QuillBot
AI paraphrasing and writing assistant that rewrites, checks, summarizes, and cites in one place. Best known for its Paraphraser, and priced well under Grammarly Pro on annual billing.
Try QuillBot Free →
Strong Paraphraser, Fair Price.
Don't Buy It to Beat Detectors.
As of September 2026, QuillBot is still the paraphrasing tool we'd point most students and non-native writers to first. Premium at $8.33/month on the annual plan buys nine rewrite modes, unlimited paraphrasing, and a Copyleaks-powered plagiarism checker for less than Grammarly Pro. The catches: the free plan's word cap makes it a demo more than a tool, the grammar checker trails Grammarly on style, and its Humanizer won't reliably get AI text past Turnitin or Originality.ai. Nor should you expect it to.
✓ What We Like
- Paraphraser with nine modes, a synonym slider, and custom modes on Premium
- Annual Premium undercuts Grammarly Pro and bundles more tools
- Citation Generator and AI Detector are free with no word cap
- Works in Chrome, Word, Google Docs, and native desktop and mobile apps
! Could Be Better
- Free plan's paraphrase cap is too tight for real work
- Grammar checker is solid but light on tone and style coaching
- Humanizer and AI Detector are the weakest links, and independent tests say so
What Is QuillBot?
Who owns it, what's in the box, and the QuillBot review question people ask first: is it still just a paraphraser?
QuillBot started life as a paraphrasing tool, and for most of its users that's still what it is. Owned by Course Hero, it has grown into a writing suite with nine tools behind one login: Paraphraser, Grammar Checker, Summarizer, Citation Generator, Plagiarism Checker, AI Detector, AI Humanizer, Translate, and an AI Chat. The Paraphraser is the reason people sign up. The rest is why they stay subscribed.
Here's the distinction that matters. Grammarly lives inside every text field on your machine and corrects as you type. QuillBot waits for a finished draft and reshapes it on request: tighten a paragraph, make an email more formal, simplify a dense passage, cut a 2,000-word report down to its key points. It's an editing tool, not a generator. If you want something to write from a blank page, that's Jasper AI for marketing copy or a general model like Claude or ChatGPT.
It's available almost everywhere you write: web app, Chrome, Edge, and Safari extensions, a Microsoft Word add-in, a Google Docs integration, and native apps for iOS, Android, Windows, and macOS. The Chrome extension alone has passed 5 million installs. The mobile app has grown its own set of Create with AI features, which we covered in a separate review.
Who Is QuillBot Best For?
Students, ESL and non-native English writers, researchers, and editors who already have a draft and need to rewrite, shorten, or polish it. It also suits anyone who wants paraphrasing, grammar, citations, and a plagiarism check under one cheap subscription instead of three separate ones.
Our Testing
We ran QuillBot on a free Max Productive AI account in September 2026: the Paraphraser in Standard mode, the Grammar Checker, the AI Detector, and the AI Humanizer, using short excerpts from our own site copy. The screenshots below are from that account. We did not buy Premium, so locked features (Tone, Compare Modes, the percent-human score, the Plagiarism Checker) are described from QuillBot's documentation and independent reviews rather than hands-on use.
One caveat belongs up front. A meaningful share of QuillBot's traffic comes from people trying to get AI-written text past detectors. The product has a dedicated AI Humanizer, and the Paraphraser has a Humanize mode. Independent tests through 2026 say this doesn't work reliably, and Turnitin can flag text specifically as having gone through a paraphrasing tool. We cover the numbers in the features section. The short version: judge QuillBot as a writing tool, because that's what it's good at.
See QuillBot in Action
Screenshots from our own free account, September 2026. Same short passages run through four of the tools.
Dashboard
One input box, a row of tool chips, and idea prompts for people who don't know where to start
The current dashboard is a single "write, paste, upload" box with the main tools as chips underneath. Paste text and pick what to do with it, or start from one of the Create ideas. Those suggestions (a SaaS pitch deck, a business-internship resume, an Instagram announcement) show how far QuillBot has drifted from pure paraphrasing. Once you know which tool you want, the left sidebar visible in the next screenshots is the faster route. Worth noting: the 40%-off Premium banner was live during our testing, and QuillBot runs promotions often, so check what's on offer before paying full price.
