Grammarly now supports Google Docs. Over the course of the last few years, Grammarly has made a name for itself as one of the better grammar and spelling checkers on the market. As a Chrome extension, it neatly integrates with virtually every major online tool and social media site, but until now, Google Docs remained a blind spot.
Because of its real-time collaboration features, the Google Docs editor isn’t just a straight-up text field, after all, so the Grammarly team had to do a bit of extra work to make its service work there. Once you have installed the extension, though, it’ll now work just like in any other web app.
The feature has actually been available as a beta to paying premium users for a little while, but now everybody can give it a try.
It’s interesting to see Grammarly come to Google Docs now. In July, after all, Google announced that it was bringing its own grammar checker to Google Docs, too. Google’s twist here is that it is basically using the same kind of machine learning techniques that power its translation software to check for errors in your documents. My sense is that Grammarly actually offers a more comprehensive set of tools for keeping you from embarrassing yourself with bad grammar (including help with punctuation, for example), but Google’s tool remains in private beta, so I haven’t been able to give it a try yet.
Grammarly’s paid plans start at $29.95 per month, but you get a discount if you pre-pay for three months or a full year (and the company also regularly offers discounts to its free subscribers). There also is a team plan for businesses that starts at $10/month/members (with a minimum of three subscribers).