Duden-Mentor vs GoldenDict

Duden-Mentor checks German text for spelling, grammar, punctuation, and style, then suggests corrections. It can flag filler words, repeated wording, and overly long sentences, with suggestions for readability. The service supports German variants for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, but checks German only. Browser extensions are available for Chrome, Firefox, and Microsoft Edge, and the plug-in works in text fields on services including Gmail, Web.de, GMX.de, Trello, Facebook, and WordPress. A Microsoft Word add-in supports macOS from Word 2016 and Windows from Word 2019. An internet connection is required. Duden says text is encrypted in transit, not used for AI training, and deleted after checking. Basis is free and lists a 10-word personal dictionary and 500 characters without an account. Pur costs €2.99 a month, billed 35,88 € pro Jahr, with 10 test corrections or rewrites monthly. Premium costs €7.95 a month, billed 95,40 € pro Jahr, with 250 monthly text optimizations; Premium Plus costs €9.95 a month, billed 119,40 € pro Jahr, with unlimited optimizations. Paid plans are annually payable and annually cancellable.

GoldenDict is a dictionary lookup program for finding words across installed dictionary sources, websites, and other applications. It supports Babylon BGL, StarDict, dictd, ABBYY Lingvo DSL, and Lingvo audio archives. Web lookups can use Wikipedia, Wiktionary, other MediaWiki sites, and websites configured through URL templates. Hunspell morphology provides word stemming and spelling suggestions, while pronunciation lookup can use Forvo or indexed audio directories. A scan popup can show a translation for a selected word in another application; global hotkeys can open GoldenDict or translate clipboard text. Dictionary articles are displayed through WebKit with formatting, color, images, and links. The original program is free software under the GNU GPLv3+ license, with offline access. The Windows installer does not include local dictionaries, which users download separately. GoldenDict-ng adds Anki integration, a dark theme, Xapian full-text indexing, and support for dictionaries larger than 4 GB. Its builds are for Windows and macOS, with packages for some Linux and Unix distributions; it requires Windows 10 version 1809 or later, or macOS 13 or later.