Paraphrasing Tool
Standard mode on a 39-word passage about our own site
We pasted a 39-word blurb about max-productive.ai and hit Rephrase in Standard mode. QuillBot returned 34 words, kept the two-sentence structure, and color-coded every change so you can see exactly what moved. Click any changed word and you get alternative synonyms. The result read cleanly, but it swapped "long format articles" for "lengthy essays," which changes the meaning. That's the Paraphraser in one sentence: fast, controllable, and something you read before you accept. Compare Modes, Statistics, and Tone in the right rail all carry crown icons on a free account.
Grammar Checker
Same 39 words: two corrections and four writing scores
It caught the missing hyphen and the missing Oxford comma, with an Accept all button and a short explanation for each. Fine, but any checker does that. The four dial scores are the more interesting part: a 58 on Clarity and a 59 on Fluency for a sentence that opens with "In order to help you save time" is a fair verdict, and the Average label underneath doesn't sugarcoat it. What you don't get is Grammarly's tone and formality coaching. The Improve, Rewrite, Continue writing, and Ask AI bar under the editor shows where this is heading: the Grammar Checker is becoming a general document editor.
Want to run your own draft through the Paraphraser?
Try QuillBot's Paraphraser →Standard and Fluency modes are free • No card needed for a free accountAI Detector
88 words, model version 7.1.0, and a verdict with no hedging
We pasted an 88-word excerpt from one of our own articles. The detector came back 100% AI-generated, flagged all three segments High, and immediately offered to fix that with the Paraphraser. A detector that volunteers to rewrite whatever it flags is a strange incentive, and it says a lot about who QuillBot thinks is using it. The confidence is useful when it's right and expensive when it's wrong: independent testing puts the QuillBot AI detector at about 80% accuracy on clearly AI-written text, with a false-positive rate near 13% on human writing. QuillBot's own disclaimer under the results says not to rely on detection alone for decisions about someone's career or academic standing. Take that seriously.
AI Humanizer
The same 88 words, two rewrite styles, and one locked score
Same passage, this time through the Humanizer. The output grew from 88 to 90 words. It swapped "generators" for "creator," turned "citing" into "saying," and reordered a few clauses, all color-coded by type of change. The "--% Human" score sits behind a crown; free users never see the number. We didn't run the output back through the detector, and given what independent testing shows (see the features section), we wouldn't expect a clean pass. As a plain-language rewriter it's fine. As a detector-beater, don't count on it.
How QuillBot Works
From a rough draft to a cleaner one in four steps. The workflow is the same in the web app, the extension, and the Word and Docs add-ins.
Create an Account and Pick Where You'll Work
A free account gets you the full dashboard. From there you choose your surface: the web app for longer sessions, the Chrome, Edge, or Safari extension for quick rewrites in any text field, the Word add-in or Google Docs integration for working inside a document, or the native apps on phone and desktop. The tools are identical across all of them; only the layout changes.
Paste Your Text and Choose a Mode
In the Paraphraser, pick a mode and drag the synonyms slider to decide how aggressively QuillBot swaps words. Standard and Fluency are free; Formal, Academic, Simple, Creative, Expand, Shorten, and Humanize need Premium, as do custom modes where you describe the style you want in your own words. Hit Rephrase and the rewrite appears on the right, one sentence at a time if you prefer. The free plan caps each run, so long documents go in as chunks.
Review Every Change Before You Accept It
This is the step people skip, and it's where QuillBot either earns its keep or quietly rewrites your meaning. Changed words are color-coded, clicking one shows alternatives, and the sentence navigator steps you through the output in order. Premium adds Compare Modes, which lays several rewrites side by side, and Statistics, which reports word count and readability. Our own test produced one meaning shift in 39 words. Read the output.
Run the Rest of the Suite
With the rewrite done, the same left sidebar takes you to the Grammar Checker for mechanics and writing scores, the Summarizer to condense reading material, the Citation Generator to reference it, the Plagiarism Checker (Premium, powered by Copyleaks, 25,000 words a month) to catch accidental matches, and the AI Detector for a first-pass read on whether text looks machine-written. None of these are best-in-class on their own. Together, under one login, they cover most of a student's or editor's week.
Premium Removes Friction More Than It Adds Features
You can try every tool on the free plan. What you can't do is use them at length: paraphrasing stops after a short passage, the summarizer has a modest limit, and the useful modes are locked. Premium's real value isn't a feature list, it's not having to paste an essay in six pieces.
