Best European Alternatives to Grammarly

Why people leave Grammarly

Nobody leaves Grammarly because the suggestions are bad. In English it is still the most accurate proofreader you can install, and the reason people put up with a browser extension that watches every text box is that it earns its place there.

They leave for two things that happened off-screen. The first is that the company changed its name. In October 2025 it became Superhuman, after buying Coda and Superhuman Mail earlier that year, and grammarly.com/privacy-policy now redirects to a document belonging to Superhuman Platform Inc. of 2261 Market Street, San Francisco. If your supplier register still says Grammarly, Inc., it is describing a counterparty that no longer signs anything.

The second is simpler and harder. There is no European region. Grammarly's own security page states that it hosts data in Amazon Web Services data centres in the US East region, and that is the whole configuration: no Enterprise add-on, no residency toggle, no paid upgrade that moves it. Every other page in this series argues about what an EU region fails to cover. This one has nothing to argue about.

• There is no region to choose The security page names one location, AWS US East, and the support centre repeats that Grammarly data sits on Amazon servers in the United States. Transfers out of the EEA run on the EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses. That is a lawful arrangement and it is also the entire answer: where your text goes is decided by the product, not by you, and no plan changes it.
• The counterparty has a different name now The rename to Superhuman in October 2025 was not cosmetic. Grammarly is now one product inside a suite that also sells mail, calendar, documents and agents, and the legal entity on the privacy policy is Superhuman Platform Inc. A procurement file, a DPA and a records-of-processing entry naming Grammarly, Inc. all need rewriting, and most organisations have not noticed yet.
• It is an English product with other languages attached The Pro plan advertises, in its own words, that you can "write fluently in English". There is no comparable depth in German, French, Dutch or Polish, which is fine for an English-first company and a real problem for a European team writing to customers in four languages. Paying €12 a month per person for coverage of one of them is the arithmetic that starts most of these searches.
• Whether your text trains the models is a setting The privacy policy puts it plainly: you can decide whether your user content is used to train the AI models by adjusting the training controls in your account settings. That is a control, which is better than nothing, and it is not the same as a commitment that the text is never used. The distinction matters when the text in question is a client letter someone pasted into a box without thinking.

What you have to replace, not just match

Grammarly is three products behind one extension, and which of the three you lean on decides where you should go.

The first is the correction engine: spelling, grammar, punctuation and agreement, checked in place wherever you type. The second is the rewrite layer, which takes a sentence you already wrote and gives you a better one at a different level of formality. The third is the enterprise apparatus that sits on top — the shared style guide, the plagiarism and AI detection, data loss prevention, custom roles and the bring-your-own-key encryption that appears on the Enterprise plan.

The two tools here split the first two between them and neither one touches the third. If your organisation bought Grammarly specifically for plagiarism reports or AI-writing detection, this page cannot help you and pretending otherwise would waste your afternoon.

The alternatives compared

How each alternative compares to Grammarly

What actually breaks when you switch

The habit is what breaks first. Grammarly's extension is always on, in every box, in every browser, and the muscle memory of glancing at a red underline takes about three weeks to transfer. Both alternatives have extensions and neither is quite as ubiquitous, so expect a fortnight of people writing in the old tool by accident because it is still installed. Remove it centrally rather than asking politely.

Then the compliance half goes missing. Plagiarism reports, AI-writing detection, the shared style guide, data loss prevention and the Enterprise key management have no equivalent here. Find out who inside the organisation uses those before you cancel, because it is usually one department that nobody consulted and they will notice in the first week of term or the first week of a campaign.

Finally, the account settings themselves. Your personal dictionary, your ignored rules and your tone preferences live inside Grammarly and do not export into anything. Copy the word list by hand while you still have the account open. It takes an hour and it is the difference between a new tool that feels broken and one that feels like the old one.

Grammarly was founded by Ukrainians. Does that not make it European?

