REVIEWS / AI WRITING / OWNER INSIGHTS
🦉 WE READ 316 OWNER COMMENTS
Grammarly: what owners actually say
Grammarly is praised as essential for non-native speakers and dyslexic writers, but owners increasingly resent its data-harvesting terms, pushy AI rewrites that strip personality, and aggressive advertising.
What owners complain about
- Broad data rights in terms of service COMMON
A paid subscriber read Grammarly's ToS and found a clause granting Grammarly a 'nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable' license to all user content. Multiple Lemmy users call Grammarly 'a keylogger with helpful features' and allege it sold user data long before AI features arrived.
- AI rewrites remove personality and add verbosity SOME
A multi-year user with dyslexia says Grammarly's 'increasing focus on LLMs and its insistence on rewriting sentences in more verbose ways' removes personality from writing. Other HN users echo frustration that AI-assisted tools over-correct and flatten voice.
- Aggressive or intrusive advertising FEW
A ProductHunt user reports Grammarly injects ads that interrupt YouTube playback directly (not standard YouTube ads), calling it 'very very bad adverts.'
- Poor desktop/web UX and reliability SOME
One user had to open grammarly.com each time they wrote, finding it inconvenient. Another reports the desktop app took ~30 minutes to process a paper on a DOD network, then crashed, leaving 'a bad taste.' A third calls it 'not as convenient' as the browser extension.
- Aggressive signup gating during trial FEW
A user complains that when trying Grammarly's homepage demo, as soon as it finds a mistake it throws you into a trial signup instead of letting you freely test the product first.
What owners love
- Essential for non-native English speakers
An ESL user calls Grammarly 'absolutely essential,' noting it helped them maintain correct grammar, punctuation, and spelling even in casual IMs after developing pride in their native-language creative writing.
- Critical accessibility tool for dyslexia
A user with dyslexia relied on Grammarly for spellchecking for 'a few years,' explaining that their condition prevents them from seeing errors even after reading text 10 times.
- Helped achieve academic success
A university subscriber credits Grammarly with helping them get good grades on their dissertation 4 years ago; a 4-year subscriber calls it 'one of the biggest help in my blogging, writing journey.'
- Reliable browser extension for everyday writing
Multiple users call the browser extension a 'must have' for catching 'dumb mistakes' and making 'noticeable grammar improvements on the fly' in emails and business writing.
- Solid free-tier grammar checking
Users say the free version keeps them from making grammatical 'typos' in everyday business writing and fixing 'all my grammatical mistakes' in publications.
Surprising patterns
- Several technically skilled users (including dyslexic writers) have already switched to open-source alternatives like LanguageTool or Harper, not primarily for cost but for privacy and to avoid AI-driven rewrites—they want rule-based checking they can control.
- A paid subscriber explicitly read the terms of use after subscribing and was alarmed enough by the broad license grant to reconsider—suggesting even paying customers may not realize how their writing data can be used.
- Multiple users express a philosophical objection to the product's direction: they liked Grammarly as a grammar linter but feel the AI rewrite features turn it into a tool that homogenizes writing style, with one noting that 'when you do writing as a form of art, rules are meant to be bent or broken.'
WHO SHOULD SKIP IT
Creative writers who value preserving their personal voice, privacy-conscious users uncomfortable with broad data licensing terms, and anyone seeking a lightweight grammar linter without AI-driven sentence rewrites.
Synthesised from 316 real owner comments across 5 platforms. Every point is grounded in the comments — no marketing, no AI guessing. How we do it →