ProwritingAid Review
When I began the publishing process for my first book, The Nehemiah Factors: Your Pathway To Godly Effective Leadership, I used Microsoft Word for the writing process, then discovered that Scrivener would be a much more efficient platform for writing long-form. Up to that point, I had been using the premium version of Grammarly, and I really loved it. After purchasing the license for Scrivener, however, I soon discovered that Scrivener doesn’t integrate with Grammarly. This began my quest for searching out other options.
As a small non-profit, I soon discovered that Grammarly’s annual subscription could be quite steep. However, when my subscription was due for renewal, I learned that ProwritingAid is Scrivener-friendly and offers a lifetime license. So, I decided to give it a whirl and compare it with Grammarly before deciding on my next course of action. Here are my findings:
Both products have many great strengths, but when determining what could potentially work best for me, I had to measure; Accuracy, feature richness, integrability, ease of use, and cost.
Accuracy:
As an author, it is of the utmost importance that the editing piece of the writing process is excellent. Before sending my manuscripts over to editors, I want to ensure that my document is as clean as I can possibly make it. With my book, I even ran the manuscript through Grammarly after the final proof to ensure that there was no stone left unturned. While I wouldn’t say that Grammarly is 100% accurate, I would say that its suggestions were at least 75% on target. I also took advantage of Grammarly’s paraphrasing feature at least 70% of the time.
ProwritingAid, on the other hand, was only about 60% accurate and didn’t offer as many suggestions in the grammar department. ProwritingAid doesn’t have a paraphrasing tool to offer. If I want to use such a service, I would have to look elsewhere, like Quillbot. The problem with that is that I’m not always sure when there is a need to rephrase a sentence.
Feature Richness:
Both products come with robust features. Grammarly outshines Prowriting aid with the plagiarism feature unlimited and comes with their premium version. As a non-fiction writer, this is of great importance. Conversely, ProwritingAid’s plagiarism feature is limited to only 60 checks/year. Anything beyond that will cost you anywhere from $10 to $200/year. And the highest rate only includes 1,000 checks. So that’s another big downside for ProwritingAid. So again, I would have to find another external plagiarism checker and risk assuming more costs on the back end.
Another feature that ProwritingAid offers is a robust scoring system with around 19 reports that can point you to the types of issues it has discovered. I love this feature because I can quickly become bored with editing when going from one issue to the next.
Integrability:
This is where ProwritingAid shines in my view. While it doesn’t work across all devices as Grammarly does, I don’t want it on anything except my computer. Grammarly caused me more headaches on my phone than advantages, so I soon removed it. Both ProwritingAid integrates with Word, Google Docs, and Chrome. But, since I started using Scrivener for almost all of my writing, it was vital for me to have something that integrated with Scrivener. When I started using Scrivener, I would have to export into Word just to run my grammar check. Afterward, I was stuck making all my revisions via Word since much of the formatting was lost in the transfer.
ProwritingAid works with Scrivener quite well. The only caveat is that once you have written in Scrivener, you will have to open your Scrivener file in the desktop ProwritingAid App. Once you’ve run your various checks and saved the file, you have full access to the updated file in Scrivener. While I thought that would be a headache, it has worked out in my favor. While writing in Scrivener, I can focus purely on writing instead of getting bogged down with editing suggestions that can disrupt the writing flow.
Ease-Of-Use
Both were equally easy to use. I never used Grammarly’s app because it integrates with Word and Chrome so well. The integrated interfaces were more pleasing and didn’t take too much space. ProwritingAid’s app is OK-looking but very easy to navigate. I don’t place much importance on looks unless it hinders functionality, so I can’t say that I have any preferences there.
Cost:
The last is certainly not the least, and I may argue, could well be the greatest in my case. Since I tend to purchase subscriptions annually, I’ll only quote annual rates. To renew my Grammarly plan, I’ll have to pay $144 instead of only $89 for Prowritingaid. What’s more, ProwritingAid has a lifetime license you can purchase. I considered buying it last year, and it would have only cost around $179.00 less than six months ago due to budget constraints. I decided to wait until my Grammarly subscription expired. However, when I considered purchasing it, the price more than doubled. I’m not sure if the original price advertised was a special promotion, but I didn’t see that noted anywhere. Personally, I feel that a more than doubled price increase is akin to gouging. For that reason, I’ve elected to forgo purchasing the lifetime license. That has been my greatest frustration concerning ProwritingAid. To be able to buy a lifetime license at that price point would have been a dream come true. Now, it’s turned into a true nightmare.
Conclusion:
Based on the original price point for ProwritingAid, I could have easily justified purchasing the lifetime license and either coupled it with a separate plagiarism checker. But unfortunately, with the extreme price increase, I would not be a good financial steward by purchasing what could undoubtedly be the best deal. So, now I’ll return to the drawing board. Prayerfully, ProwritingAid will consider enhancing some of its deficiencies to justify such a steep price increase.