.

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The Negatives: On the other hand, some users find the paraphrasing tool can be a bit simplistic. Instead of truly rewriting a sentence for better clarity, it sometimes just rearranges words, which doesn't always improve the text. Occasionally, it can make the writing sound a bit robotic or even introduce new mistakes. A significant limitation, however, is that it can only work with text that is already written. It can't assist with the heavy lifting of research, brainstorming, or structuring an article from scratch.

I once tried to rely on Quillbot to “fix” my essay, and honestly it just shuffled words around without making the arguments clearer. It felt like patching up a sinking boat with duct tape. The paper still read awkward and I had to redo half of it anyway.

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The limitations of Quillbot for scaling SEO content

This gets to the main limitation of Quillbot, especially for anyone focused on content marketing and SEO. It's a great assistant for refining existing text, but it's not a creator of new, original content. It helps you polish a draft, but it doesn't do any of the important work that comes before that.

For marketing teams trying to increase their organic traffic, this process just doesn't scale. A person still needs to come with the idea, perform keyword research, find stats and sources, create an outline, write the first draft, and then find all the necessary images and media. Quillbot only helps with the final editing step.

This is the key difference between a writing assistant and a true AI content generation platform. One helps you fix what you have; the other does the entire job for you.

An alternative for content generation: eesel AI blog writer

If your goal is to produce quality SEO content consistently and at scale, you need a different kind of tool. This is where the eesel AI blog writer comes in. It's designed to take you from a single keyword to a complete, publish-ready article in minutes.

It manages the entire workflow that Quillbot doesn't. Here’s what sets it apart:

• One-Click Creation: You provide a topic, and it handles the rest. It conducts deep, context-aware research, creates a logical outline, and writes the entire article.
• Automatic Assets: It doesn't just produce text. It automatically generates and embeds AI images, data tables, and infographics directly into the post, saving you hours of work.
• Built-in SEO and AEO: The content is automatically optimized for traditional search engines like Google and the new wave of AI Answer Engines like Google AI Overviews, setting you up to rank.
• Authentic Social Proof: To make the content feel more human and trustworthy, it automatically pulls in real quotes from Reddit threads and embeds relevant YouTube videos.

We used this exact tool to grow our own blog from 700 to 750,000 impressions in just three months by publishing over 1,000 articles. It’s built for growth.

For a closer look at how Quillbot works in practice, check out this helpful video tutorial that walks through its main features.

This video tutorial provides a comprehensive walkthrough of Quillbot's key features and how to use them effectively.

Is Quillbot the right tool for you?

So, should you use Quillbot? The answer really depends on what you need to do.

If you're a student, professional, or writer who just needs a smart assistant to help you proofread, polish, and rephrase text that you've already written, Quillbot is a great choice. It’s one of the best tools available for improving the quality of your writing.

But if you're on a team trying to scale a content marketing program and drive significant organic traffic, Quillbot alone won't be enough. It’s not designed to generate new, complete, and SEO-optimized articles from scratch.

While Quillbot is a fantastic tool for making your writing better, teams serious about growth need a solution that does more than just edit. For those looking to move beyond polishing and start generating complete, media-rich blog posts that are built to rank, you should try eesel AI for free.