I have a habit. I write a sentence, read it back, and immediately think it sounds clunky.
Most writers know this feeling. You know what you mean, but the words on the page do not quite match what is in your head.
Quillbot was built around exactly this problem. It started as a simple paraphrasing tool, the kind that rewrites a sentence so it reads more naturally without losing the original meaning. Since then, it has grown into a much bigger suite of writing tools.
I tested it across the kind of writing both students and working professionals actually deal with. Essay paragraphs that needed rewording. Emails that needed a grammar pass. Long articles that needed summarizing before a meeting.
This review covers what Quillbot actually does, what it costs, and how it compares to Grammarly and Wordtune, the two tools people most often weigh it against.
Let’s get into it.
If you want to test the platform yourself, you can try Quillbot here.
What Is Quillbot?
Quillbot is an AI writing assistant built around a paraphrasing tool, with a full suite of additional writing features layered around it.
It started in 2017, when a college student named Anil Jason set out to build a tool to help English language learners write more clearly. He teamed up with two friends, Rohan Gupta and David Silin, and together they built Quillbot’s first paraphraser. The tool went viral on Reddit the following year, in 2018, and grew from there, eventually becoming the company it is today, now operating under its parent company, Learneo, with Andrew Grauer currently serving as CEO.
At its core, Quillbot still does what it always did. You paste in a sentence or paragraph, and it rewrites that text in a different way while trying to keep the original meaning intact. Think of it as a thesaurus that works on whole sentences instead of single words.
Around that core paraphrasing engine, Quillbot has added a genuinely wide set of tools. A grammar checker. An AI content detector. A plagiarism checker. A summarizer. A translator. A citation generator. An AI chat assistant. And a separate writing workspace called Quillbot Flow, which brings research, note-taking, and writing together in one place.
Where You Can Use Quillbot
Quillbot is built to work wherever you are already writing, not just inside its own website.
There is a Chrome extension, a Microsoft Edge extension, and a Safari extension. Any of the three lets Quillbot follow you into Gmail, Google Docs, and most other text fields in your browser. There is also a Word add-in for people who draft inside Microsoft Word, plus dedicated apps for macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS. An Android and iOS keyboard brings Quillbot’s suggestions directly into your typing on mobile.
This matters in practice. A lot of writing tools only work inside their own editor, which means copying and pasting your text back and forth. Quillbot’s browser extension avoids that entirely, since it can appear right inside the text box you are already using.
Key Features That Actually Matter
Here is a closer look at the tools that make the biggest difference day to day.
The Paraphraser, Still the Core Feature
This is where Quillbot started, and it remains the most distinctive part of the product.
You paste in your text, choose a mode, and Quillbot rewrites it. The free version gives you two modes, Standard and Fluency. Premium unlocks nine built-in modes, including Formal, Academic, Creative, and Shorten, along with the ability to build unlimited custom modes of your own.
One detail worth knowing. On the free plan, you can only paraphrase up to 125 words at a time. Premium removes that limit entirely, which matters a lot if you are working through full paragraphs or entire essays rather than single sentences.
You can also click on any word in the paraphrased text to see a list of synonym suggestions, then swap in the one that best fits your tone.
Grammar Checker
Quillbot’s grammar checker catches the usual spelling, punctuation, and basic grammar mistakes, and on Premium it goes further with more advanced suggestions and tone insights, so you can see whether your writing reads as more formal, casual, confident, or uncertain than you intended.
AI Detector
This tool scans text and estimates how much of it is likely to be AI-generated. Quillbot is upfront that no AI detector is completely reliable, and it reminds you of that whenever you run a scan. The free version is limited, while Premium gives you unlimited use.
Plagiarism Checker
The plagiarism checker compares your writing against a large index of existing web content to flag matches. This is not available at all on the free plan. Premium includes it with a monthly allowance of 25,000 words.
If you are a student, this is one of the more genuinely useful tools in the suite, since it lets you catch accidental overlap with existing sources before a professor or a plagiarism detection tool at your school does.
AI Humanizer
This tool takes text, often AI generated text, and rewrites it to sound more natural and less mechanical. The free plan allows up to 125 words at a time, limited to six uses per day. Premium removes both limits and adds a “humanizer insights” feature that shows your writing’s human score along with a usage history.
