A Grammarly Alternative for Writers Who Cite
Grammarly is a great proofreader, but it does not draft or cite. If you need a writing tool that does both for the same annual price, here is what switching to Dock looks like.
People rarely leave Grammarly because it is bad at its job. They leave because its job is narrow. Grammarly corrects what you have already written. It does not help you produce a draft, and it has no idea what a citation is. If your writing has grown past proofreading into research, reports, or anything with a reference list, you have outgrown the tool, not failed it.
Dock is a writing editor built for exactly that next step. This is what the switch actually involves.
- They need citations. A reference list is not a grammar problem, so Grammarly cannot help. Formatting sources by hand, or trusting a chatbot to invent them, is the gap people feel most.
- They want help drafting, not just fixing. Grammarly reacts to finished text. It will not help you get the words down in the first place.
- They are paying for one job. Grammarly Pro is $144 a year for grammar and tone. The same money in Dock buys grammar-adjacent help plus citations plus a full editor.
- Citations from real papers. Search an academic index, insert a source with its DOI, and format it in any of seven styles. Switch the whole document between styles in one move.
- Drafting that asks first. Improve, rewrite, expand, shorten, or summarize any passage, with every suggestion staged for you to accept or reject.
- A real document. Track changes, version history, voice dictation, and export to Word, PDF, and Markdown.
- The same broad reach. A Chrome extension works in any text box across the web, and command-line and MCP access let you write from your terminal too.
All for $144 a year, the same as Grammarly Pro.
Be clear-eyed about this. Grammarly's real-time correction across every app on your machine is more mature than Dock's, and it is always on in the background. If your single most important need is the best possible grammar and tone engine running everywhere, Grammarly still does that better.
Many people keep Grammarly as a system-wide proofreader and use Dock as the place they write cited documents. That is a perfectly good outcome, and the two do not fight.
There is nothing to migrate. Dock starts as a blank editor; you write in it. Try one real document, with a citation or two, before you decide anything.
Start free at Start Writing, see the full editor at Dock Editor, or compare them feature by feature at Dock vs Grammarly.