LanguageTool Review 2026

What is LanguageTool?

In March 2026 LanguageTool switched off its browser extension for free accounts, a big change for a tool that millions of people used without paying. That one decision reshapes the languagetool premium price and free limits question for anyone weighing it today: the free plan still works on languagetool.org, but only inside the web editor, with a cap of 2,000 characters per text field and three AI rephrasings a day. Everything that follows your cursor across Gmail, Google Docs or LinkedIn now sits behind Premium, unless you run your own server.

This review is research based. Prices come from LanguageTool's help center (an article dated 24 March 2026), limits from the official Premium page, and the extension change from LanguageTool's own help article plus coverage by Thurrott and Let's Data Science.

LanguageTool Premium price and free limits, in euros and dollars

LanguageTool's help center lists individual Premium in euros. The live Premium page loads prices through a script tied to your region and was not displaying amounts when we checked, so treat the figures below as the official list prices and confirm your local amount at checkout. No rupee price is published, and Indian buyers should expect to be billed in euros or US dollars, with the card's forex markup on top.

The gap between monthly and annual billing is unusually wide. Paying €19.90 every month adds up to roughly four times what the yearly plan does, so the monthly option only makes sense for a short project. LanguageTool offers a 14-day money-back guarantee on every Premium package, and press coverage of the extension change mentions a 14-day Premium trial. Prices include VAT, the Premium page says, which matters for European buyers more than for Indian ones.

What the March 2026 extension change means for free users

LanguageTool's help article, dated 24 March 2026, now describes the browser extension as a Premium product covering Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, along with the Windows, macOS and iOS apps. Free users are pointed to the grammar checker and paraphrasing tool on the website, both with usage caps.

In daily use this means copy, paste, check, copy back. For a student polishing a 300-word assignment, that is fine. For a marketer writing 40 emails a day, it gets old fast. The Word add-in page says you need a Microsoft 365 subscription, and the March help article groups the desktop and Office add-ons with the other Premium integrations.

LanguageTool Premium vs free: the checks you actually lose

The free tier is a competent spelling checker with grammar basics. Premium adds more than 20,000 extra grammar, punctuation and style rules for seven languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Polish and Portuguese), according to the pricing page. Those are the rules that catch clumsy phrasing, repeated words, inconsistent number formats and wrong prepositions rather than plain typos.

• Text length: 2,000 characters per field on free (around 300 English words) against 150,000 on Premium, which is enough for a full thesis chapter or a long report in one pass.
• Picky mode: limited on free, full on Premium. It adds stricter style suggestions and is the setting editors leave switched on for long reports.
• Paraphraser: three AI sentence rewrites a day on free, unlimited on Premium.
• Personal style guide and custom dictionary: the dictionary lets you teach the checker brand names, product terms and Indian proper nouns so they stop being flagged; the style guide sets rules such as preferred spellings.
• Integrations: browser, email and desktop add-ons are Premium only since March 2026.

If you write fewer than 2,000 characters at a time and do not mind working in a separate tab, Basic still covers the essentials. Anyone who needs suggestions inside the tools they already write in has to pay.

Why LanguageTool remains a multilingual grammar checker first

The Premium page says LanguageTool works in more than 30 languages, and the public developer list shows how uneven that support is. Catalan, English, French, German, Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish and Ukrainian get regular rule updates; Italian, Russian, Swedish and Greek show no rule changes at all in the last six months. German grammar check is where the product is strongest, which makes sense for a project that began as Daniel Naber's diploma thesis in Germany in 2003. German has more than 5,000 XML rules in the open-source engine and a long tail of compound-word logic.

For Indian users the picture is narrower. Hindi is not in the supported list. Tamil appears in the open-source engine with 210 rules, no spell check and no active maintenance, so it is closer to a placeholder than a usable checker. Marathi, Bengali, Telugu and other Indian languages are absent. If your work mixes English with a European language (export documentation in German, a Spanish client site, French marketing copy), multilingual proofreading in one account is the real reason to pick LanguageTool. If you write in English and Hindi, it will only help with the English half.

LanguageTool vs Grammarly for English and everything else

Grammarly is the obvious comparison and it is built around English. Its plans page lists Pro from $12 a month, which places it above LanguageTool's annual rate but below LanguageTool's monthly rate. QuillBot, which belongs to the same parent company as LanguageTool, is the other one people ask about; its annual Premium is $8.33 a month on the web and it keeps a free browser extension, which is why LanguageTool itself pointed free users there.

For English-only writers who want tone rewrites and generative drafting, Grammarly has the deeper feature set. For people who switch between English and German or Spanish several times a day, LanguageTool handles both inside one subscription, and the two-year plan is cheap enough to beat most rivals on cost per month.

Running a LanguageTool self hosted server

The checking engine is open source under the LGPL 2.1 (or later), and the repository on GitHub has around 15,000 stars. The developer docs describe a short setup: install Java 8 or newer, download the latest snapshot zip, unzip it and start the HTTP server with one java command on a port such as 8081. By default it only accepts local connections; a --public flag opens it to your network. Community Docker images exist if you prefer containers.

Three practical points. First, Thurrott and Let's Data Science both report that the browser extension still works when pointed at your own server, so this is the legitimate way to keep in-browser checking without a subscription. Second, the open-source engine does not include Premium's extra rules or its AI rewriting, so expect free-tier quality, not Premium quality. Third, text never leaves your machine or VPS, which suits legal, medical or client work where uploading drafts to a third party is a problem. The same HTTP api is what developers call from their own apps, using a simple POST request to the check endpoint.

Privacy, ownership and Learneo

Learneo, the US parent of QuillBot, Course Hero and Scribbr, announced its purchase of LanguageTool on 5 April 2023. At that point LanguageTool had more than 60,000 paying subscribers, according to Learneo's announcement. The product is still run as a separate brand, though the current terms of service name Learneo, Inc. as the contracting company. LanguageTool's service terms and privacy policy cover how cloud checks are processed; read them before sending confidential drafts through the hosted service. If data residency is a hard requirement, the self-hosted engine is the cleaner answer because nothing reaches LanguageTool at all.

Who should pay for LanguageTool in 2026

Freelance translators, export teams and anyone writing in German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese or Polish alongside English get the most out of Premium. The two-year plan at €99.90 is the best value, and the Team plan at €56.90 per user per year works for small agencies that want a shared dictionary of client names. Writers who only need English and want a free extension are better served elsewhere.

A sensible first week looks like this. Paste a real 2,000-character draft into the free web editor and note which errors it finds. Add your product and brand terms to the dictionary. If you need checking inside Gmail or Docs, start the Premium trial, install the extension for your browser and the Word add-in from Insert, then Get Add-ins in Word, and compare results with Picky mode switched on. If your team is technical and privacy matters more than AI rewrites, try the self-hosted server on a spare machine before buying anything.