Comparison
A Grammarly alternative for Mac: Echo vs Grammarly.
One reads over your shoulder as you type and suggests corrections. The other stays silent until you select something and ask. That is the whole difference, and it decides which one suits you.
· Written by the people who make Echo
The short version
Grammarly is a proofreader that is always on: it sits across your apps and your browser, marking mistakes and offering rewrites while you write. Echo is on-demand and broader: select any text in any Mac app, press one shortcut, and it will clean up the grammar — or translate it, reply to it, summarise it, or turn it into an email — writing the result straight back over your selection. If you want a safety net under everything you type, Grammarly. If you want a fast way to finish a specific piece of text without leaving the app, Echo.
What Grammarly is good at
Grammarly has been doing one thing for a long time and does it well: catching the mistakes you did not notice. It runs continuously, across a very wide range of apps and websites, and flags problems as they appear — which is genuinely valuable, because the errors that survive a reread are exactly the ones you cannot see. It also covers Windows, browsers and mobile keyboards, and offers team features like shared style guides.
The standalone Grammarly Editor app for Mac was retired in 2024; what continues is Grammarly for Mac, the assistant that works across your other apps, plus the browser extension. Pricing at the time of writing is a free tier, with Grammarly Pro at $12 a month billed annually or $30 month-to-month.
If your main worry is “I do not want to send an email with a typo in it”, that is Grammarly’s home ground, and Echo does not compete for it.
What Echo does differently
Echo does nothing until you ask. There is no underlining as you type, no assistant panel, no suggestions to dismiss — which some people find restful and others will miss, and it is worth being clear about which of those you are.
When you do ask, it does more than correct. Select text anywhere on your Mac and press ⌘1, and five tools are one keystroke away: Clean Up fixes grammar, spelling and clumsy phrasing while keeping your voice; Translate turns the passage into another language; Reply drafts an answer to the message you are looking at; Summarize condenses something long; Write as Email turns rough notes into a proper email. The result replaces your selection in place, or goes to the clipboard if you would rather paste it yourself.
Two of those — Translate and Summarize — are about text you are reading rather than text you are writing, which is a job a proofreader does not do at all. And because Echo reads the selection through macOS Accessibility, it is not a list of supported apps: anywhere you can highlight text, it works.
Side by side
When it acts
Echo: Only when you select text and press the shortcut.
Grammarly: Continuously, as you type, across apps and the browser.
What it does
Echo: Five jobs: translate, reply, clean up, summarise, write as email — plus your own instructions.
Grammarly: Grammar, spelling, clarity, tone and rewriting suggestions, with generative AI features on top.
Text you are reading
Echo: Handled — translate or summarise anything you can select.
Grammarly: Not the focus; it is built around what you write.
How the result arrives
Echo: Replaces your selection in place, or is copied for you to paste.
Grammarly: As suggestions you accept, inline where you are writing.
Coverage
Echo: Any macOS app where text can be selected, through Accessibility.
Grammarly: A very wide set of apps and sites, and Windows, browsers and mobile too.
Your text afterwards
Echo: Nothing kept or logged on our servers. A local history stays on your Mac, yours to delete or expire.
Grammarly: Processed through Grammarly’s cloud service; see their privacy documentation.
Price at the time of writing
Echo: 7-day free trial, then $9.99 / month or $79 / year.
Grammarly: Free tier; Pro $12 / month billed annually, $30 month-to-month.
Platform
Echo: macOS 13 or later, native Swift, Apple Silicon and Intel.
Grammarly: macOS, Windows, browsers, mobile.
The honest version of “alternative”
Swapping Grammarly for Echo is not like swapping one proofreader for another. You would be giving up continuous checking — the thing that catches the typo you were never going to see — and gaining a way to finish text on demand, in more languages and more forms, without leaving the app you are in.
For a lot of people that is the right trade, particularly if the corrections had started to feel like noise, or if a meaningful part of the day is spent reading and replying rather than composing long documents. For others it plainly is not, and the two sit together perfectly well: nothing about Echo interferes with Grammarly running.
Which one, when
Grammarly fits better when
- You want everything you type checked automatically, without asking.
- Catching typos and grammar slips is the main worry.
- You work on Windows, in browsers or on mobile as much as on a Mac.
- You need team style guides or brand-tone controls.
- You prefer inline suggestions you accept one at a time.
Echo fits better when
- You would rather nothing watched you type, and asked only when you want it.
- The job is often translate, reply or summarise — not only correct.
- You want the finished text written back in place, in whatever app you are in.
- You work on a Mac and want something native and instant.
- You would rather your writing was not kept anywhere afterwards.
Questions
For the “fix this text” half of Grammarly, yes — and Echo goes further, because it also translates, replies, summarises and turns notes into an email. For the “watch me as I type and flag mistakes” half, no: Echo only acts when you ask it to. Which one you want depends on whether you would rather be corrected continuously or served on demand.
No, and that is deliberate. Nothing runs in the background reading what you write. When you want a passage fixed, you select it and press one shortcut — Clean Up repairs grammar, spelling and clumsy phrasing while keeping your voice, and writes the result back in place.
Echo works in any Mac app where you can select text, because it reads the selection through macOS Accessibility instead of integrating app by app. That covers Mail, Safari, Slack, Notes, Pages, Word, PDFs and code editors alike. Grammarly reaches into a very wide set of apps and browsers too, and additionally covers Windows and mobile, which Echo does not.
At the time of writing, Grammarly Pro is $12 a month billed annually, or $30 month-to-month, and there is a free tier. Echo is $9.99 a month or $79 a year after a 7-day free trial, with no free tier beyond the trial.
Clean Up is built to fix the writing without flattening it — the point is that it still sounds like you. If you want a specific register, type your own instruction instead of using a preset, and Echo follows it.
Like Grammarly and every other cloud service of this kind, the text travels over the network to be processed — over HTTPS, to Echo’s own backend. What happens next is the part worth knowing: we keep no copy of it and write no log of it, so there is no cloud history of your writing on our side. On your Mac, Echo keeps a local history so you can look back at what you did — it is never synced or uploaded, you can delete any entry, and you can have it drop the text automatically after a while.
Echo is free to try for 7 days. Download it for macOS, or see how Clean Up works.