This review article is for if you are interested in learning how to check grammar online or want extra proofreading for text. It’s a nice tool to have for anyone that writes emails on a regular basis. We tested the four top spelling and grammar checkers for English in the Chrome Extension store and present some of their features, in case you are ever looking for a new grammar checking tool or if you are unhappy with your current one and are looking for alternatives to Ginger, Grammarly, Language Tool, or Sapling.
Let’s take a look at the most popular tools on the market!
High Level Breakdown
When looking for a spelling and grammar checker, you’ll need to consider the following key features:
- Price. Some apps offer premium features, but most also have a usable free version
- Spelling and Grammar Coverage. You want to make sure that the app catches as many of your mistakes as possible.
- Suggestion quality. It can be annoying to constantly reject bad suggestions.
- Ease of use. Proofreading text shouldn’t be complicated. The best tool should be simple to learn and use.
Ginger https://www.gingersoftware.com/
Ginger corrects all types of grammatical mistakes including punctuation, sentence structure, and style. In our testing of Ginger the applied edits broke down after a couple of paragraphs, so we cannot recommend this extension for checking long-form text such as essays. This can be partially reflected in the chrome store reviews, Ginger has less than a 4 of 5 vs Grammarly, Language Tool and Sapling that have 4.5+ of 5.
Grammarly https://www.grammarly.com/
Grammarly is the most recognized grammar checker and AI-powered writing assistant with the biggest user base. 20 million people use Grammarly to improve their writing, and it has 34,000+ Chrome store reviews. Grammarly helps you eliminate errors and find the perfect words to express yourself.
Grammarly also has a tone detector, in beta, that will classify your text based on a variety of different tones. In our opinion, the tone detector is interesting but there are too many different tones. Most users probably only care about a formal-informal axis and maybe a polite-impolite axis.
Language Tool https://languagetool.org/
The rules engine that powers Language Tool is an open-sourced rules-based grammar checker. For the most privacy-conscious people, this is probably the best tool available because you can run your own local instance of the grammar checker if you really wanted. It also has the cheapest premium offering for people who don’t want to manage their own hosting. Language Tool also supports more than 25 languages if you need grammar checking in a different language.
Sapling https://sapling.ai/
Sapling claims to be an AI powered grammar checker that catches 60% more language quality issues than other spelling and grammar checkers using a machine learning system trained on millions of English sentences. Depending on the benchmark or the test certain grammar checkers will do better than the others, so we recommend you try it out to form your own opinion. In our experience it misses some spelling mistakes but it is still very good at catching overlooked issues. For people interested in boosting productivity, Sapling comes with keyboard shortcuts to accept edits. Their UI is also the most minimalist, with the suggestions popup being small as well as the corner badge.
Conclusion
We recommend checking out Language Tool if you need grammar checks in multiple languages, Grammarly if you need a tone detector or Sapling if you want the best productivity boost from keeping your fingers on the keyboard with it’s keyboard shortcuts. Ginger can be used as a backup grammar checker, but it’s UI issues make it not as reliable as the other three. We’ve included screenshots of all four applications and their UI on randomly generated pieces of text to show readers the expected behavior. Outside of Chrome, Grammarly, Language Tool and Sapling also have integrations for Firefox and Edge browsers.