Hemingway Editor vs Writer's brew

Hemingway Editor highlights hard-to-read sentences, passive voice, adverbs, and weak phrasing so you can tighten prose before publishing. The free online readability checker scores your text at a grade level and marks yellow sentences (4+ grades above average) and red sentences (6+ grades above) in real time with unlimited word count. Hemingway Editor Plus adds one-click AI rewrites for grammar, clarity, tone, and custom editing instructions.

Grammarly and similar tools focus on correctness; Hemingway focuses on readability first. It targets an 8th-grade reading level because that is the average adult comprehension level in the United States, and it shows exactly which sentences trip readers up rather than just an overall score. The Plus tier rewrites up to 5,000 or 10,000 sentences monthly while keeping your voice, and the company states it will not sell your data or use it to train AI models.

Bloggers, marketers, and academics use it to cut jargon and wordiness. The classic desktop app (Hemingway Editor 3 at $19.99) works offline on Mac and PC without AI features. Plus subscribers get eight tone presets (confident, formal, friendly, persuasive, and more), document review feedback, context-aware synonym suggestions, and file import/export with target reading level controls.

Writer's brew is a macOS writing assistant that rewrites, summarizes, translates, and replies to text you highlight in any app. It runs from the menu bar, a Spotlight-style popup, or keyboard shortcuts, and includes snippets, 15+ text utilities, and OCR that pulls words from images before sending them to AI. You bring your own OpenAI API key, so usage costs go to OpenAI rather than a monthly SaaS bill.

Most writing assistants live inside one browser tab or web editor. Writer's brew works system-wide on macOS 15.0 or later, which suits people who jump between Notes, email, Slack, and docs all day. The trade-off is it is Mac-only, requires your own OpenAI key, and skips the managed cloud workflow that all-in-one web tools provide.

Product managers, founders, and students who draft in multiple native Mac apps are the core audience. Power users pair it with Raycast or PopClip extensions for one-click rewrites, while snippet forms with placeholders like {date} and {clipboard} handle repetitive replies.