Hemingway Editor vs Vale
Hemingway Editor
hemingwayapp.com
Vale
vale.shSide by side
| Figure | Hemingway Editor | Vale |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $8.33/mo | Free |
| Free plan | — | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Web | Yes | Yes |
| Windows | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 10 | 1 |
| Spec score · Writing Style Checkers | 8.3 (#11) | 7.7 (#21) |
| Intended users | Hemingway describes Editor Plus as helping teams improve mass communications, internal communications, grants, sales proposals, and other written work. | Vale is aimed at people and teams who want style-guide checks in their editors and alongside their code, including documentation teams. |
| Purpose | Hemingway Editor scores writing for readability and highlights sentences and issues that can weaken or complicate a message. | Vale is an open-source command-line linter that checks prose against style-guide rules. |
| Support | Hemingway directs users who need help to email [email protected]. | The project directs users to GitHub issues or Discord for questions and support. |
Plans
Hemingway Editor
- Individual 5K (annual)$8.33 a month
- Individual 10K (annual)$12.50 a month
- Team 10K (annual)$12.50 a month
- Individual 5K (monthly)$10 a month
- Hemingway Editor 3 desktop$19.99, paid once
- Hemingway Editor Classic$19.99, paid once
- Individual 5K$100 a year
- Individual 10K$150 a year
- Team 10K$150 a year
- EnterprisePriced on request
In their own words
Hemingway Editor
Hemingway Editor scores writing for readability and highlights sentences and issues that may weaken or complicate a message. Editor Plus adds rewriting for wordy sentences and passive voice, grammar fixes, and controls for tone, length and style. It also provides document review with writing feedback and suggestions, and supports importing and exporting Word, Markdown and HTML files. The Classic desktop app works offline and keeps writing on the computer; it can publish to WordPress or export HTML and Markdown for a blogging platform or CMS. Hemingway Editor is available on web, macOS and Windows. The free plan is available. Individual 5K annual access costs $8.33 a month, billed as 100 USD annually, and includes 5,000 AI sentences per month. Hemingway Editor 3 desktop costs $19.99, paid once and does not include new AI features. Hemingway says document content is discarded after processing and is not used to train AI models. For analysis or rewriting, content is sent through Hemingway to an LLM provider, currently OpenAI, Google or Anthropic, and then discarded. Editor Plus does not yet have SOC 2 or ISO certification.
Vale
Vale is an open-source command-line linter that checks prose against style-guide rules. It runs offline as a single binary, without an account, server, or model. Supported markup includes Markdown, AsciiDoc, reStructuredText, MDX, MyST, Quarto, Typst, HTML, XML, DITA, Org, and QDoc. It can extract and check comments in 19 programming languages, and Vale Views can target content in OpenAPI, Jupyter notebooks, commit messages, transcripts, docstrings, JSON, YAML, and TOML. Users can write custom rules in YAML and choose which rules and style packages apply. Ready-made packages include Google, Microsoft, Red Hat, readability, and Harper grammar styles. Integrations span editors including VS Code, Cursor, Neovim, JetBrains IDEs, and Obsidian, as well as GitHub Actions and pre-commit hooks. Its language server offers autocomplete, diagnostics, hover popups, and quick fixes. Only error-level alerts cause a non-zero exit code in CI; warnings and suggestions pass. The free plan is MIT-licensed; paid plans start at $19/user/mo.