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How to Switch from Grammarly to QuillBot

Grammarly corrects the sentence you wrote. QuillBot rewrites it. That distinction decides whether this migration is an upgrade or a downgrade for you, and it has almost nothing to do with the price difference that usually motivates it. If your problem is that your writing is technically fine but doesn't read the way you want, you're moving toward the better tool. If your problem is catching mistakes across every app you type in, you're about to lose coverage you won't notice until something ships with an error in it. This guide covers what actually carries across, the surfaces that silently stop being checked, and the cases where staying is correct.

Writing, paraphrasing & proofreading⏱ About 90 minutes, most of it rebuilding things that don't export7-step migration

Why people leave Grammarly

✍️ Rewriting as the primary action, not a suggestion

QuillBot's paraphrase modes — standard, fluency, formal, creative — restructure a sentence rather than flagging it. For non-native writers and anyone whose drafts are correct but clunky, this is a fundamentally different and more useful operation than an underline you have to fix yourself.

🎚️ A synonym slider you actually control

You can dial how aggressively it swaps wording, and lock terms you don't want touched. That control is why it works on technical writing where an over-eager rewriter would replace domain terms with plausible-sounding wrong ones.

🧾 Summariser, citations and translation in one place

Summarising long sources, generating citations and translating passages sit alongside the writing tools. For students and researchers that bundle replaces two or three separate subscriptions, which is where the real cost saving comes from — not the headline price.

💸 Price, honestly

This is the actual reason most people arrive here, and it's a legitimate one. Just make the decision knowing you're buying a narrower surface area, not the same product cheaper.

Stay on Grammarly if…

A migration you regret costs more than the subscription you were trying to escape. These are the cases where Grammarly is still the right answer.

•You rely on system-wide correction. Grammarly's desktop app checks you in native email clients, Slack, and applications a browser extension never sees. QuillBot's surface is narrower — web editor, browser extension, Word — and everything outside it silently stops being proofread.
•You're on a team plan with a shared style guide or brand tones. Those are organisational assets with no equivalent on the other side; migrating means your team loses its enforcement mechanism, not just a tool.
•Your drafts are already clean and what you want is tone and clarity feedback. That's Grammarly's actual strength, and a paraphraser aimed at restructuring sentences is the wrong instrument for it.
•You're a student or academic. Some institutions treat paraphrasing tools as an integrity concern regardless of how you use them. Read your institution's policy before you subscribe — this is the one stay-signal that can have consequences beyond wasted money.

What you gain and what you give up

Capability	Grammarly	QuillBot
Grammar & spelling checking	Best-in-class, very few false positives	Solid, occasionally noisier
Sentence rewriting / paraphrasing	Suggestions within your sentence	Core product, multiple modes
Coverage across desktop apps	System-wide desktop app	Browser extension and Word
Tone detection & clarity scoring	Mature and genuinely useful	Limited
Summarising long documents	Not a focus	Built in
Citation generation	Not included	Built in
Translation	Not included	Built in
Team style guides / brand voice	Available on business plans	Not an equivalent feature
Price for an individual	Premium pricing	Substantially cheaper

Green marks the stronger side of each row. Rows where both are comparable are left neutral.

The migration, step by step

Audit where you actually get corrected

15 minutes

For two days, notice which applications Grammarly catches you in — browser, Word, Slack desktop, your mail client, your IDE. Write the list down. This is the honest scope of what you're giving up, and for a lot of people the list is longer than they assumed. If a native desktop app is on it and matters, that alone can end the decision here.

Copy out your personal dictionary and snippets by hand

25 minutes

Your added words, snippets and any team style rules do not export in a form another tool can read. Open the settings and copy them into a plain text file or spreadsheet yourself. It's tedious and it's the difference between the new tool feeling accurate on day one and it flagging your product name forty times an hour.

Check the policy question before you pay

10 minutes

If you're a student, read your institution's academic integrity policy on paraphrasing and AI writing tools. If you're at a company, check whether pasting work text into a third-party writing service is permitted — a paraphraser necessarily sends the passage to a server. Both checks take ten minutes and both are much cheaper now than after the fact.

Install the extension and the Word add-in on day one

10 minutes

Set up the browser extension and the Word add-in immediately, not later. Migrations fail when the new tool is a website you have to remember to visit while the old one appeared automatically wherever you typed. Getting it into your existing writing surfaces on the first day is what makes it stick.

Set your default paraphrase mode and calibrate the slider

20 minutes

Run three real paragraphs of your own writing through each mode and pick your default deliberately. Then tune the synonym slider down until it stops replacing terms you care about, and lock any domain vocabulary. The out-of-the-box setting is tuned to demonstrate change, not to preserve your voice, which is why untuned first impressions read as 'it made my writing worse'.

Downgrade Grammarly to free instead of deleting it

5 minutes

Cancel the paid plan but keep the free account and extension installed. The free grammar checker remains a useful second pass on anything important, and it costs you nothing — a deliberate belt-and-braces setup rather than an incomplete migration. Only delete outright if a policy requires it.

Ship one real piece of work through the new setup, then commit

30 minutes

Take an actual document with a real deadline through the whole flow — draft, paraphrase, grammar pass, export. Anything the setup can't do shows up here rather than three weeks later. Once one real deliverable is through cleanly, the migration is done; until then you've only changed subscriptions.

What does not come across

Every migration loses something. Budget for these before you cancel Grammarly, not after.

✗System-wide correction in native desktop apps. This is the big one, it's silent, and you find out about it via a typo in something already sent.
✗Tone detection and clarity scoring, which have no direct equivalent.
✗Team style guides, brand tones and any shared enforcement your organisation had configured.
✗Your personal dictionary and snippets — rebuilt manually from the notes you took in step 2.
✗Weekly writing insights and account-level stats, if anyone on your team was actually using them.

Grammarly → QuillBot: common questions

Can I export my Grammarly personal dictionary into QuillBot?

No. There's no interchange format between them, so the dictionary, snippets and any style-guide rules have to be copied out by hand before you cancel. Do it while your paid plan is live and keep the list in a text file — you'll want it again if you ever change tools a third time.

Is QuillBot's grammar checker as good as Grammarly's?

It's competent but Grammarly is still the stronger pure proofreader, with fewer false positives on complex sentences. The reason to switch isn't better grammar checking — it's that paraphrasing is a genuinely different capability that Grammarly doesn't lead on. If proofreading accuracy is your only need, you're likely to feel a small step down.

Will QuillBot work in Slack, Outlook or other desktop apps?

Only where a supported surface reaches — the browser extension covers web apps including web-based mail and Slack in a browser, and the Word add-in covers Word. Native desktop applications outside that set are not checked. If your writing happens in native apps, audit that list before you switch, because losing that coverage is the most common regret with this migration.

Is using a paraphrasing tool considered plagiarism?

Rewriting someone else's work and presenting it as yours is plagiarism whether a tool did the rewriting or you did. Using a paraphraser on your own draft to improve clarity is normally fine — but some institutions treat paraphrasing tools themselves as a violation, so read your specific academic integrity policy rather than reasoning from first principles.

Should I cancel Grammarly completely?

Cancel the paid plan, keep the free account. The free grammar checker is a useful independent second pass on anything that matters and costs nothing to retain. The only reason to delete entirely is an employer or institutional policy that requires it.