The best proofreading tools in 2026
Nine proofreaders, A to Z. Every one of them catches commas. The question worth asking is what each does about the sentence that is perfectly punctuated and wrong.
Grammar checking is a solved problem and has been for a while. Any tool on this page will find your typos, your subject-verb disagreements and your runaway sentences, and the differences between them at that level are small enough that you would not switch over them.
The differences that matter are elsewhere: how many languages the tool genuinely checks rather than nominally supports, whether it can be run on your own hardware, whether it says anything about whether a claim is true, and whether it reaches the applications your text actually lives in. Listed alphabetically, with the constraint each one answers.
The list below is in alphabetical order, not ranked. aiCat is one of the tools in it, so any ranking we published would be worth what you would expect — instead, every entry says plainly which situation it is the right answer for, and which it is not.
What was actually compared
- Depth on grammar and style, in the languages you write in
- Whether anything checks the claims, not only the commas
- Where the tool can reach: browser, Office, or every application
- Whether it can run without sending text anywhere
- The price of the tier that actually removes the limits
All 9, A to Z
| Tool | Price from | What it is | Languages | Strongest at |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| aiCat | Free · Premium from $6/mo | Every app, OS-wide | Any language the model speaks | One key that proof-reads, translates, explains, detects, dictates and reads aloud |
| Apple Intelligence | Free (supported hardware) | OS-level assistant | Growing, English-first | Built into the OS, with rewriting available in most text fields; On-device processing for most requests, which is a real privacy story |
| Ginger | Free · from ~$14/mo | Grammar checker | English, with translation add-ons | Grammar and spelling correction aimed at English learners; Sentence rephrasing suggestions |
| Grammarly | Free · Pro from ~$12/mo | Writing assistant | English-first | Deep grammar, spelling and clarity checking in English; A browser extension plus Office, Google Docs and desktop surfaces |
| Hemingway Editor | Free · Plus from ~$10/mo | Readability editor | English only | Making prose shorter and plainer, which most prose needs; A readability grade you can actually act on |
| LanguageTool | Free · Premium from ~$5/mo | Grammar checker | 30+, genuinely multilingual | Grammar and style checking across thirty-odd languages, not just English; An open-source core you can self-host, which very few competitors offer |
| ProWritingAid | Free (limited) · from ~$10/mo | Writing analysis suite | English-first | Twenty-plus reports on structure, pacing, echoes and readability; Genuinely useful for book-length manuscripts |
| QuillBot | Free (word-capped) · from ~$10/mo | Paraphraser | Several, English strongest | Named paraphrase modes with a synonym slider you can actually feel; A summariser and a citation generator in the same account |
| Sapling | Free · Pro from ~$25/mo | Business writing assistant | Several, English strongest | Built for customer-facing teams: CRM and helpdesk integrations; Autocomplete and snippet expansion for repeated replies |
The list, A to Z
aiCat
For the mistakes that are not grammatical
Why: It marks each claim supported, unsupported, false or unclear with a source where one exists, in any application and any language, on one key. Free to start, Premium from $6/month.
Watch out: You install it, and it acts when you press a key rather than underlining as you type.
Download for free →Apple Intelligence
For the proofread you did not want to pay for
Why: Free on supported Apple hardware, available in most text fields, and most requests never leave the machine.
Watch out: English-first, recent Apple hardware only, and almost no control over what it does.
How aiCat proof-checks claims →Ginger
For somebody learning the language they are writing in
Why: Correction aimed squarely at English learners, with a trainer that drills the mistakes you keep making and text-to-speech on the corrected text.
Watch out: English is the whole product, coverage is narrower than the leaders, and development has been slower than the field's.
How aiCat proof-checks claims →Grammarly
For English prose, at depth, before you ask
Why: The deepest English style engine here, suggestions that appear while you type, and the only enforceable team style guide on this page.
Watch out: English-first and integration-bound; a terminal or a native IDE is outside it. From about $12/month.
aiCat vs Grammarly →Hemingway Editor
For the draft whose problem is length
Why: A readability grade you can act on and a blunt highlight on passives and adverbs. Free in a browser with nothing to install.
