GrammarlyReviews 3,489

PROS:
-Reliable
-Suggestions and corrections very helpful
-Desktop app great
-Like Correct with assistant

CONS:
-Not flexible when it comes to membership plans
-Premium too expensive
-Premium eventually comes to a bunch of synonyms
-Plagiarism tool not reliable
-Not Linux/LibreOffice friendly

I realize it's in the fine print but Grammarly will charge your credit card at the time of renewal automatically without even having the courtesy of sending a single email reminder. I thought maybe I missed the email so I went back to check and I have over 100 emails from them mostly from Grammarly Insights but not a single email reminder that my account was about to expire and that they would auto-renew in March. And not a follow-up email with the receipt of payment either. You have to log in and download the PDF. They email just about every day about stuff except when it comes to billing and auto-renewal. They keep very quiet on that front so you forget. And if like me, you don't check until 5 months later and cancel they will not issue a prorated refund. Again, it's in the small print. Stay vigilant with Grammarly. You snooze they charge. Lesson learned.

Let me start with their tricky way to have you purchase their product. While they display 3 steps during the time of purchasing their product, it does not take you through every step. Their page makes you type in your credit card for step 1, and then you automatically purchase it. While thinking that you will go to step 2 to pick your package, and then to step 3 to confirm payment. Nope! Not with Grammarly! Furthermore, I purchased the membership for $30 for premium service and then I paid $32 to have what I thought was a human proofreader. The service was quick to get me my proofread paper back, but I would get back an absolute disaster of a service. It destroyed my paper and made my paper make zero sense! So I wanted my money back and to be done with this service. I emailed them a request for my money back, and they denied me a refund! So after having their service for less than 24 hours, and getting the worst service on a proofreader. Im currently out $65 in the matter of 24 hours for this horrible service. If anyone knows what I can do to get my money back, and to make more people aware about this service, PLEASE let me know! One last thing to new readers... STAY AWAY from Grammarly!

It's about as useful as the autocorrect feature on my phone. Just use Microsoft Office Word or pretty much any free word processor and you'll have better spelling and grammar checking.

On their website it says '4.5-star rating with over 20,000 reviews' which a quick google search will reveal, is not true. Not even close.

Other than that, I was worried about how they make money on a free product. Skimming their privacy policy, terms of agreement and a google search revealed that they sell the data they mine from everything you type, including confidential and/or private information (!!!)

Fortunately, their software is stable enough for everyday use. But it's not like it's going to help you much.

For me, "Free" Grammarly is a Big Scam. What do you get with "free" Grammarly? A very limited version of Grammarly, if you really want to have all the "benefits" of Grammarly, you got a pay and pay a LOT for a yearly subscription.
So that's the catch. For over a year I've seen the "Free" Grammarly, but it always sounds like a scam. But I decided to try out, and that's it, there's no such a thing as free if you really want to have what they promise to you on their promotional videos, but rather is a "Premium" subscription with a Premium price.

Nope. Grammarly insisted on adding unnecessary commas without considering the length of the phrase. It also misunderstood words that were a clear typo for nouns that needed be capitalized. I confess that I was using the free account, but if this is the level of corrections and insights Grammarly offers, then I'm not interested. It is not for the good writers that want to be great, it's for the not-so-good who want to be good. Not my cup of tea. And I'm not even a native.

For the record, I would say I'm pretty interested in writing whether it would be an original novel or fanfiction. At that time, I was preparing quick drafts for my new story. I was listing my character's personality traits and I used impatient, an abjective which means you're not calm and patient. Grammarly thought I might have confused the words and recommended inpatient, a noun which means a patient staying in a hospital. I was sure I did no wrong so I chose to ignore it. However, Grammarly kept on pointing it as a mistake 'till it grew annoying.

That wasn't the first time Grammarly was the one mistaken. In the same drafts, I wrote something along the lines of "a popular game series those who don't know of are literally lynched by the fandom" and Grammary told me to replace "are" with "being". Now, I'm sure I was right here. My sentence used passive grammar, like "flowers were watered" or "the game was played". In my sentence, "a popular game series" was the noun while "those who don't know of are literally lynched" was describing the noun. There, "those who don't know of" was the subject in a passive sentence (object in an active one) and "are literally lynched" was its continual. I can rewrite it in active as "an ambiguous subject lynch those who don't know of".

Even while writing this review, Grammarly insisted that my accurately used "its" and "in active" should be replaced with "it's/it is" and "inactive/in action".

Now, I'm not saying I should never disagree with Grammarly but the way the ignore option doesn't work and Grammarly returns insisting that I'm wrong is annoying. I hope the staff works on it. Actually, Grammarly isn't that bad at acknowledging we're right. There's your personal dictionary, I used it for the word gallow which means stage for execution by hanging and a Japanese name Saihara which Grammarly tried to fix as Sahara. I just want the ignore option to improve like the personal dictionary is too.

Other than that, Grammarly really helps me with the grammar mistakes I did out of distraction or when I type something wrong with the keyboard.

I don't have the premium service so no comment about it.

Quoted
"
To expensive and when you do end up paying for it, and using the correction it suggests. It ruin your paper, grammar and logic wise. Also if you don't cancel on time before the date to pay for it, they do not give refunds back not even if you miss a day for cancelling it. I repeat DO NOT GET IT. A waste of time and Grammarly did not help me with my writing tech paper at all."

It isn't worth $80aud and if you have basic writing skills it will hardly help you.

I am a former English teacher in the middle of a career change. When I first downloaded Grammarly, I noticed that the program slowed down my computer because it's always running in the background and I am a fast typer. Basically, Grammarly can't keep up with my typing speed so it creates lag on my computer. This lag causes letters that I type not to be recognized, and Grammarly gets to claim you made a spelling mistake. Also, if you go back and insert words and phrases into previously written lines (like most people do), Grammarly's software struggles to keep up with what you're doing. While the software tries to underline the mistake, it slows down your computer and creates more spelling errors by combining words.

Anyway, I didn't pay much attention to all this until I started applying for jobs. Not only did Grammarly create a spelling error (the word additionally), the software did not recognize the word was spelled incorrectly AND I SUBMITTED THE COVER LETTER.

You want to know how I realized Grammarly didn't pick up the spelling error? I reused the same cover letter on another application, but this time, Grammarly recognized the mistake.

It's one thing for this bulky software to slow down my computer's ability to keep up with my typing speed -its another for this scam of a service to fail to pick up on spelling errors -especially when you're submitting cover letters!

I am going to delete this software as soon as I submit this review. It is too inconsistent. Also, the program creates the majority of spelling errors it catches because it slows down your computer and keystrokes aren't recognized -hope that makes sense.

I guess the software would have caught the spelling mistake if I had paid for the premium version? This is a scam.

At first, I thought I was scammed because I was looking at the plans it provides. I only wanted to use it for one month, and I saw $11/month and decided to get it. When I went into my account to cancel any future payments, it said I would be recharged in 2019, so I immediately checked my bank account only to see they charged me over $100. After reviewing the plans, they put in much smaller text underneath "will be charged as $XXX amount." On top of that, it doesn't even find all of the mistakes made, and also makes suggestions that don't make sense (it just told me the word "account" I used was too repetitive, and to replace it with "mind").

Also, I understand not being able to work on certain programs, but not being able to work on Google Docs? Where so many people write every day!?