Best AI Writing Tools 2025

Artificial intelligence is absolutely everywhere these days, from AI Writing Tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini,

to music, photo, and video creators like Dall-E, HeyGen, and Suno AI. For many people who write on the job or in their personal life, AI apps that can collaborate on writing projects are quickly becoming indispensable.

Many of these tools are available, and many are excellent at what they do—you just need to find the best AI writing tool for your particular needs, because each one has a different focus and skill set. After testing over 18 options, the best AI writing tool overall—the one that is best suited for most people doing routine writing tasks—is ParagraphAI.

But I loved a number of other options as well. Grammarly, which you might know as a popular grammar checker, packs a powerful punch as a sort of super-powered AI writing tool for editing. I named Sudowrite as the best AI writing tool for creative writers like novelists and aspiring storytellers.

There are other great choices, too. Read on to find the best AI writing tool for your particular writing needs.

Best for:

• Punching up all sorts of writing projects
• Generating a wide variety of content types from the same prompt
• Experimenting with a range of styles, tones and editorial voices

Skip if:

• You don’t want to pay to get more than five uses per day

Every day in the office, most of us are faced with needing to write a lot of different kinds of content. There are emails and short text messages, articles, blog posts, project outlines and more.

ParagraphAI is built from the ground up to help you write all of that, offering customized responses for all those different kinds of content from the same prompt.

ParagraphAI asks you, “What do you want to write?” Here, you can enter a prompt as simple or detailed as you like. Then it gives you a slew of custom responses, as an outline, email, paragraph, article and more.

Because it gives you all of these results simultaneously, it makes it easy to create a unified communication strategy in which the same overall language is used for all the different content products you might need. And you’re not limited to the options ParagraphAI presents, because you can create custom output instructions—literally anything from, “write this as a product description,” to, “make it a poem.” Your custom outputs are added to the library of default outputs the app generates for you.

As you’d expect, ParagraphAI’s results are natural and human-sounding. The app lets you customize the way it reacts to your prompts with sliders that vary between formal and informal, friendly and assertive as well as pessimistic and optimistic.

If you want to tweak some text, you can ask ParagraphAI to fix it, where you use interactive controls to tweak aspects like length and formality to taste. You can even instruct the app to inject emojis into text—which is handy if you’re planning to send it as a text message or post it on social media.

I appreciate some other features it offers as well. Using the Reply feature, you can paste an email, Slack message or some other communication and ask it to draft a reply.

The app will craft a response you can use as is, or continue to customize to strike just the right tone. An optional context field lets you specify additional information that ParagraphAI might benefit from knowing as it writes its reply—like, “I am this person’s manager,” or, “I don’t know why I was included in this thread.”

And then there’s the Output Library, which is essentially a library of free plug-ins that add new capabilities to ParagraphAI. There’s an AI writing coach, a plug-in that transforms your passive voice text to active voice, makes your writing more concise and dozens (and dozens) more.

---

Best for:

• Catching and correcting common errors
• Using AI to brainstorm, edit, revise and polish your work
• Getting AI help and feedback wherever you write, from the web to Microsoft Word and Outlook

Skip if:

• Your primary goal is to create original content using AI prompts
• You expect to use more than about 30 AI prompts a day in your writing projects

In a world filled with artificially intelligent writing assistants designed to draft entire documents for you with limited intervention, Grammarly might feel somewhat pedestrian.

Grammarly is, at its core, a grammar checker—the free version suggests improvements to your writing based on spelling, punctuation and grammar, and makes recommendations about your clarity and tone. It works almost everywhere—in Google Docs and other websites via a browser plug-in, and in desktop apps like Word and Outlook using a desktop app download.

But Grammarly comes alive with the paid plan, which offers more comprehensive writing advice, along with AI-powered writing assistance that can help you outline your ideas and draft your copy.

The AI writing assistant can create detailed article outlines, as well as help you brainstorm, write articles, draft emails and create other kinds of documents. The most common way to use these tools is via a pop-up window in your browser, where you can type prompts like, “shorten this paragraph,” “make it more descriptive,” or, “outline this article.”

When you’re happy with what it’s done, you can add it to your active document with a click. Grammarly recommends a number of prompts—it can tell a story based on your core idea, help edit your existing article by suggesting improvements or places to cut and trim your copy and more. The tool also tries to keep you honest by offering to add a summary of all AI prompts into your article.

Grammarly also has features designed to guard against accusations of plagiarism. Grammarly Authorship, for example, tracks what you type and the sources you use, which you can share as evidence of originality.

