Grammarly vs local AI: what you give up, what you gain

Disclosure first: I build Outlier, so I'm an interested party. I've tried to write this the way I'd want a competitor to write about me. Grammarly is a specialist, and at catching errors while you type it does things a general local model doesn't do at all.

What Grammarly actually is

Grammarly checks grammar, spelling, clarity and tone and rewrites text, as an overlay that follows you around the machine: Mac (macOS 11 Big Sur or newer) and Windows apps, browser extensions, iPhone and Android keyboards, a web editor, Google Docs and Office integrations. Its reach across apps and programs is the product: it corrects you in Apple Mail, in Pages, in a Jira ticket, without you thinking about it.

Pricing, precisely. Free is $0: spelling and grammar correction, tone detection, 100 AI prompts a month. Pro is $30 per member per month, $60 quarterly, or $144 per year: that last figure is where the $12/month in marketing comes from, an annual average rather than a month-to-month price. Pro adds 2,000 prompts a month, full-sentence rewrites, tone adjustment, plagiarism and AI-text detection, one style guide and one brand tone. Enterprise is quote-based: unlimited prompts, SAML SSO, SCIM, BYOK encryption, DLP.

None of it runs on your computer. Grammarly's own documentation is blunt, "your computer must be connected to the internet", and there's no offline mode. Checked text goes to AWS servers in the United States: TLS 1.2 in transit, AES-256 at rest. Editor documents stay there until you delete them or close the account.

On individual accounts, content is used for model training by default. The control is Product Improvement and Training (at account.grammarly.com/security/privacy for Free and Premium, under admin data settings for Pro) and switching it off stops new content being used for training. Grammarly's documentation does not say that data already collected under the setting is deleted. Enterprise, sales-purchased and Education accounts start opted out; everyone else opted in. Grammarly says it uses aggregated, de-identified samples rather than raw documents, doesn't sell content, and bars its model providers from training on user text. Stronger than most, still promises about words that already left your laptop.

What the local version looks like

Outlier is a Mac app for Apple Silicon (M1 or later, macOS 15+) that runs the model on the machine. No account, no meter, and it works with Wi-Fi off. Six tiers, from Nano (4B, 2.37 GB, 6 GB RAM) through Core 27B (15.13 GB, 24 GB RAM) to Plus 397B-a17b, which streams experts off the SSD and wants 64 GB. Nano and Lite are free; Pro is a one-time Outlier Lifetime Licence at $49.

What it isn't is a system-wide overlay: it doesn't sit inside Apple Mail or watch browser text fields. That's the main thing you give up, along with no mobile app, no Windows or Linux build and no cloud sync. Web research exists but is Pro-only and opt-in, the free tiers have no web search at all.

Grammarly and Outlier, side by side

Where Grammarly is clearly better

• Reach. One install puts correction everywhere you type, desktop and phone. Matching that from a Mac app means solving system-wide text injection, which is hard on macOS. I haven't.
• Specialist correction quality. Not a chatbot pointed at prose: the output of a long grammatical-error-correction research program (GECToR is on their GitHub, Apache 2.0). For commas, agreement and house style, a specialist is the right instrument.
• The free tier is real. Core correction and tone detection at $0, not a crippled demo. Plenty of people never need to pay.
• Languages. More than 20 supported languages including English, with American and British English listed separately. On-device that's one very large model or many small ones; I can't match it today.
• Compliance depth. SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, ISO 27701 and ISO/IEC 42001:2023 (the AI-management standard, certified 2025), plus stated HIPAA, CCPA and GDPR compliance, SSO and SCIM. A one-person company in Michigan cannot carry that paperwork; if procurement has a checklist, this decides it.
• No hardware requirement. Runs on any Mac back to macOS 11, including Intel Macs from 2018 or newer, with no download and no battery cost. Outlier needs Apple Silicon and 6 GB of RAM minimum.
• A higher ceiling, plus team tooling. Anthropic, OpenAI and Azure appear on the published subprocessor list, so hard rewrites aren't bounded by laptop memory; shared style guides and analytics matter at fifty seats.

Where running it locally is better

• Nothing leaves. No opt-out to hunt for, because there's no upload. For unpublished manuscripts, client files, legal or medical drafts, or non-US residency rules, that's structural rather than a setting.
• It works offline. On a plane, on bad hotel wifi, in a basement.
• No meter. 100 prompts a month free, 2,000 on Pro, unlimited only on Enterprise. Locally, nothing ticks down.
• No account. The free tiers work straight after download: no email, no usage history attached to an identity.
• Price, honestly told. Grammarly Pro is $30 a month, or $144 a year billed annually. A $49 Outlier Lifetime Licence costs about a third of one year of Grammarly Pro billed annually, and nothing after that.
• Model transparency. You know which model answered, you can pin a version, and the Nano, Lite, Quick and Core weights are published at huggingface.co/Outlier-Ai (Plus and Vision 3.8 come from public community conversions of Qwen's models). Grammarly names its AI subprocessors collectively, not which one serves which feature.
• Surface stability. Grammarly for Word on Mac was discontinued and Grammarly for Microsoft Office is being retired; the parent company rebranded to Superhuman in late 2025 and the privacy policy moved off grammarly.com. None of that makes the checker worse, but the surfaces move.

The quality question, answered honestly

I don't have a head-to-head grammatical-error-correction benchmark against Grammarly, and I won't invent one. What I have is a 54-prompt side-by-side with Claude Opus, published so you can compare the answers yourself, plus a blind slice of SWE-bench Verified at 46%. Those are assistant and coding tests; they say nothing about comma splices.

My read from daily use: a 27B general model is good at the structural half of editing: this paragraph buries its point, this sentence carries two ideas, this draft runs forty percent long. It's weaker at the mechanical half, where you want every instance flagged, not most of them noticed. Grammarly is built for the mechanical half and it shows.

Which one fits your writing

Pick Grammarly if you want correction everywhere you type without thinking about it; you write in more than one language or a non-American English variant; procurement needs certifications; you're on a 2018-or-newer Intel Mac, a PC, an 8 GB laptop or a phone; or your team needs shared style guides.

Run it locally if your drafts are confidential: client work, legal filings, medical notes, unpublished writing; you edit offline; you'd rather your text not train anyone's model; or you don't want an account.

Use both, which is what I'd tell most people. Grammarly Free does the mechanical pass everywhere you type; a local model handles what shouldn't leave the machine, plus structural rewriting.