It makes the story European and the jurisdiction American, and they are separate facts. Max Lytvyn, Alex Shevchenko and Dmytro Lider founded it in 2009, the Kyiv office is still listed at Gulliver BC on Sportyvna Square, and there are further hubs in Berlin, Porto and Warsaw. None of that is decoration; a lot of the engineering genuinely happens there.

What decides the legal question is who holds the data and under whose law. That is Superhuman Platform Inc., a company at a San Francisco address, storing text in an American AWS region. A US corporation must respond to a lawful US order for data it controls no matter which of its nine offices the engineers sit in.

So if your objection is that an American company can be compelled to produce your drafts, the Ukrainian origin does not soften it. If your objection was only that you wanted to support European engineering, it is a fair point and this page is not the right tool for that decision.

Is LanguageTool actually European?

The software is. The core is LGPL-licensed, the project has been open since 2003, and you can run it as a Java HTTP server on your own hardware with the same rule engine and no text leaving the building. Docker images exist too, though the README points at community-contributed ones rather than an official image.

The hosted service is a different answer. The privacy policy at languagetool.org/legal/privacy names Learneo, Inc. at a San Francisco address as the data controller and appoints an Article 27 GDPR representative in Dublin, which is what a non-EU controller does.

Learneo is the group behind QuillBot, Scribbr, Course Hero and CliffsNotes, and LanguageTool appears on its own site as one of eight brands. Their about page describes the product as made in Europe and the US, which is a fair summary.

The practical consequence: if you are moving off Grammarly because of the US parent, LanguageTool Premium in the cloud swaps a large American company for a smaller one. The self-hosted build is the version that answers the question you asked.

What happens to plagiarism and AI detection?

They go, and there is no replacement on this page. Grammarly Pro includes plagiarism checking and AI-writing detection at €12 a month, which for a university department or a content agency is the reason the subscription exists rather than a bonus attached to the grammar.

Neither LanguageTool nor DeepL Write does either. LanguageTool corrects and rephrases; DeepL Write rewrites. Detection needs a corpus to compare against and a classifier trained for it, and neither company sells one.

If that is your use case, the honest options are to keep a small number of Grammarly seats for the people who need detection and move everyone else, or to buy detection separately. Scribbr, oddly enough, sells that — and it belongs to the same Learneo group as LanguageTool, which is worth knowing before you congratulate yourself on the migration.

Will a European tool actually write better English?

Usually not, and the page will not pretend otherwise. Grammarly has spent fifteen years on English, and on a long English document its suggestions are still more consistent and better explained than anything here. In a straight English-only comparison you are trading quality for jurisdiction.

The trade flips as soon as a second language enters. LanguageTool maintains separate rule sets per language rather than deriving them from English, which is what catches German case agreement and compound formation, or French agreement, where an English-trained model shrugs. DeepL Write runs the same engine as the translator, which DeepL advertises at over 100 languages, though it publishes no separate count for Write.

So the test worth running is not "which is better at English". It is "how much of what my team writes is not in English", and for most European companies the honest answer is between a third and a half.

Which one to pick

If what you want is for confidential text to stop travelling, LanguageTool self-hosted is the only answer on this page, and it is a complete one: LGPL, your own server, nothing leaving the network. Take the free build seriously rather than defaulting to the cloud plan, because the cloud plan is run from San Francisco and does not answer the question you started with.

If you write in several languages and use Grammarly mainly to improve sentences rather than to catch mistakes, DeepL Write is the better fit and DeepL SE is the cleanest European counterparty in this comparison — a German company in a German register, with a documented position on storage and training.

If you need plagiarism reports or AI-writing detection, keep a handful of Grammarly seats for the people who genuinely use them and move everyone else. Splitting the licence is unglamorous and it is cheaper and more honest than pretending a proofreader is a detection product.

And whichever way you go, update the paperwork. The counterparty is Superhuman Platform Inc. now, not Grammarly, Inc., and a data processing agreement naming a company that has changed its name is the kind of thing an auditor finds in five minutes.