ProWritingAid vs Vale

ProWritingAid provides grammar and style suggestions through browser extensions and a desktop editor. It works with Word, Google Docs, Scrivener, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge, and browser extensions are available for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. The free account handles 500 words at a time and includes two line-editing runs, ten rephrases, three Sparks, and three Creative Nudges per day. Premium and Premium Pro support documents of any length. Premium includes document sharing, real-time comments, and more than 25 writing analysis reports. Its plagiarism checker compares work against webpages, published works, and academic papers. The product supports English only, including general, British, US, Australian, and Canadian English. ProWritingAid says text entered into its editor is not kept on processing servers, is encrypted during processing, and is not used to train algorithms. The free plan is available; listed paid plans include Premium at $30 a month and Premium Pro at $36 a month, both billed monthly.

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.