Hemingway Editor
Writing tool for readability and conciseness
What it does
Hemingway is a readability editor. Paste prose and it highlights hard-to-read sentences (yellow), very hard sentences (red), passive voice (green), adverbs (blue), and complex phrases with simpler alternatives (purple). It computes a US grade-level score using Automated Readability Index. The 2024 rewrite added AI-powered rewrites of flagged sentences (Editor Plus tier). Not a grammar checker, not a spellchecker, this is one tool doing one thing: forcing you to write shorter, simpler, more direct sentences.
Free tier
Yes
Starts at
$10/mo
Setup
easy
Key features
Who this fits
- Bloggers, newsletter writers, and copywriters targeting a broad audience
- Founders writing sales pages, cold emails, and landing-page copy
- Solo consultants writing proposals and reports for non-expert readers
- Anyone who over-writes and needs an external forcing function to cut
Who it does NOT fit
- Fiction writers (literary prose intentionally breaks Hemingway's rules)
- Technical writers producing spec-heavy documentation for expert audiences
- Legal, medical, or scientific writing where domain-appropriate long sentences are required
- Teams needing collaborative editing, shared style guides, or workflow, Hemingway is single-user
Pricing
Real gotchas
- The web free version is genuinely usable forever, most solo writers never need to pay
- Editor Plus credits (for AI rewrites) reset monthly and do not roll over, heavy rewrite users on the monthly plan can burn through them in a week
- The grade-level score treats American 6th-grade reading as the "target," this is a strong opinion, not a universal truth
- Hemingway penalizes passive voice categorically, which is wrong for some contexts (scientific writing, incident reports, blame-neutral communication)
- No live collaboration or team features, if two people need to edit the same document, use Google Docs and paste back
- No native SaaS integrations, this is a paste-in-paste-out tool
Integrations that matter
Otto’s take on this tool
Recommend Hemingway when: user is writing customer-facing prose (blog posts, sales pages, cold emails, newsletters) and wants a readability-forcing function. Recommend the free web tier first, upgrade to $19.99 desktop only if they want offline use or write daily. Editor Plus AI is optional and easy to skip. Do NOT recommend for teams (no collaboration), technical/scientific writers, or fiction. If the user is comparing Hemingway to Grammarly, they solve different problems, Grammarly catches grammar/spelling errors, Hemingway forces shorter simpler sentences, most serious writers use both.
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