The plagiarism scanner checks your work against the internet at large, and can help you generate citations if needed. As with any plagiarism scanner, its accuracy is far from 100%, and you shouldn’t rely on it exclusively, since it flagged some original content I wrote as, “resembling AI,” (which hurt my feelings) and didn’t detect some sentences which I copied and pasted right out of other webpages.

Even so, Grammarly is taking originality seriously and offers tools to help.

Grammarly is ideal if you’re mainly looking for a tool that can serve as a writing coach and editor to help you improve the quality of your own prose. It can do a lot more than that, as well, thanks to a robust AI assistant that can interactively write with or for you.

If you find yourself loving Grammarly too much, though, you might find yourself running into the 1,000 prompts per month limit—even if you pay for Grammarly Pro.

---

Best for:

• Collaborating with AI to write and improve fiction
• Blasting through writer’s block
• Mastering the mechanics of storytelling and worldbuilding

Skip if:

• You are looking for a free tool
• You are focused on non-fiction or business writing

Sudowrite is built from the ground up for fiction writers, with a deep bench of tools explicitly designed to help creative writers plot out their ideas, build worlds and characters, work through writer’s block and interactively complete stories.

The developers behind Sudowrite seem to really understand the fiction writing process—the app starts by giving writers a place to build their Story Bible.

With this feature, you can catalog your cast of characters and detail their attributes, describe your story genre and style, enter a plot synopsis, worldbuilding details and more. Then, when you ask Sudowrite for help, it draws on these details to help you write the story you intended.

One of the coolest moments I’ve ever had with an AI tool was laying the groundwork for a story, starting to write a chapter and asking Sudowrite to pick up from there. It’ll give you multiple options for how the scene might unfold while staying within the guardrails of your Story Bible, and you can insert the one you like best into your chapter-in-progress.

Sudowrite can also rewrite a problematic section for you, offer to flesh out idea by describing a selected phrase in more detail, or help you brainstorm characters, plot points, dialog and more.

Sudowrite is extensible, too; the site works with a community of plug-ins that deliver new capabilities. I added the Characters Prompt The Author plug-in, for example, which lets you ask a character in your story for feedback on a scene.

Characters can give you really interesting insights into choices you’ve made, things to think about next and even ways to better use the character itself.

This is an especially valuable tool for aspiring novelists who struggle with getting started or need inspiration, collaboration and feedback to keep a story moving. Sudowrite is the closest I’ve found to working with a live coauthor—the suggestions it makes are genuinely useful and have enough humanity that you won’t need to rewrite every suggestion it makes.

---

Best for:

• College students and researchers
• Integrating academic-focused AI writing suggestions with Word, Google Docs and Overleaf
• Getting fast answers about the content within large PDF documents

Skip if:

• You don’t have a laser-like focus on writing within academia

In the same way creative writers have unique needs that can’t be handled by general-purpose AI tools, the world of academia is another deeply specialized domain. A handful of AI writing tools try to meet the needs of students and other academics, but I found that Paperpal does the best (and most thorough) overall job.

For starters, Paperpal offers the usual suite of spelling, grammar and language suggestions, similar to Grammarly. Though like any AI tool, you should be careful with its suggestions; it’s also susceptive to error. On more than one occasion, it goofed, such as the time it suggested that something, “built from the ground up,” should be, “built from the ground-up,” which regrettably means something very different and far less pleasant.

But from there, Paperpal is laser-focused on students, supporting academics from high school through the doctorate level. Give the app some draft copy, be it part of a term paper, essay, dissertation or journal article, and it can rewrite, paraphrase or trim your copy, depending on your needs. Everything Paperpal does is with a scholarly style in mind, so the suggestions it makes are intended to improve clarity, coherence, vocabulary and academic tone.

Even better, Paperpal can help you develop your work from start to finish; armed with a thesis statement, Paperpal can suggest a complete outline, helping you think through your idea in detail. It can also help you brainstorm, riffing suggestions to help you zero in on a specific direction. Paperpal’s Research and Cite module lets you search through what the developer claims are 200 million papers for citations and references, too.

You can also run a plagiarism checker, called Plagiarism Check, which looks for similarities in how your paper is worded. The Submission Checks tool runs a set of language and technical checks as an aid before you submit your work to your professor or a journal for publishing.

Paperpal does a lot more, too. Upload a PDF, for example, and Paperpal lets you ask it questions, so you can get thorough and detailed answers quickly about the content of even lengthy PDFs you don’t have time to read or study. And you’re not stuck working in a web browser; if you prefer, you can install plug-ins to work in Word, Google Docs and Overleaf.

