Instead of Grammarly
The free Grammarly alternative is LanguageTool — but the rules changed in December
LanguageTool has been the honest answer to “free Grammarly alternative” for years. Then in December 2025 the company put its browser extension behind a paid plan and roughly six million free users lost it overnight. The good news is that the engine itself is still open source and still free — and running your own copy gives you the extension back, removes every limit, and stops your writing leaving your computer.
Short answer
Use LanguageTool, running on your own machine. The hosted free tier is now crippled; the self-hosted version is unlimited, offline, and costs nothing.
Get LanguageTool — free, from the official site
We don't host this yet, so the button goes straight to the project's own download page. The setup steps below are the part most people get stuck on.
What actually changed, and which parts are still free
Almost every “best free Grammarly alternative” article still recommends installing the LanguageTool browser extension and stopping there. That advice is now out of date, and it is the single reason people arrive at this page confused.
There are four different ways to use LanguageTool and they are not equally free:
- The website — free, but capped at 10,000 characters per check, and your text is sent to their servers.
- The browser extension — paid only since December 2025. This is the one that broke. Six million people were using it free the day before.
- The desktop app and the LibreOffice extension — still free, still offline. Good for documents, useless for writing in Gmail.
- Your own LanguageTool server — completely free, no limits, nothing leaves your machine, and the browser extension will happily talk to it instead of theirs.
That last option is the one nobody explains, and it is the whole point of this page. The LanguageTool engine is licensed under LGPL-2.1. That cannot be revoked. Version 6.8 was updated on 28 August 2026, one day before this page was written, so this is not a stale fork — it is the same software the company sells, run by you instead of by them.
None of this is a scandal, incidentally. LanguageTool is a small European company that has to pay salaries, and they still publish the engine openly, which is more than Grammarly has ever done. It just means the free path now takes twenty minutes instead of two.
What you gain, and what you actually give up
Grammarly Premium against both versions of LanguageTool. Note the last two rows — they are the ones the comparison articles skip, and they cut in opposite directions.
| Grammarly Premium | LanguageTool self-hosted | LanguageTool free web | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grammar & spelling | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Style & clarity suggestions | Yes | YesBetter with n-gram data | PartlyReduced rule set |
| Works in Gmail, Docs, the browser | Yes | YesExtension pointed at your server | NoPaid plan only since Dec 2025 |
| Works in LibreOffice / Word | PartlyWord only | YesFree LibreOffice extension | No |
| Text length limit | NoUnlimited | NoUnlimited | Yes10,000 characters per check |
| Your writing stays on your computer | NoSent to Grammarly | YesNever leaves the machine | NoSent to their servers |
| Languages supported | NoEnglish only | Yes30+ languages | Yes30+ languages |
| AI rewriting & tone adjustment | YesGenuinely ahead, no free equal | NoNot what it does | No |
| Price | No~$144/year billed annually | YesFree, LGPL-2.1 | YesFree, limited |
Don't switch if any of these is true
We sell nothing and take no affiliate money, so here is the part the comparison sites leave out. Four cases where LanguageTool is the wrong answer:
- You use Grammarly to rewrite sentences, not just correct them. Grammarly's generative rewriting and tone adjustment are genuinely good and LanguageTool does not attempt them. It finds errors and suggests style fixes; it will not rephrase your paragraph to sound more confident. Nothing free replaces this well.
- You want zero setup. The desktop app is a normal two-minute install, but getting the browser extension working free means running a small server on your own machine. It is about twenty minutes and it involves installing Java. That is a real cost and you should know it before you start.
- You need it on a phone or tablet. A self-hosted server on your laptop is not reachable from your phone in any convenient way. If mobile writing is where you actually need help, this does not solve it.
- You write only in English and want the strongest possible checker. Grammarly is more aggressive at catching awkward English phrasing. LanguageTool's advantage is breadth — 30+ languages — not depth in English alone.
If you mainly want your spelling, grammar and obvious style problems caught, without a subscription and without your drafts being uploaded anywhere, self-hosted LanguageTool does that permanently and for nothing.
Getting the free version working
Two routes. Do step 1 and stop there if you only write in documents; carry on to step 3 if you want checking inside Gmail, Google Docs and everywhere else in your browser.
