Grammarly: our review

Grammarly corrects a text where it's written: in a browser, in Word, in an email client. It doesn't ask you to open a separate tab to paste a paragraph and wait for a verdict, which explains its presence in nearly every English-speaking office toolkit for the past fifteen years.

What it actually does

The extension installs once and then underlines mistakes in red (spelling, basic grammar) and, on paid plans, in blue (clarity, tone, fluency) in any text field. A client writing an email in Gmail or a proposal in Word sees suggestions appear without switching tools. The checker goes further than isolated errors: it offers to rephrase a whole sentence for a more direct or more formal tone depending on the chosen recipient.

Why it interests us, and where it gets complicated for French

Grammarly was long a strictly English-language tool. Since September 2025, the vendor has extended its advanced features — blue underlines and paragraph-level rewriting — to five additional languages, including French. That's a real change, not to be waved away, since it widens the possible use for a French SME. But the engine is still trained primarily on English, and it shows: independent tests run on French text find gender-agreement errors and register confusions (the informal "tu" versus the formal "vous") that the tool doesn't make in its native language. For an internal memo in English addressed to an international partner, Grammarly delivers on its promise. For a client letter in French, a checker built for that language from day one is a better choice — see our page on correction tools for the legal sector, where getting the register right matters as much as spelling.

What happens to the text you send

This is the question a business owner should ask before installing the extension on every computer. On a free or individual Pro account — the most common case for a small business — the setting that allows Grammarly to use the entered text to train its models is on by default. You have to go and turn it off yourself in the privacy settings. On a Business or Enterprise account bought through the sales team, that same setting is off by default — the exact opposite of the individual behavior. An SME that signs up for a self-service Pro account without checking this setting therefore lets, by default, contracts and client letters feed the model's improvement. This setting deserves the same care as a standard compliance audit — see our AI audit and advisory page for the method we apply for a client before rolling out a tool of this kind.

Where it falls short

Three reservations, beyond French. First, team pricing is no longer published: beyond the Pro plan at €12/month, everything goes through a sales quote, which makes it impossible to compare a cost in advance. Second, the vendor doesn't publish a named list of subprocessors, only a generic data processing addendum. Finally, Grammarly's parent company has been called Superhuman since October 2025, following the acquisition of the email client of the same name: the correction product keeps its name, but it becomes part of a wider productivity suite, driven by a cross-cutting AI assistant. Nothing indicates the product's data policy is changing overnight, but a governance structure reorienting toward a whole different project deserves watching.

Our recommendation

Grammarly is convincing for a team that writes mainly in English and wants a checker present everywhere without switching tools. For use that's mostly in French, correction quality still lags, and a poorly configured individual account leaves the entered text training the model by default. Check this setting before rolling out the extension across a team. The Pro plan is enough for individual use; see our page on free-tier AI tools to compare other tools in the same situation before paying.