Use It After the Draft, Not Instead of One
QuillBot is at its best as the second pass. Draft in your own words, or in a model like Claude, then bring the text here to tighten, formalize, or simplify it. Asking it to be the drafting tool is where the disappointment starts.
Key QuillBot Features
One subscription, a long tool list. Here's what each one does, and which ones are worth the Premium price.
Paraphraser
The reason QuillBot exists. Nine modes (Standard, Fluency, Formal, Academic, Simple, Creative, Expand, Shorten, Humanize), a synonyms slider, sentence-level navigation, and custom modes on Premium where you describe the voice you want. Free accounts get Standard and Fluency with a per-run word cap; try the free Paraphraser to see if the output suits you before paying.
Grammar Checker
Spelling, punctuation, and grammar with a one-line explanation per fix, plus Grammar, Fluency, Clarity, and Engagement scores. It works in several languages. Where it falls short is tone and style: Grammarly will tell you a sentence sounds hesitant or wordy; QuillBot mostly tells you it's correct.
Summarizer
Paste an article or report and get either the key sentences or a paragraph summary, with a length slider. The free limit sits around 1,200 words, which covers a news article but not a journal paper; Premium raises it to several thousand. Useful for reading, less so for writing.
Citation Generator
Free for everyone, no word cap, and it supports more than 1,000 citation styles including APA, MLA, Chicago, and Harvard. Search by URL, DOI, ISBN, or title and it builds the reference. For a student this alone is worth the free account.
Plagiarism Checker
Premium only. It scans against web sources in 100+ languages using Copyleaks technology, and Premium accounts get 25,000 words of scanning per month. Good for catching accidental overlap before you submit. It does not see unpublished student papers the way Turnitin does, so a clean score here is not a guarantee of a clean score there.
AI Detector
Free with no word cap, and it breaks results down by sentence into AI-generated, human-written and AI-refined, and human-written. Accuracy is the issue: about 80% on clearly AI text, roughly 60% on mixed text, and a false-positive rate near 13%. Treat it as a first read, and use Pangram when the result matters. You can test the QuillBot AI Detector without an account.
AI Humanizer
Rewrites AI-sounding text in a Clear or Concise style, with a percent-human score on Premium. As a readability pass it's decent. As a way to beat detectors, independent 2026 tests show most of its output still gets caught by GPTZero and Originality.ai, and Turnitin can tag it as paraphrasing-tool output. The AI Humanizer is worth trying for tone, not for cover.
Translate, AI Chat, and Integrations
The Translate tool handles dozens of languages and pairs well with the Paraphraser for non-native writers. AI Chat is a light assistant for quick questions, not a ChatGPT replacement. The integrations are the quiet strength: Chrome, Edge, Safari, Word, Google Docs, and native apps mean you rarely have to copy text out of wherever you're writing.
Taken together, the QuillBot features add up to a bundle rather than a best-of-breed anything except paraphrasing. That's a fair trade at this price. What we'd push back on is the marketing weight behind the Humanizer and Detector: they're the two weakest tools in the suite, and they get top billing on the dashboard.
See what Premium unlocks and pick a billing period:
See QuillBot Pricing →Free plan available • Annual, quarterly, and monthly optionsQuillBot Pricing
Simple on the surface: free, or Premium. The billing period is what moves the price.
Free
- ✓ Paraphraser: Standard + Fluency, 125-word cap per run
- ✓ Basic Grammar Checker
- ✓ Summarizer up to ~1,200 words
- ✓ AI Detector, no word cap
- ✓ Citation Generator, 1,000+ styles
- ✓ Web, extensions, and native apps
Premium Annual
- ✓ Billed ~$99.95 per year
- ✓ All paraphrase modes + custom modes
- ✓ Unlimited paraphrasing, no word cap
- ✓ Plagiarism Checker, 25,000 words/month
- ✓ Tone, Compare Modes, Statistics
- ✓ Humanizer with percent-human score
Premium Monthly
- ✓ Same features as Annual
- ✓ No commitment, cancel anytime
- ✓ Quarterly option: $13.31/mo
- ✓ Good for a single project or semester
- ✓ Switch to Annual later to save
Pricing last verified September 2026. Visit QuillBot for current rates.
