Dock vs Grammarly
Grammarly polishes the words you already wrote. Dock helps you write them, cite real sources, and work from anywhere you type. A fair comparison, including where Grammarly is the better pick.
Grammarly and Dock get put side by side a lot, and the comparison is a little unfair to both. Grammarly is a writing assistant that watches what you type and fixes it: grammar, spelling, clarity, tone, and a layer of generative AI on top. Dock is a writing editor: a place to draft a document, cite real sources, and ship it. One cleans your prose. The other helps you produce it.
They even cost the same. Grammarly Pro is $12 a month billed annually, which is $144 a year. Dock Unlimited is also $144 a year. So this is not a price argument. It is a question of what the same money should buy you.
If your writing is already drafted and you want it to read better, Grammarly is excellent and you should probably keep it. If you are producing the writing itself, especially anything that needs citations, Dock is built for that and Grammarly is not.
| Grammarly | Dock | |
|---|---|---|
| Core job | Correct and refine existing text | Draft, cite, and finish documents |
| Grammar and tone | Best in class, real-time, everywhere | Solid, through approve-first AI actions |
| Citations | None | APA, MLA, Chicago, and more, from a real paper index |
| Source quality | Not applicable | Verifiable papers with DOIs, not invented references |
| Document editor | No, it edits inside other apps | Yes, a full writing workspace |
| Browser reach | Extension across the web and desktop | Extension in any text box, plus a real editor |
| Agent access | No | Command line and MCP, same documents |
| Free tier | Yes | Yes |
| Paid price | $12/mo billed annually ($144/yr) | $12/mo billed annually ($144/yr) |
Grammarly has spent over a decade on one hard problem: catching mistakes in real time, in any app, without getting in your way. It is very good at it.
- It is everywhere you write, instantly. Email, docs, social, comment boxes. The corrections appear as you type, with no panel to open.
- Its grammar and tone engine is more mature. For pure correctness and tone-shifting on text you already have, it is the benchmark.
- It does not require you to change tools. You keep writing where you write. Grammarly just makes it cleaner.
If that is the whole job, Grammarly wins, and switching to Dock would be a downgrade for that specific task.
Dock is not trying to be a better proofreader. It is trying to be the place the writing happens, which is a different and larger job.
- Citations from real papers. Dock searches an academic index and returns sources with titles, authors, and DOIs you can verify. It formats them in APA, MLA, Chicago, Harvard, IEEE, AMA, or Vancouver and switches the whole document between styles in one move. Grammarly has nothing here.
- Drafting, not just correcting. Improve, rewrite, expand, shorten, or summarize any passage, with every suggestion staged for you to accept or reject before it touches the page.
- It writes from outside the browser. Drive the same documents from the
agentdockcommand line or an MCP client like Cursor. For people who live in a terminal, this does not exist anywhere in Grammarly. - Real export. Word with tracked changes intact, PDF, Markdown, and HTML, because the document is yours to take with you.
Yes, and many people do. Grammarly runs as a layer across your whole machine; Dock is where you write the serious, cited documents. They do not conflict. If you only want to pay for one and you write research, reports, or anything with a reference list, Dock covers more of the actual work for the same annual price.
Will I get flagged for AI if I use Grammarly? Grammar corrections are not AI generation, and detectors are not hunting for fixed commas. The risk enters with generated text, from Grammarly's generative features or anyone else's. If your school or employer has an AI policy, the defensible position is a tool that records which changes you accepted, which is how every AI action in Dock works.
Can a professor tell if you use Grammarly? Not from correction alone; polished grammar is what professors ask for. What raises questions is prose that stops sounding like you, which happens when a tool rewrites instead of corrects. Accepting changes one at a time, in either tool, keeps your voice attached to your name.
Is Grammarly still worth it in 2026? For always-on correction across every app, yes, nothing else does that job as well. The honest question is whether correction is still your biggest writing problem. Once the work needs sources and drafting, the same $144 buys a different category.
Pick Grammarly if your writing is already happening somewhere you like, and you want a tireless editor catching mistakes and adjusting tone across every app you use.
Pick Dock if you are producing documents, you cite sources, or you want an assistant that drafts with you and reaches you in your editor, your browser, and your command line, for the same $144 a year.
Try Dock free on a real document at Start Writing, or see the full feature set at Dock Editor. Pricing is on the pricing page.