Grammarly vs. Microsoft Editor: Does Your Browser Need an Extra Extension?

You are typing a work email. You hit send. Then you notice it. A typo in the subject line, a clunky sentence in paragraph two, and a tone that sounds borderline rude. Sound familiar?

Both Grammarly and Microsoft Editor were built for exactly this kind of moment. Grammarly is the independent AI writing assistant that goes wherever your browser takes you. Microsoft Editor was Microsoft's answer to that, a built-in competitor that came bundled with Microsoft 365 and worked across Word, Outlook, and the web.

But here is the twist you need to know before picking a side. In October 2025, Microsoft quietly retired the standalone Microsoft Editor browser extension. The extension for Chrome and Edge stopped receiving updates and support as of October 31, 2025. The writing features moved into Microsoft Edge's built-in proofing tools and remained available inside Microsoft 365 apps like Word and Outlook.

So the question this comparison is really answering is not just which tool writes better. It is whether you even need a separate browser extension in 2026, and if so, whether Grammarly earns that slot.

Now, let us break it down feature by feature to see which one truly deserves a spot on your device in 2026.

Grammarly vs. Microsoft Editor: A Complete Writing Tool Comparison for 2026

What is Grammarly?

Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that works across browsers, desktop apps, mobile keyboards, and over a million third-party tools. Founded in 2009 and now part of the Superhuman Platform family following a 2025 acquisition, it has grown from a basic spell-checker into a full writing-intelligence suite.

In 2026, it is used by over 40 million people and 50,000 organizations, including Atlassian, Zoom, and Zapier. It is best suited for students, professionals, content creators, and teams who write frequently across multiple platforms and want real-time assistance, regardless of the tool they use.

Key Features

Real-Time Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation Checks: Grammarly flags errors as you type, across every platform it supports. It works inside Gmail, Google Docs, LinkedIn, Microsoft Word, Slack, and any web browser you install the extension on. The suggestions appear inline and require a single click to apply.

Tone Detection and Audience Insights: Grammarly reads the emotional register of your writing and tells you how it is likely to land with a reader. If a message sounds too aggressive or too casual for context, it flags it. The Pro plan adds audience insight features that let you set the intended audience and communication goal before you start writing.

Full-Sentence Rewrites and AI Drafting: The Pro plan rewrites full sentences to improve clarity, flow, and engagement. You can also prompt Grammarly to generate first drafts, build outlines, or rewrite sections from scratch. The free plan offers 100 AI prompts per month & Pro bumps this to 2,000.

Plagiarism Detection and AI Content Checks: Grammarly scans your text against billions of web pages and academic sources. It also includes an AI content detector called Authorship, which categorizes text as typed by a human, generated by AI, or sourced from an online database. These features are available on the Pro plan and above.

Auto-Citations in APA, MLA, and Chicago Style: This is a feature the free version includes, which is a genuinely useful addition for students. Grammarly generates properly formatted citations, so you do not have to remember every style guide rule manually.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Works across Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and over a million apps, including Google Docs and Microsoft Word

• Tone detection and audience insight features go beyond basic grammar checks

• Plagiarism detection and AI content checks are built into one interface

• Auto-citations in the free plan are a notable advantage for students and researchers

• The desktop app for Windows and macOS extends coverage to all text fields on your computer, including Slack, Asana, and other native apps

Cons:

• The Pro plan, at $12 per month annually ($30 per month on a monthly basis), is a standalone cost on top of any other tools you already pay for

• Grammarly is designed primarily for English. Support for other languages is very limited compared to Microsoft Editor

• AI prompt limits apply even on Pro, which is 2,000 per month, which may not be enough for heavy content teams

• Suggestions can sometimes be overly aggressive, especially with technical writing or deliberately unconventional style choices

Pricing

Free Plan: Available at no cost. Includes real-time grammar, spelling, and punctuation feedback, basic tone detection, auto-citations, and 100 AI prompts per month.

Pro Plan: $12 per member per month, billed annually, so $144 per year, or $30 per month on a monthly billing cycle.

Adds full-sentence rewrites, plagiarism detection, AI content detection, advanced tone and audience features, 2,000 AI prompts per month, and style guides for business users. A quarterly billing option at approximately $20 per month is also available.

Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing, available through the Grammarly sales team. Includes unlimited AI prompts, enhanced security, team management features, brand tone controls, and admin analytics.

A one-month free trial of Pro features is periodically available on the Grammarly website. Grammarly has also offered seasonal discounts, like a 50% discount during its 2025 Black Friday sale.

What is Microsoft Editor?

Microsoft Editor is Microsoft's AI-powered writing assistant, and its story in 2026 looks quite different from how it started. Originally launched as a browser extension in April 2020, it was Microsoft's direct answer to Grammarly, and it operated across Chrome and Edge for five years. However, Microsoft retired those browser extensions on October 31, 2025.