How the Annual Price Compares
On monthly billing the gap widens: $19.95 against Grammarly's $30. Wordtune is cheaper still at $6.99/month annual, but it's a sentence rewriter with basic grammar, not a suite. Whether QuillBot's bundle beats Grammarly for you comes down to what you write: paraphrase-heavy work favors QuillBot, everything-else-heavy work favors Grammarly.
Is Premium worth it? For most people who land on this page, yes, with one condition. The free plan is a demo. If you paraphrase more than a couple of paragraphs a week, the annual plan pays for itself in saved copy-pasting alone, and the Plagiarism Checker is a bonus you'd otherwise pay for separately. If grammar correction is your main need and rewriting is occasional, compare Grammarly's free tier first. And skip Premium entirely if your reason for buying is detector evasion; you'd be paying for the one thing the product doesn't reliably do.
Detailed Pros & Cons
What held up in our own testing, what independent reviewers agree on, and where the product oversells itself.
✓ Pros
Every mode from Formal to Shorten, a synonyms slider, sentence-by-sentence navigation, and custom modes give you more control over a rewrite than the other paraphrasers we've reviewed. Reviewers across 2026 hands-on tests keep landing on the same conclusion: this is the strongest dedicated paraphraser available, and everything else in the suite orbits it.
Premium on the annual plan costs less than Grammarly Pro, and less again with the student rate, while bundling a summarizer, citation generator, and plagiarism checker. Few writing subscriptions cover that much ground at this price.
The Citation Generator and the AI Detector work without limits on a free account. For a student building a reference list, the citation tool alone justifies signing up, and it's more generous than several rivals in this category.
Browser extensions for Chrome, Edge, and Safari, a Word add-in, a Google Docs integration, and native apps on four platforms. The Chrome extension holds a 4.7 rating on the Web Store, which for a tool with millions of installs is a good sign the day-to-day experience is solid.
Every rewrite is color-coded, every changed word is clickable, and the Humanizer has its own legend. In our test that transparency is what let us catch a meaning shift in seconds. Plenty of AI writing tools hand you a rewritten block and leave the diffing to you.
Paste, pick a mode, click Rephrase. The dashboard's idea prompts help newcomers, and the left sidebar keeps every tool one click away. We were productive in the first minute of the free account, which is more than we can say for most suites.
✗ Cons
A per-run cap of just over a hundred words and two modes means the free Paraphraser can't handle an essay without you feeding it in pieces. That's fine for evaluating the output, frustrating for actual work, and it's the single most common complaint in user reviews.
It catches mechanics and gives you four scores, then stops. There's no tone coaching, no wordiness nudges, no audience-aware suggestions. If grammar is the main job, Grammarly is the better checker, and its free plan is more useful than QuillBot's.
Independent tests through 2026 show Originality.ai catching QuillBot-paraphrased AI text roughly nine times out of ten, GPTZero not far behind, and Turnitin able to label output as coming from a paraphrasing tool. That last part can make a submission look worse, not better. For students this is an academic-integrity risk, not a loophole.
It misses a fair share of mixed human-and-AI text and wrongly flags a meaningful slice of human writing. That's an awkward combination for a tool QuillBot puts on its front page. When the result matters, use a purpose-built detector like Pangram.
Our 39-word test turned "long format articles" into "lengthy essays." Small, but wrong, and Standard is supposed to be the conservative mode. Accept a rewrite unread and this kind of drift ends up in your document.
QuillBot vs Alternatives
Its true rivals are the tools competing for the same rewrite-my-draft budget. The detector, fiction, and marketing tools further down are neighbors, not substitutes.
| Feature | Reviewed QuillBot | Grammarly | Wordtune |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Yes, word-capped paraphrasing | Yes, 100 AI prompts/month | Yes, 10 rewrites/day |
| Cheapest paid plan | $8.33/mo (annual) | $12/mo (annual) | $6.99/mo (annual) |
| Monthly, no commitment | $19.95 | $30 | $9.99 |
| Paraphrasing | 9 modes + custom | Rewrite suggestions | Tone-based rewrites |
| Grammar & style depth | Good, light on tone | Best-in-class | Basic |
| Plagiarism checker | Premium (Copyleaks) | Pro plan | No |
| Works inside other apps | Extensions, Word, Docs, native apps | Everywhere you type | Extension + web |
| Best for | Students, ESL writers, editors reworking drafts | Daily professional writing across apps | Sentence-level polish on a budget |
QuillBot vs Grammarly: The Comparison Most Readers Are Actually Making
The two get lumped together, but they do different jobs. Grammarly watches you type, everywhere, and nudges you on grammar, clarity, and tone as you go. QuillBot waits for a finished draft and rewrites it on request. In our test the QuillBot Grammar Checker caught two mechanical errors and gave four scores, then stopped. That's the gap: Grammarly's suggestions go deeper into tone and wordiness, and it works in more places.