Summarizer
Paste in a long article, research paper, or document, and Quillbot will condense it into a shorter summary. The free plan handles up to 1,200 words per input. Premium raises that to 6,000 words and adds the ability to create custom summaries tailored to what you actually need from the text.
Translator
Quillbot can translate text into more than 40 languages, and the paraphraser itself can also work directly in 23 languages, which is useful if English is not your first language and you want suggestions that respect the structure of your original phrasing.
Citation Generator
This tool builds properly formatted citations in APA, MLA, and Chicago style. For students writing research papers, this alone can save a meaningful amount of time compared to formatting citations by hand.
AI Chat and AI Image Generator
Premium also includes an AI chat assistant for brainstorming, drafting, and answering questions, with a daily limit of 20 chats on the free plan and unlimited chats on Premium. There is also an AI image generator, limited to 3 images per day on free and 300 images per month on Premium.
Quillbot Flow
Flow is Quillbot’s more recent addition, a dedicated writing workspace rather than a single tool. It brings together research, note-taking, paraphrasing, summarizing, translation, and plagiarism checking in one workspace, designed to support longer projects like essays and research papers from start to finish.
Quillbot Pricing: What You Actually Pay
Quillbot’s pricing is based on three billing options for one Premium tier, plus a separate plan for teams. Here is what’s confirmed directly from Quillbot’s own pricing page and help center.
Free Plan
- $0, no credit card required
- Paraphrase up to 125 words at a time, in 2 modes (Standard and Fluency)
- Basic grammar error fixes
- AI Humanizer up to 125 words, 6 uses per day
- Basic summaries up to 1,200 words
- Limited AI Detector access
- No plagiarism checker
Premium Plan
Premium is billed three ways: monthly, quarterly, or annually. Quillbot’s help center confirms all three options exist and notes that prices can shift slightly based on your region and local currency at checkout. The clearest confirmed figure, taken directly from Quillbot’s pricing page, is the annual rate.
- $8.33 per month, billed annually
- The annual plan is confirmed at $8.33 per month billed annually. Monthly and quarterly prices may vary slightly by region, so check Quillbot’s pricing page for the latest figures before subscribing.
Premium includes:
- Unlimited paraphrasing, in 9 built-in modes plus unlimited custom modes
- Paraphrase History access
- Paraphrasing in 23 languages, translation in 40+ languages
- Advanced grammar suggestions and tone insights
- Plagiarism checking, up to 25,000 words per month
- Unlimited AI Detector access
- Unlimited AI Humanizer, with human score and full history
- Summaries up to 6,000 words, with custom summary creation
- Unlimited AI chat
- 300 AI-generated images per month
- 100 MB of storage in Quillbot Flow
- Faster processing speed
Team Plan
For two or more people, Quillbot offers a Team plan, confirmed directly from their own pricing page, billed annually per seat:
- 2 to 10 seats: $7.50 per seat per month ($89.95 billed every 12 months per seat)
- 11 to 50 seats: $6.66 per seat per month ($79.95 billed every 12 months per seat)
- 51 or more seats: $5.83 per seat per month ($69.95 billed every 12 months per seat)
Team plans include everything in Premium, plus a user management dashboard, centralized billing, data control, and priority support with account management.
Student Discounts
Quillbot does offer a discounted rate for students. The exact current discounted price was not something I could confirm directly from Quillbot’s own pricing page during this review, so check the student pricing page on Quillbot’s site directly for the live number before subscribing.
How Quillbot Compares to Other Options
Quillbot vs Grammarly
Grammarly is the name most people compare Quillbot against, and the comparison comes down to a difference in starting point.
Grammarly was built first as a grammar and clarity checker. It later expanded into AI writing prompts, tone detection, and plagiarism checking. Quillbot was built first as a paraphrasing tool, and expanded into grammar checking, citations, and the rest of its current suite.
On pricing, Grammarly’s current structure is Free, Pro, and Enterprise. Pro costs $12 per month billed annually, or $30 per month billed monthly. It includes 2,000 AI prompts per month, full grammar suggestions, tone adjustment, full sentence rewrites, and plagiarism and AI detection. Grammarly’s free plan includes 100 AI prompts per month. Enterprise pricing is custom, and it adds single sign-on, audit logs, and other security and admin controls for larger organizations.