Today, Microsoft Editor lives in two places. First, it is built into Microsoft Edge starting with version 137, where its grammar and spelling features activate automatically in text fields for Microsoft 365 subscribers.

Second, it remains a fully integrated feature within Microsoft 365 desktop and web apps, specifically Word, Outlook, and OneNote. If you are already inside the Microsoft ecosystem, the Editor is right there waiting. If you use Chrome and Google Docs as your primary workflow, the picture is more complicated.

Microsoft Editor is best suited for people who spend most of their writing time inside Microsoft 365 apps and who already pay for a Microsoft 365 subscription.

Key Features

Grammar, Spelling, and Punctuation Corrections: Microsoft Editor underlines spelling errors in red and flags grammar and clarity issues in blue or purple. Clicking an underlined word opens a suggestion panel with the recommended fix and a brief explanation. These basics are available for free with a Microsoft account.

Clarity, Conciseness, Formality, and Vocabulary Refinements: With a Microsoft 365 subscription, Editor goes beyond surface-level corrections. It suggests ways to make sentences tighter, flags overly formal or informal language depending on context, and offers vocabulary alternatives. These refinements are comparable in scope to what Grammarly offers in the mid-tier of its feature set.

Multilingual Support Across 20+ Languages: This is one of Microsoft Editor's clearest advantages over Grammarly. It supports spelling and grammar checks in over 20 languages, with grammar refinements available in many of them. Non-English writers who need consistent support across multiple languages will find this coverage more reliable than Grammarly's English-first approach.

Similarity Check or Plagiarism Detection: Microsoft Editor includes a Find Similarity feature that checks your text against online sources and reports back matching content as a percentage. It is less detailed than Grammarly's plagiarism tool but covers the core use case for students and writers who need a basic originality check.

In-App Learning Tips and Microsoft 365 Integration: Editor includes brief explanations alongside its suggestions, which can help you understand why a change is being recommended rather than just blindly accepting it. Because it lives inside Word and Outlook natively, there is no installation step needed if you are already working on Microsoft 365.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Included at no extra cost with Microsoft 365 Personal, which is $6.99 per month, which also includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and 1 TB of OneDrive storage

• Supports 20+ languages for grammar and spelling checks, making it a strong option for multilingual writers

• Deep integration with Word and Outlook means suggestions appear without any setup

• Built into Microsoft Edge natively from version 137 onward, so Edge users do not need to install anything separately

• In-app explanations help users learn from their corrections rather than just clicking past them

Cons:

• The standalone browser extension was retired on October 31, 2025, which means Chrome users outside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem lose access to Editor features on the web

• Advanced features require a Microsoft 365 subscription; the free tier covers only basic spelling and grammar

• No dedicated mobile keyboard app, unlike Grammarly, which extends coverage to mobile writing

• Tone detection and audience insight features are not as developed as Grammarly's equivalents

• Does not offer AI drafting or content generation tools comparable to Grammarly's Pro plan capabilities

Pricing

Free Tier: Available with a free Microsoft account. Covers basic grammar and spelling checking inside Edge, Word for the web, and Outlook.com.

Microsoft 365 Personal: $9.99 per month & $99.99 per year. Unlocks the full set of advanced Editor features across Word, Outlook, and Edge, along with all other Microsoft 365 apps and 1 TB of cloud storage. Consumer plan pricing remained unchanged in the July 2026 Microsoft pricing update.

Microsoft 365 Family: $12.99 per month & $144 per year. Extends all personal plan features to up to six people.

Microsoft 365 Business Plans: Starting from $7 per user per month in Business Basic after the July 2026 pricing adjustment, with higher tiers adding more collaboration, security, and compliance features. Advanced Editor features are included at all business subscription levels.

There is no standalone purchase option for Microsoft Editor premium features. You get them only as part of a broader Microsoft 365 subscription.

Grammarly vs. Microsoft Editor: Feature-by-Feature Comparison

Ease of Use

Grammarly wins this category for cross-platform simplicity. Once you install the browser extension, it activates automatically on every website you visit. The interface is clean, suggestions appear inline without cluttering your screen, and first-time users can figure it out within minutes. The desktop app extends this behavior to all native applications on your computer without any additional configuration.

Microsoft Editor's ease of use depends heavily on where you are working. Inside Word and Outlook, it is seamlessly integrated and requires no setup at all. But the retirement of the standalone browser extension changes the story for Chrome users.

If you want Editor's assistance on Gmail, LinkedIn, or Google Docs while using Chrome, that functionality is no longer available through an extension. Edge users with Microsoft 365 subscriptions get built-in proofing tools automatically, which is convenient but still limits the audience.

