Hemingway Editor
AI-powered clarity-focused writing editor
Overview
Hemingway Editor flags overly complex sentences, passive voice, and adverbs — now with an AI rewrite feature that proposes simpler alternatives. Free web tier; desktop app and AI premium are paid.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 11 Jul 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- Readability grade
- Passive voice & adverb flags
- Wordiness highlights
- 5,000 AI sentence rewrites/mo
- Unlimited grammar fixes
- AI synonym suggestions
- 10,000 AI sentence rewrites/mo
- All 5K features
- Priority processing
- 10,000 AI sentences/user/mo
- Role-based admin controls
- Priority email support
Use cases
ASEAN Perspective
Hemingway Editor in Southeast Asia
ASEAN-region availability and pricing notes coming soon. Drop the editorial team a note via /contact/ if you can supply local context (Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia/Thailand/Vietnam).
Hemingway Editor is a long-standing writing tool that highlights hard-to-read sentences, passive voice, adverbs, and complex phrasing, with a readability grade to push you toward clearer prose. The free web app remains genuinely useful on its own; Editor Plus layers on AI rewriting and tone adjustment starting at $8.33/month for 5,000 AI sentences, with a 10K-sentence tier and a team plan above that.
Caveats: its rules are blunt and opinionated, sometimes flagging deliberate stylistic choices or necessary adverbs with the same urgency as genuinely bad sentences, and it's not a grammar/spelling checker on Grammarly's level. Following every suggestion can make prose overly stilted, and AI rewrites burn through the monthly sentence quota fast on long documents. English-only by design, so ASEAN readiness is limited to English writing. No public API.
What people say
Hemingway Editor has never tried to be Grammarly, and more than a decade in, that focus is still its biggest strength and its biggest limit. Paste in a paragraph and it grades reading level, flags passive voice, circles adverbs, and highlights sentences dense enough to lose a reader — rules-based, instant, and free on the web with no account required.
The newer AI layer, Editor Plus, adds sentence rewrites for clarity, tone and structure, priced from $8.33/month (billed annually at $100/year) for 5,000 AI sentences a month; a $12.50/month tier doubles that allowance, and a team plan sits above it. Reviewers rate the AI additions decent but modest — useful for a quick tone shift, not a substitute for a real editor, and rewriting a whole document burns through the monthly sentence allowance fast.
The core complaint hasn't changed since the free tool first shipped: Hemingway's rules are blunt. It flags idioms, deliberate style choices and necessary adverbs with the same red highlight as genuinely bad sentences, and it starts to lag past roughly 50 pages of text. There's no browser extension, no document sharing, no track changes, and no public API — this is a single-document tool for a final clarity pass, not a writing platform. For students and bloggers tightening prose before publishing, the free version alone is worth bookmarking; the AI premium is a nice-to-have, not a reason to switch from something else.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
Notable facts
- Hemingway Editor was built by two brothers (Adam and Ben Long) in a weekend as a side project and became viral without any marketing.
- The Grade 9 readability target was chosen because the New York Times writes at approximately Grade 9 — accessible to 90% of adult readers in the US.
- Hemingway Editor has no AI generation — it purely analyses text, making it one of the few modern writing tools that adds value without any LLM component.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Hemingway Editor's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Hemingway Editor unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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