LanguageTool

LanguageTool is doing something structurally different from most writing assistants: it treats English as one market among many rather than the whole product. That shows up in the six English variants (US, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa), in core support for German, Spanish, French, Dutch, and Portuguese, and in the fact that more than 30 languages and dialects get checked at all. For bilingual writers, EU-based teams, and anyone producing documents in more than one language, that breadth is the whole reason to pick it over Grammarly. The free editor is genuinely useful rather than a teaser. You get spelling and basic punctuation checking, some style suggestions, a Personal Dictionary, and a statistics panel that tracks languages used, errors made, and suggestions applied. Creating a free account adds a distraction-free editor, secure text storage, and dark/light appearance. Honest limit: paraphrase and the deeper checks sit behind Premium. Where the money goes is the check depth. Premium performs more than 20,000 additional checks for English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, and Portuguese, raises the per-field limit to 150,000 characters, and turns on unlimited AI paraphrasing you can steer toward formal, fluid, simple, or concise. The Style Guide lets you encode your own wording rules — useful for brand voice, technical terms, or house style — and Picky Mode digs into punctuation and typography that most checkers ignore. Teams layer on user management via email invites, a Team Style Guide, and a Team Dictionary for technical vocabulary, at $7.99/user/month billed annually with a two-seat minimum. Business adds GDPR-conform deployment and proofreading API access, priced by sales conversation. On deployment, LanguageTool covers more surfaces than most competitors at this size: browser add-ons across Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari; email add-ons for Gmail, Outlook (beta), Apple Mail, and Thunderbird; office plugins for Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, and LibreOffice; plus native macOS and Windows apps. The browser add-on stores no text on LanguageTool's servers, and the Windows/macOS desktop apps extend checking into apps like Notepad, WordPad, Pages, Mail, Slack, Word, Notes, and Messages. LibreOffice and Apple Pages support in particular is something you will not find from Grammarly. Where it falls short: English tone rewriting is still Grammarly's edge, and the suggestion UX feels less polished. LanguageTool also requires an internet connection, so if you want fully offline checking with no cloud round-trip, this is not the tool. If you write only in English and never paraphrase, the free tier may already cover you, and the paid tier's value drops. But for the specific job of doing accurate multilingual checking with team-level style controls and EU-friendly data handling, the pricing is difficult to beat.