Watch out: English only, one opinion about prose, and you paste into it.
How aiCat proof-checks claims →LanguageTool
For thirty languages, cheaply, or on your own server
Why: Rule-based and deterministic, so the same sentence gets the same correction twice, and the open-source core can be self-hosted so nothing leaves your network. Premium starts from about $5/month.
Watch out: It checks form, not meaning: a grammatical sentence that says the wrong thing passes.
aiCat vs LanguageTool →ProWritingAid
For a manuscript, not a message
Why: Echo, pacing and structure reports across a whole book, with Scrivener and Word integrations and a one-off lifetime licence available.
Watch out: Unusable volume of feedback on a short piece, and English-first.
How aiCat proof-checks claims →QuillBot
For proofreading that turns into rewriting
Why: The grammar pass sits next to paraphrase modes and a summariser, which is the right shape when 'fix this' usually means 'say this differently'.
Watch out: Paste-based, word-capped free tier, Premium from about $10/month.
aiCat vs QuillBot →Sapling
For a team that proofreads customer replies all day
Why: Built around helpdesks and CRMs, with snippets and autocomplete for the replies you send fifty times a week.
Watch out: From about $25/month and shaped for teams; outside the integrations there is much less to it.
How aiCat proof-checks claims →Hands-on notes
First-person impressions from using these, not a benchmark. They are here because everything above this point is a table, and a table cannot tell you which tool you will still be opening in three months.
My complaint about every checker I had used was that they were confident about commas and silent about the sentence that quietly said the wrong number. This one at least tries: claims come back marked, with a link when there is one, and it has caught me twice in a month. Setup was four minutes and one permission, explained in one line. What sold it was not the proofreading — it was that the same key dictates, and that it keeps the context of what I am working on and applies it without being asked. It is an app you install rather than a tab, so if you want an assistant that lives on the machine, that is the shape of it.
Ran the self-hosted server for a month on a box under the desk. Nothing left the network, it was faster than anything cloud-based, and it cost nothing. It also missed every sentence whose problem was meaning, which is not a criticism — it is a rule engine and rules do not know what you meant.
The underline that appears before you ask is worth more than the feature list suggests. I only understood how much when I stopped using it and started having to remember to check.
Ran a 60,000-word draft through it. The reports on echoes and pacing found things no sentence-level tool could — and on a two-line email it is hopeless, which is the honest summary of the whole product.
One of them is a hotkey. Try it on the text you have open
Free to start with 10 aiCatCoins, no card. Premium starts from $6/month. macOS, Windows and Linux.
aiCat pricing at a glance
| Plan | Price | aiCatCoins / month | Max selection | What it unlocks |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 10 | 500 chars | Everything aiCat does, plus free dictation and your own memory |
| Premium | from $6/mo (list $10) | 3 000 | 5 000 chars | Think More, read-aloud, encrypted memory, premium models |
| Team + Offline | from $18/member | 12 000 | 50 000 chars | Edit your memory, MCP access, local models, team sync |
| Enterprise | from $90/member | 150 000 | Unlimited | SSO, audit, best coin rate |
Shortlist of one? Start with the one that costs nothing to try
aiCat's free tier includes every task, 10 aiCatCoins a month, and coins bought outright never expire. macOS, Windows and Linux.
Frequently asked
What is the cheapest good proofreader?
LanguageTool. Its free tier does real work and Premium starts from about $5/month, and it is the only one here you can host yourself.
Does any proofreader check whether what I wrote is true?
Only the model-based ones attempt it. aiCat marks each claim supported, unsupported, false or unclear with a source where one exists. Rule-based checkers such as LanguageTool are not built for that and do not claim to be.
Which works in a code editor or a terminal?
aiCat, because it reads the selection at the operating-system level. Extension- and add-in-based tools stop where their integrations stop.
Which operating systems does aiCat support?
macOS (Apple Silicon and Intel), Windows 10/11, and Linux as AppImage, .deb or .rpm.
Is my text sent anywhere?
Only the text you explicitly act on is sent to the model you selected, for that one request. Your history is stored locally on your device. Team + Offline can run a local model so nothing leaves the machine at all.