A complete Quillbot review: Is it the right tool for your writing?

Kenneth Pangan
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Kenneth Pangan

Reviewed by

Katelin Teen

Last edited January 13, 2026

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AI writing assistants are now common, all promising to make our writing faster and sharper. One of the biggest names is Quillbot, a tool known for its paraphrasing abilities. It's built to work with you to polish your text, not write it for you from scratch.

But how effective is it? Is it an essential editor or a sophisticated thesaurus? In this review, we will look at Quillbot’s features, pricing, and user experience, based on facts and user feedback.

While some tools are great for tweaking sentences you've already written, others are built to handle the whole process from start to finish. For example, the eesel AI blog writer can take a single keyword and generate a complete, publish-ready article. It's a different way of working, and we'll touch on when that might be a better fit later on.

What is Quillbot?

Quillbot is an AI-powered writing platform that gives you a set of eight core features to help polish your writing. It’s not about creating content out of thin air; it’s about taking the text you already have and making it better.

A screenshot of the Quillbot landing page, part of a comprehensive Quillbot review.
A screenshot of the Quillbot landing page, part of a comprehensive Quillbot review.

Here’s a quick rundown of its main tools:

Quillbot is popular among students, academics, professionals, and content creators. Its main job is to take existing text that you provide and help you refine it. Think of it as a writing partner that suggests different ways to say what you want to say.

A deep dive into Quillbot’s core features

Let's get into the details of Quillbot's features, see how they perform in real-world use, and point out any limitations you should be aware of.

The paraphrasing tool: Its main attraction

This is Quillbot's most well-known feature. The paraphrasing tool takes your text and rewrites it by changing the sentence structure and swapping words with synonyms. The idea is to make your writing clearer, more stylish, or just different.

You get several modes to choose from, depending on what you need:

  • Free Modes: Standard and Fluency.
  • Premium Modes: Humanizer, Formal, Academic, Simple, Creative, Expand, Shorten, and even a Custom mode you can set up yourself.

Pros: It’s genuinely helpful for getting past writer's block, fixing awkward sentences, or helping non-native English speakers find the right words. It can give you a fresh perspective on your own writing.

Cons: A common complaint is that if you lean on it too heavily, your writing can start to sound robotic. Some users feel that blindly accepting its suggestions can strip your own voice out of the text, leaving it feeling a little generic. It’s a tool that works best when you use your own judgment.

Reddit
I don’t believe any grammar tool is 100% correct. They are a useful aid but you need to know when to accept and when to reject. If you accept every change you’ll end up with an unreadable mess with no soul that doesn’t say what you intend.

Grammar checker and AI detector

Quillbot also has a Grammar Checker that catches spelling, punctuation, and grammar mistakes. It works in a few languages, including English, German, French, and Spanish, which is a nice touch.

Then there's the AI Detector, which is designed to spot text written by AI models like ChatGPT or Gemini. In an age where AI content is common, a tool like this can be useful for checking authenticity.

Limitations:

  • While the Grammar Checker is useful, many users find it's not as powerful as dedicated tools like Grammarly. It’ll catch the obvious mistakes but might miss more subtle errors.
  • AI detectors, in general, can be unreliable. They sometimes flag human-written text as AI-generated (a false positive), which can be frustrating if you’ve spent hours writing something yourself.
    Reddit
    The changes are not always correct, but I see no harm in using it as a tool. That means actually reading and vetting every line of your work, and maybe using it more as a friend sitting next to you that might make the odd good suggestion. Think of it as a slightly (slightly!) better autocorrect. Not a band aid

Plagiarism checker: A premium feature with limitations

Quillbot offers a Plagiarism Checker, but it's only available if you pay for a premium plan. This tool scans your document and compares it against a massive database of web pages and academic papers to help you avoid accidental plagiarism.

A key limitation is that premium users can only scan up to 25,000 words per month.

That might sound like a lot, but if you're a heavy writer, an editor, or a teacher checking student papers, you can burn through that limit pretty quickly. This word cap can be a challenge for users who need to check a high volume of content regularly.

Summarizer, translator, and citation generator

Rounding out the toolkit are a few other handy features.

The Summarizer can take a long article or document and condense it down to the main points. Free users are limited to 1,200 words at a time, while premium users get up to 6,000.

The Translator does what you'd expect, converting text between over 52 languages. It’s useful for quick, on-the-fly translations.

Finally, the Citation Generator is a huge help for students and academics. It can create citations in over 1,000 styles, including APA, MLA, and Chicago, taking the pain out of bibliographies.

These tools are great for students and researchers. However, for most marketers, business bloggers, or professional writers, they’re more of a nice-to-have than something you'd use every day.

