For years, Grammarly has dominated the market for grammar editors. It's one of the best tools that you can get as a writer. However, Microsoft sought the opportunity and released Microsoft Editor as an alternative for Office 365 users.
Grammarly has been the choice of many writers to correct their typos and also for grammar suggestions.
Microsoft Editor, on the other hand, combines their expertise in AI to correct grammar and spelling. In this article, we compare Grammarly and Microsoft Editor to help you decide which is best for your needs.
Grammarly vs. Microsoft Editor: Availability
As a result of being early in the game, Grammarly enjoys a few perks compared to Microsoft Editor.
Grammarly is available on almost every possible platform right now. It’s available on:
- Chromium and Firefox extensions (works on Edge, Chrome, Safari, and other Chromium browsers)
- Web app
- Desktop app
- Add-on for Microsoft Word
- Android and iOS Keyboards
On the other hand, Microsoft Editor is available on a limited range of platforms:
- Chromium extension (works on Edge, Chrome, Safari, and other Chromium browsers)
- Microsoft Word (online and standalone versions)
- Microsoft Outlook
Grammarly has an advantage over Microsoft Editor. This is primarily because Microsoft Editor is limited to only Chromium browsers, Word, and Outlook. Meanwhile, Grammarly works everywhere that you can imagine, and is also integrated well.
While there are other editors with grammar capabilities like the Hemingway Editor, the focus remains on Grammarly and Microsoft Editor nonetheless.
Microsoft Editor vs. Grammarly: Features
Features of Grammarly
When you start with the Grammarly editor, it asks you to set goals that let it assess the type of audience you want to target. These factors include audience type, tone of writing, the formality of the text, your writing domain i.e. Academic, Business, Casual, and more.
You can start using Grammarly as soon as you set the goals, or you can grab any TXT/DOCX file. As soon as you begin typing words, the tool starts analyzing them and divides them into four categories: correctness, clarity, engagement, and delivery. Grammarly also provides synonyms for words when you double-click a particular word.
In addition to that, Grammarly gives you a detailed analysis of your errors along with a suitable correction. This method improves a writer's understanding of grammar and appropriate punctuation.
Furthermore, in terms of language, Grammarly supports British, American, Canadian, and Australian English for now. You can also add new words to your personal dictionary.
Grammarly also features a plagiarism tool that compares articles across the web to determine if your content is copied. If there’s any plagiarism, you’ll see the text highlighted in green along with its source.
Once you are done with the corrections, you can check some stats regarding the document like word count, readability score, reading time, unique words, and rare words.
Features of Microsoft Editor
The Microsoft Editor offers three kinds of corrections: spelling, grammar, and refinements. It also offers differences among these categories. The red-dotted underline points out spell checks, and the blue-dotted underline reveals any underlying grammar corrections and word refinements.
Microsoft Editor doesn’t get any deeper with corrections as Grammarly does. However, it gives you the general rules of grammar errors to fix, which gets rid of uncertainty and makes the words/sentences sound much more confident in terms of tone.
It's worth noting that the Microsoft Editor is available in 20+ languages. The advanced version has something called a “similarity checker” that lets you verify originality against other sources. However, it's not available on the Microsoft Word app, since this feature is only available through an extension.
Grammarly vs. Microsoft Editor: Pricing
With all these features, everything comes down to pricing. If you are looking for something cost-effective, there’s no doubt Microsoft Editor is cheaper among the two. However, they both offer a free version to use the basic features.
Even though Microsoft Editor has a free version, you will still need to buy a Microsoft 365 subscription to gain access to things like language and sentence refinements.
Grammarly gives you basic grammar, spelling, and punctuation corrections as well as tone detection and conciseness checks. When you upgrade to premium, you get additional features like style, readability, and vocabulary checking, as well as more advanced tools for clarity, tone detection, and plagiarism detection.
Grammarly Premium costs $30 per month for one user, or you can pay $144 for an annual subscription. Grammarly’s plan structure consists of Premium, and Business options. The Premium plan is suitable for one user, while the Business plan is good if you have a group of users.
Microsoft Editor is available with the Microsoft 365 plan, which gives you access to the entire Office suite and 1TB of OneDrive storage. All this comes under a flat fee of $6.99 per month, or you can choose to pay an annual fee of $69.99 upfront. While this is for one person, the family plan would cost you $9.99 per month, or an upfront annual fee of $99.99 annually.
Microsoft has committed to providing new features for Microsoft Editor in the future. When comparing the price to value ratio, Microsoft Editor seems to be a better overall package than Grammarly.
Choosing the Best Grammar Tool—Grammarly or Microsoft Editor?
Before you go ahead and subscribe to any of the grammar tools, you should try the free versions of the Microsoft Editor and Grammarly. You can use them in any text editor on the web or in Microsoft Word.
Despite that, choosing between them is a tough job, and completely depends on your use case. If you want a cost-effective option, then you can go ahead with Microsoft Editor. With its Office Suite, proofreading tools, and cloud storage, this service gives you the best price to value ratio. It is much suitable for general writers.
For those looking for the best grammar tool, Grammarly is undoubtedly the top choice. It comes with a lot of features and is suitable for professional or serious writers. However, you will need to pay a higher price for the same.