Easy route — install the desktop app
Download the desktop app from
languagetool.organd install it normally. It works offline and covers documents. Take it from the official site only — LanguageTool is heavily mirrored by download portals that wrap installers in adware, and several rank on the first page of Google for its name. If you use LibreOffice, install the LanguageTool extension from the official extensions site too; it is free and stayed free.Install Java 17 or newer
Only needed for the browser-extension route. LanguageTool's server is a Java program, so you need a Java runtime of version 17 or above. Any current OpenJDK build works — Adoptium's Temurin is the usual choice and is free. This is the step that stops most people, and it is the one our installer will eventually remove entirely.
Download the standalone server and start it
Get the standalone
.zipfrom languagetool.org, unzip it anywhere, and start the server from that folder withjava -cp languagetool-server.jar org.languagetool.server.HTTPServer --port 8081 --allow-origin. Leave the window open — it prints the port it is listening on when it starts. That is your whole server.Point the browser extension at your own server
Install the LanguageTool extension for your browser, open its settings, find the advanced or experimental section, and change the API server URL to
http://localhost:8081/v2. The extension now checks against your machine rather than theirs — no account, no subscription prompt, no length limit, and your text never leaves the computer.Optional — add the n-gram data for better suggestions
LanguageTool catches confused words far better (their/there, then/than in context) when given a statistical language model. The English n-gram set is a large download — around 8 GB — and you point the server at it with a config file. Entirely optional. Skip it on a laptop with a small SSD; add it later if you find the checking too permissive.
LanguageTool vs Grammarly: the honest split
These two are not really competing for the same job any more, which is why “which is better” gets such mushy answers elsewhere.
Grammarly is a writing assistant. It rewrites, adjusts tone, and increasingly wants to draft for you. It is English-only, it is expensive, and every word you type goes to its servers. If rewriting is what you are paying for, it is genuinely good at it and LanguageTool is not a replacement.
LanguageTool is a proofreader. It finds mistakes and flags clumsy style, in more than thirty languages, and it can run entirely on your own machine. It will not make you sound different; it will stop you publishing a typo. For most people — and for anyone writing in a language other than English — that is what they were actually paying Grammarly for.
The privacy difference is the one worth thinking about hardest. A self-hosted LanguageTool is the only option here where your unpublished drafts, client emails and half-finished ideas never leave your laptop at all.
Questions people actually ask
Is LanguageTool still free in 2026?
The engine is, permanently. The convenience is not.
Since December 2025 the browser extension requires a paid plan, and the free website caps each check at 10,000 characters. But LanguageTool's core is released under the LGPL-2.1 licence, which cannot be retroactively withdrawn, and the desktop app and LibreOffice extension remain free.
Run the server yourself and everything is free and unlimited again, including the browser extension — it simply talks to your machine instead of theirs.
Is there a Grammarly alternative that doesn't use AI?
Yes, and LanguageTool is largely it.
LanguageTool is built primarily on linguistic rules and dictionaries rather than a generative model. It tells you that something is wrong and why, instead of silently rewriting your sentence into something blander. Nothing you type is used to train a model, and when self-hosted nothing you type is transmitted anywhere at all.
If you specifically want a checker that corrects rather than composes, this is the one to use.
Does LanguageTool work in LibreOffice and Microsoft Word?
LibreOffice, yes and free — install the official LanguageTool extension from the LibreOffice extensions site. It works offline and was not affected by the December 2025 change.
Microsoft Word is weaker. There is an add-in, but the integration is less mature than the LibreOffice one and the smooth Word experience is a paid feature. If Word is your main writing surface, the desktop app alongside it is the more reliable free route.
Does my text get sent to a server?
It depends entirely on which version you use, and this is the most important thing on this page.
The website and the standard browser extension send your text to LanguageTool's servers in Germany. The company states it does not store the text or your IP address, and it is bound by GDPR — which is a considerably better position than most competitors.
Self-host it, though, and the question stops mattering. Nothing is transmitted. You can disconnect from the internet entirely and it keeps working.
Do I need to be technical to self-host this?
Not really, but you do need to be willing to run one command and leave a window open.
The steps are: install Java, unzip a folder, run one line, change one setting in the browser extension. There is no configuration file to edit and nothing to compile. If you have ever installed anything from a .zip, you can do this in about twenty minutes.
If that still sounds like too much, use the desktop app instead. It is a normal installer and needs none of the above — you just don't get browser checking.
How many languages does it actually support?
More than thirty, including English (British, American, Australian, Canadian and more as separate variants), German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Italian, Ukrainian and Catalan.
Quality varies by language — German and English are the strongest, since the project started as a German tool. This breadth is LanguageTool's clearest advantage over Grammarly, which handles English only.