On price, QuillBot wins: about a third less than Grammarly Pro on annual billing, and the gap is wider month to month. QuillBot also bundles a summarizer, citation generator, and plagiarism checker into the same plan, where Grammarly keeps its plagiarism checker on Pro. So: if you write all day in email, Slack, and documents, Grammarly earns its premium. If your work is reworking drafts, translating, and citing sources, QuillBot is the better buy. Both have free tiers; the honest advice is to run the same paragraph through each before you pay either of them.
Which Tool Is Right For You?
QuillBot
ReviewedBest for: students, non-native English writers, researchers, and editors who need to rewrite, shorten, or formalize existing drafts and want citations and a plagiarism check in the same subscription. The sweet spot is paraphrase-heavy work on a budget. It's the wrong choice if you need a drafting engine or a way past AI detectors.
Grammarly
Grammar & StyleBest for: people who write all day across email, chat, and documents and want real-time correction with tone and clarity coaching. It's the deeper grammar checker and the more useful free plan; QuillBot beats it on paraphrasing control and on price. Many writers keep both, using Grammarly free for typing and QuillBot Premium for rewriting.
Paraphraser.io
Paraphrasing OnlyBest for: people who want a browser-based paraphraser and nothing else. It's a lighter tool than QuillBot, without the surrounding suite, and we rated it 3.9 in our own review. Worth a look if QuillBot's bundle is more than you need and you'd rather not pay for tools you won't open.
Pangram
AI DetectionBest for: anyone who needs to know whether text is AI-written and can't afford a false accusation. Pangram is a detector, not a writing tool, so it complements QuillBot rather than replacing it. Independent academic testing puts its false-positive rate at 0 to 0.1%, and a June 2026 peer-reviewed evaluation found it caught both fully AI-written and humanized papers when older detectors missed most of them. If you check yourself with QuillBot's detector, check again here.
Sudowrite
Fiction WritingBest for: novelists and screenwriters who want an AI that drafts with them and remembers the story. Story Engine takes an outline to chapters, the Story Bible keeps characters and plot consistent across long manuscripts, and none of that exists in QuillBot. Pricing starts around $10 to $19 a month and climbs well past QuillBot Premium. A novelist would draft in Sudowrite and polish in QuillBot or Grammarly afterward; nobody should be choosing between them.
Jasper AI
Marketing ContentBest for: marketing teams that need brand-controlled long-form content generated from a brief: blog posts, campaign copy, landing pages. It's a generation platform where QuillBot is an editing one, and it costs a lot more. The natural pairing is Jasper for the draft and QuillBot to tighten and check it.
Two more from our AI writers roster, for completeness: Copy.ai generates marketing copy and MagicPost writes and schedules LinkedIn posts. Neither competes with QuillBot. Both produce drafts you might well run through it afterward.
Frequently Asked Questions
Should You Use QuillBot?
QuillBot does one thing better than anyone else in its category, rewriting text you already have, and surrounds it with a set of tools that are good enough to make the subscription an easy yes for the people it's built for. Students, non-native writers, researchers, and editors will get their money's worth from the annual plan, and the student rate makes it close to a formality.
The 4.3 rather than something higher comes down to two things. The free plan is too limited to be a real working tool, so you're paying before you've done much. And the two features QuillBot promotes hardest, the AI Detector and the Humanizer, are the two it does least well, with independent testing to prove it. Buy QuillBot for the Paraphraser, the citations, and the plagiarism check. Don't buy it to hide anything.
Our Recommendation
Start on the free plan and run a real paragraph of your own through Standard and Fluency, then through the Grammar Checker. If you find yourself hitting the word cap daily within a week, you've confirmed the use case: take the annual plan, or the student rate if you have a .edu email. If what you mostly wanted was grammar correction, compare Grammarly's free tier first and decide from there.