For users who already live inside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem and use Edge, the experience is just as frictionless as Grammarly. For everyone else, Grammarly has a clearer setup path.

Features and Functionality

Both tools cover grammar, spelling, punctuation, and basic style refinements. The gap opens up when you look at what each tool does beyond those basics.

Grammarly's Pro plan adds tone detection with specific audience insights, full-sentence rewrites, AI drafting with 2,000 monthly prompts, plagiarism detection with source links, and Authorship-based AI content detection. These features work consistently across every supported platform.

Microsoft Editor's advanced features focus more on refinements: clarity, conciseness, formality, vocabulary improvement, and similarity checking. It does not currently offer AI drafting tools comparable to Grammarly's Go feature, and its tone detection is less developed. Where it pulls ahead is multilingual support. Editor handles 20+ languages with consistent grammar checks, while Grammarly remains primarily built for English.

Grammarly leads to depth and breadth of features, particularly for English-language writing. Microsoft Editor leads to multilingual coverage and tight integration with Microsoft's own app ecosystem.

Performance and Reliability

Grammarly's suggestions are generally considered more accurate for English writing. It catches nuanced errors that Microsoft Editor sometimes misses, and it performs consistently across browser tabs, Google Docs, and native apps.

That said, Grammarly can occasionally be overly aggressive with its suggestions, flagging deliberate stylistic choices as errors, which requires some manual adjustment using its goal-setting features.

Microsoft Editor's accuracy has improved considerably since its launch, and it performs well within Word and Outlook, where it has the most context about document structure and formality. Its performance inside Edge's built-in proofing is comparable to its Word integration for basic tasks.

Both tools are stable and cloud-connected. Neither requires local processing power, and both update continuously without user intervention.

Pricing

This comparison is highly context-dependent on your existing subscriptions.

If you already pay for Microsoft 365 Personal, you get Microsoft Editor's full advanced feature set included at no additional cost. Your $9.99/month or $99.99/year subscription includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and 1 TB of OneDrive cloud storage. The value proposition is compelling if you're already in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Microsoft 365 Personal was raised from $69.99 to $99.99/year in January 2025, the first consumer price increase in 12 years.

Grammarly Pro costs $12 per month, billed annually, so $144/year, or $30/month on a monthly billing cycle, as a standalone tool. If you don't already pay for Microsoft 365, Grammarly Pro costs $44 more per year than Microsoft 365 Personal. If you already pay for Microsoft 365, adding Grammarly Pro means an additional $144 per year on top of your existing subscription.

Grammarly Free: Accessible on any major browser like Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge via browser extensions, with basic grammar, spelling, and punctuation feedback

Microsoft Editor Free: Requires a free Microsoft account; works primarily within Edge browser, Word for the web, and Outlook.com with basic spelling and grammar checking

Microsoft 365 Personal at $9.99/month is the cheaper option if you need the full Office suite. Grammarly Pro at $12/month is a stand-alone product and offers more advanced writing features, including plagiarism detection, AI content detection, and style guides, but costs more if you're not already paying for Microsoft 365.

Compatibility and Platforms

Grammarly supports Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge as browser extensions. It has desktop apps for Windows and macOS. It has a mobile keyboard app for iOS and Android. It integrates directly with Google Docs, Microsoft Word, Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Notion, and over a million other apps.

Microsoft Editor, as of 2026, is built into Microsoft Edge version 137 and later and is a core feature of Microsoft 365 apps: Word, Outlook, and OneNote.

The Chrome extension no longer exists. There is no standalone mobile keyboard app. Users working in Chrome, Firefox, or Safari who are not already inside Microsoft 365 apps cannot access Editor's features through a browser add-on.

For platform flexibility, Grammarly has a clear and significant advantage in 2026.

Comparison Table

Final Verdict

Grammarly and Microsoft Editor serve different writers with different workflows. Neither is the wrong choice in absolute terms. But they are built for different situations, and the Microsoft Editor browser extension retirement in October 2025 has made those differences sharper.

If you write across multiple browsers, tools, and platforms, Grammarly is the strongest pick. It installs once and works everywhere. Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Google Docs, Gmail, Slack, Notion, and native desktop apps are all covered.

If you already pay for Microsoft 365 and most of your writing happens in Word, Outlook, or Edge, then Microsoft Editor is already sitting in your toolkit at no extra cost. For everyday writing tasks inside the Microsoft ecosystem, it handles grammar, clarity, conciseness, and similarity checks well.

The practical takeaway is straightforward. If you need writing assistance that travels with you across every app and browser, install Grammarly. If you are firmly inside Microsoft 365 and content with Edge as your browser, the built-in Editor may be all you need.

Ready to sharpen your writing? Start with the free version of whichever tool fits your workflow and see for yourself before committing to a paid plan.