Quillbot’s Premium plan, at roughly $8.33 per month billed annually, undercuts Grammarly’s annual price, while leaning harder into paraphrasing depth, with nine distinct rewriting modes plus unlimited custom modes, an area where Grammarly offers fewer built-in options.
Grammarly’s longer track record and broader team security features make it the safer default for catching grammar mistakes across many apps in a large organization. Quillbot’s paraphrasing depth and lower price make it the more natural fit if you mainly need to rework and rephrase your own sentences, especially for essays or content where varied phrasing matters.
Quillbot vs Wordtune
Wordtune, made by AI21 Labs, is a closer match to Quillbot’s original core feature, rewriting sentences to sound better.
According to its own pricing page, Wordtune offers three tiers. Basic is free, with 10 rewrites per day and 3 AI summaries per month. Advanced costs $13.99 per month billed monthly, or $6.99 per month billed annually. It includes 30 rewrites per day and 15 summaries per month. Unlimited costs $19.99 per month billed monthly, or $9.99 per month billed annually. It removes the daily and monthly caps entirely.
The biggest practical difference between the two tools is the free plan. Quillbot’s free plan caps you by word count per paraphrase, at 125 words. Wordtune’s free plan caps you by daily rewrite count, at 10 per day, plus 3 monthly summaries. One of these limits will feel more restrictive depending on how you write. Frequent short rewrites hit Wordtune’s daily cap faster. Less frequent but longer paraphrasing hits Quillbot’s word limit faster instead.
Which One Costs Less
On paid pricing, Wordtune’s Unlimited plan at $9.99 per month annually sits just above Quillbot Premium’s $8.33 per month annually. Wordtune is also narrower in scope. It focuses on rewriting, summarizing, and grammar, without Quillbot’s plagiarism checker, citation generator, or AI image generation.
If you want a tool focused tightly on making sentences sound more natural, Wordtune is worth trying, though it costs slightly more once you compare equivalent annual pricing. If you want one tool that also handles citations, plagiarism checking, and broader writing support, Quillbot’s wider feature set at a lower annual price makes it the better value.
My Take: Who Should Actually Use This
Students writing essays and research papers get the most out of Quillbot’s combination of paraphrasing, plagiarism checking, and citation generation, which genuinely covers most of what an academic writing workflow needs in one place.
Professionals and content writers who frequently rephrase sentences for tone or clarity benefit from the paraphraser’s nine modes and unlimited custom modes, which give more rewriting flexibility than most competing tools offer at a similar price.
Larger teams whose main need is grammar and tone checking across many different apps should compare Grammarly directly against Quillbot before committing, since Grammarly has the longer track record and deeper enterprise security features.
Anyone who only needs a lighter touch, mainly fixing the occasional sentence, and wants the lowest possible paid price should look at Wordtune’s Unlimited plan, with the tradeoff being a narrower feature set than Quillbot offers.
Casual writers who rarely need heavy editing will likely find Quillbot’s free plan genuinely usable on its own, with no expiration and no credit card required.
For the mix of students and working writers this review was written for, Quillbot earns its place as a broad, affordable writing toolkit rather than a single-purpose gimmick.
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Yes. The free plan lets you paraphrase up to 125 words at a time, check basic grammar, and generate basic summaries, with no credit card required and no expiration date.
The clearest confirmed price is $8.33 per month billed annually. Monthly billing is commonly listed at $19.95, though you should confirm the exact current number at checkout.
Yes, but only on Premium and Team plans. It checks up to 25,000 words per month against existing web content.
It depends on your priority. Grammarly leads on grammar and tone checking depth, especially for teams. Quillbot leads on paraphrasing flexibility and price, with nine built-in rewriting modes.
Yes. The paraphraser supports 23 languages, and the translator supports more than 40 languages.
Quillbot does offer student pricing, though the exact current rate should be confirmed on Quillbot’s own student pricing page before subscribing.
Yes, Quillbot has apps for both Android and iOS, including a keyboard that brings suggestions directly into your typing on mobile devices.
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