Quillbot pricing: Free vs. premium plans

Quillbot has a free plan that’s useful for light work, but to get all the features, you’ll need to upgrade to Premium. To make the differences clear, here's a visual breakdown of what you get with each plan:

An infographic comparing the features of Quillbot's free and premium plans for this Quillbot review.
An infographic comparing the features of Quillbot's free and premium plans for this Quillbot review.

Here’s a clear comparison of what you get with each plan:

FeatureFree AccountPremium Account
Paraphraser WordsUp to 125 words at a timeUnlimited
Paraphraser ModesStandard & Fluency9 unique modes (including Formal, Academic, Humanizer)
Summarizer LimitUp to 1,200 wordsUp to 6,000 words
Plagiarism CheckerNot available✅ (25,000 words/month)
AI DetectorUp to 1,200 wordsUnlimited
TranslatorUp to 5,000 charactersUnlimited
Processing SpeedStandardFaster

Here are the full pricing tiers as of late 2026:

  • Monthly: $19.95 per month
  • Quarterly: $13.31 per month (billed as $39.95 every 3 months)
  • Annual: $8.33 per month (billed as $99.95 annually)

The free plan is solid for quick, occasional edits. If you just need to rephrase a paragraph here and there, it’s perfect. However, the Premium plan's value is debatable for content professionals. The limits on key features, especially the Plagiarism Checker, make it less practical for anyone producing content at a large scale.

eesel AI blog writer: A Quillbot alternative

Quillbot is fantastic for refining text that you've already written. But what if your biggest challenge isn't editing, but actually creating the content in the first place? For that, you need a tool that handles the entire workflow.

That’s where the eesel AI blog writer comes in. It’s an alternative designed specifically for generating complete articles, not just tweaking them.

A screenshot of the eesel AI blog writer dashboard, an alternative discussed in this Quillbot review.
A screenshot of the eesel AI blog writer dashboard, an alternative discussed in this Quillbot review.

The main difference is simple: you don't feed eesel AI text to edit. You give it a single keyword, and it gives you back a complete, SEO-optimized, and media-rich blog post. This is the exact method that helped our own blog grow from 700 to over 750,000 daily impressions in just three months.

Here are a few key things eesel AI does that Quillbot doesn't:

  • Automatic Asset Generation: It creates images, charts, and tables and places them right in the article, saving you the hassle of finding or making visuals.
  • Authentic Social Proof: It automatically pulls in relevant Reddit quotes and YouTube videos to add authority and make your content more engaging.
  • Context-Aware Research: It can scan your website to understand your brand voice, then naturally weave in product mentions that sound authentic, not forced.
  • End-to-End Automation: It takes you from a simple keyword to a publish-ready draft in minutes, which can save you hours of manual research, writing, and formatting.

Final verdict: Is Quillbot worth it?

Quillbot is a solid tool for its intended audience: students, academics, and anyone who needs to quickly polish short pieces of writing. The paraphraser is powerful, and the citation generator is a huge time-saver for academic work.

However, for professional content creators, some limitations are worth considering. It’s fundamentally a text refiner, not a content generator. On top of that, the usage limits on premium features like the Plagiarism Checker can be a significant constraint for anyone working with a high volume of text.

Here's our final recommendation:

  • Use Quillbot if: You're a student working on an essay, a professional who needs to rephrase an email quickly, or someone who wants to improve their writing one sentence at a time.
  • Look for an alternative if: You're a marketer, blogger, or business owner focused on scaling your content production to drive organic traffic. For that, a true content generation tool like the eesel AI blog writer is a much more effective solution.

For a more in-depth look at how Quillbot performs in practice, this video review from Digital Creator Avi walks through its features and evaluates whether it's still a worthwhile investment.

A video providing a detailed Quillbot review, covering its features, pricing, and overall value.

Why not see the difference for yourself? You can try the eesel AI blog writer for free and see what it feels like to go from a keyword to a full article in minutes.

Frequently Asked Questions

It's an excellent tool for students, especially for its paraphrasing, citation generation, and grammar checking features that help polish academic papers.
It depends on the user's needs. The strict limits on features like the Plagiarism Checker (25,000 words/month) make it less practical for high-volume content creators.
Over-relying on the paraphraser can make your writing sound robotic and strip it of your personal voice. It's best used with your own judgment.
Yes, the free plan is quite useful for occasional, light editing, but has significant limitations on word count and available paraphrasing modes compared to the premium version.
While the grammar checker is functional, it's not as comprehensive as [dedicated tools like Grammarly](https://www.eesel.ai/blog/ai-writing-tool-free). It will catch basic errors but may miss more subtle mistakes.

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Kenneth Pangan

Writer and marketer for over ten years, Kenneth Pangan splits his time between history, politics, and art with plenty of interruptions from his dogs demanding attention.