---

Best for:

• Newbies dipping a toe into AI writing tools
• People who want a super-simplified interface and not a lot of options
• Getting help rewriting and riffing on your first draft

Skip if:

• You want to interactively chat with or explain your needs to your AI tool
• You’re looking for advanced features like research, PDF searches or brainstorming

The downside of many AI writing tools is that while they pack a lot of features, they can be difficult to master—just knowing how to get started is often a challenge. That’s what drew me to Wordtune, which presents a refreshingly simple interface. Just start typing, and you can use the roughly half-dozen buttons at the top of the page to trigger very useful and easy-to-understand tools.

Select a sentence and choose Rewrite, for example, to see a slew of options you can insert into your document. The Formal and Casual buttons do just what they imply—they rewrite selected text to better suit your tone and audience.

There are Expand and Shorten buttons, which help you to riff on an idea to lengthen the copy or trim it down to its essence. A Synonyms button offers alternatives to a selected word. You can use the Expand button to let Wordtune pick up where you left off and continue writing for you, or you can ask the app to elaborate on one of your ideas, offer examples, give a counterexample and more. And of course, it also offers spelling and grammar suggestions.

There aren’t a lot of advanced tools here. Students can’t use it for research or citations, and there’s no brainstorming or outlining tools for creative writers, but that’s sort of the point.

This is an AI writing tool that anyone can start using in minutes, and the suggestions it offers are great for both casual users and professionals who need help without a complex interface or intimidating learning curve. As your comfort level with AI tools grows, you might want to graduate to something like ParagraphAI, but it’s hard to beat Wordtune for everyday writing tasks.

The Basic plan won’t get you very far—the 10 daily uses is really only good to get a sense of whether the app is good for you. After that, you’ll need to pay—and even the $7 per month Advanced subscription offers too little for most users (30 rewrites and suggestions per day), so the $10 per month Unlimited plan is probably the best fit for most people.

---

Why Trust Forbes Vetted

The Forbes Vetted team has published a large library of tech guides, including reviews of a variety of online tools and home office essentials like the best document scanners and all-in-one printers. Notably, we are also a trusted source to recommend the best resume writing services.

• Executive editor Dave Johnson wrote and oversaw the creation of this guide. He has a particular interest in AI and has tested every AI writing tool in this roundup, as well as a number of contenders which did not make the cut to be recommended as a “best” product. He’s written about consumer tech since the days of the PalmPilot and has authored about three dozen books on mobile tech, robotics, digital photography and more.
• This article was edited by Rebecca Isaacs, Forbes Vetted’s consumer tech and electronics editor. She has been a tech journalist for over six years and is an expert in a broad range of consumer tech products and services.
• We will continue to monitor the best AI writing tools and will routinely update this guide to provide the most current information about pricing and offerings. We’ll add to this list or replace recommendations as the AI tool landscape changes.

---

How We Chose The Best AI Writing Tools

To begin researching this story, we conducted an exhaustive search for AI writing tools—apps and services that seemed to offer the ability to assist with writing tasks using some form of artificial intelligence. We looked for tools that, at a minimum, offered suggestions for improving text that has already been written as well as generate text from prompts or existing copy.

• Armed with that those candidates (there were roughly one and a half dozen to consider) we created accounts and started using them. When there were free accounts or free trials available, we started there to see what you could do without spending any money. After that, we acquired subscriptions to evaluate the paid set of features. In most cases, the free feature set was quite limited, so we spend most of my time testing what each app could do with a subscription.
• When the AI writing tool worked in a variety of environments—such as on its own website or within Google Docs, for example—we tested each situation to see how well the features worked and how user friendly they were. In each case, we paid close attention not to just how well the app worked, but for whom it seemed to be designed, so we could make useful recommendations in the final article.
• We tried to use each app for its intended purposes (for example, creative writing or drafting work emails) multiple times over multiple days.
• In addition, we talked to a number of experts to get their perspective on AI writing tools—both the ones they recommend and how they use them. We spoke to AI writing tool users like Joshua Lisec, a NY Times bestselling coauthor and an international bestselling ghostwriter as well as Sara Lobkovich, an OKR coach, career fulfillment coach and author at Red Currant Collective. We also interviewed an AI technologist—Mike McGowan,
  lead AI architect and developer at Brainiest AI.
• In total, the initial research and testing for this article took roughly two months.

---