Readable writing is a choice, not a talent. After hundreds of blog posts and several published books, the single edit that improves my drafts most reliably is still the boring one: shorter sentences, fewer adverbs, active voice. The Hemingway App exists to force exactly that edit, and it does it by making your weakest sentences impossible to ignore.
The tool has changed a lot since most reviews of it were written. What used to be one free web page is now three products: the free online editor everyone knows, a paid AI-powered version called Hemingway Editor Plus, and the old one-time-purchase desktop app, now sold as Hemingway Editor Classic. This review covers all three, with 2026 pricing I verified on the developer's site, and an honest take on the writers it will frustrate.
My short version: the free editor belongs in every nonfiction writer's toolkit, the paid version competes in a crowded field, and fiction writers should use it sparingly and skeptically.
What Is the Hemingway App?
The Hemingway App is a readability editor named after Ernest Hemingway, whose famously spare prose is the tool's north star. You paste in text, and it highlights problems in color: sentences that are hard to read, adverbs, passive voice, and phrases with simpler alternatives. It also scores your text with a readability grade level, along with word count and reading time.
Unlike a grammar checker, it does not explain rules or catch typos in the free version. It answers one question: will a reader glide through this, or stall? That focus is the whole point. Research on web reading behavior shows most visitors scan pages rather than read them, and prose that fights the scanner loses the reader. If you write anything meant for a screen, that is your audience.
Today the developer, Boondoggle Studio, offers the tool in three forms. The web editor at hemingwayapp.com is free with no word processor bells and whistles. Hemingway Editor Plus layers AI on top: one-click sentence rewrites, advanced grammar fixes, tone adjustment, and document-level feedback. And Hemingway Editor Classic is the offline desktop app for Mac and Windows, a $19.99 one-time purchase that includes formatting, file import and export, and one-click publishing to WordPress, but none of the AI features.
How the Hemingway Editor Works
Open the web editor and you land in a page of sample text with the analysis sidebar already lit up. Replace it with your own draft, either by pasting or by switching into Write mode and drafting directly in the app. Write mode hides the highlights so you can get words down without the tool nagging you mid-sentence, which matters more than it sounds. Editing while drafting is how paragraphs die.
Switch back to Edit mode and the highlights return. Hover over any highlight and the app tells you what it objects to, and for some issues suggests a specific replacement. Fix the sentence and the highlight disappears, which turns editing into a strangely satisfying game of clearing colors off the page. When you are done, copy the cleaned text back into your word processor, or export directly if you use the desktop app.
The readability grade in the sidebar is the number I watch. It estimates the US school grade needed to understand your text. Famous novels routinely score around grade five or six, and my own rule for web writing is to stay under grade nine. That is not dumbing down. It is respecting the fact that clear ideas survive simple sentences, and muddled ideas hide inside complicated ones. It is also one of the fastest writing strategies for making an average draft feel professional.
What the Color Highlights Mean
Five colors do all the work in the Hemingway editor:
Yellow: a sentence that is hard to read. Shorten it or split it in two.
Red: a sentence that is very hard to read. These are the priority fixes, and a draft with several red highlights almost always improves when you break them apart.
Purple: a word or phrase with a simpler alternative. Hover to see the suggestion, such as replacing utilize with use.
Blue: an adverb or weakening phrase. The app nudges you toward a stronger verb instead.
Green: passive voice. Rewriting in active voice usually makes the sentence shorter and clearer at the same time.
The adverb hostility is inherited from the app's namesake, and from writers like Stephen King, who famously wrote that the road to hell is paved with adverbs. The logic holds up in practice. The boy walked briskly to class is weaker than the boy sped to class, because a precise verb beats a vague verb propped up by a modifier. The app will not catch every weak verb, but it trains the habit of noticing them, which quietly teaches you how to write faster too, since strong first-draft sentences need less repair later.
What Hemingway Editor Plus Adds
The free editor diagnoses. Editor Plus treats. Instead of just highlighting a dense sentence, the AI rewrites it with a click, and in my judgment this is where the tool becomes interesting for busy professionals: it fixes wordiness, corrects genuinely tricky grammar mistakes such as its versus it's in context, adjusts tone across eight styles from confident to casual, suggests context-aware synonyms, reviews whole documents with feedback, and takes custom instructions like removing jargon from a paragraph. The developer also commits to not selling your data or letting it train third-party AI models, which matters if you edit client work.
Pricing in 2026 works out like this:
Free trial: two weeks, no credit card required, cancels automatically
Individual 5K: $8.33 per month billed annually at $100, with 5,000 AI sentence rewrites per month
Individual 10K: $12.50 per month billed annually at $150, doubling the rewrite allowance
Team 10K: $12.50 per user per month billed annually, adding centralized billing and admin controls
Hemingway Editor Classic desktop app: $19.99 one-time for Mac or Windows, offline, no AI features
Those AI sentence quotas are generous for articles and email but worth checking if you plan to run entire manuscripts through it. For a book-length project you would also want software built for long documents in the first place; my roundup of the top writing tools for authors covers better homes for a manuscript.
What the Hemingway App Gets Right
Speed is the headline. There is no account, no setup, and no learning curve in the free editor. Paste, read the colors, fix, leave. When I need to sanity-check a paragraph before it ships, this is faster than any full-featured editing suite.
It is also a genuine teaching tool. The highlights are consistent, so after a few weeks you start hearing the yellow warning before you type the sentence. Writers who are writing a book for the first time tend to overwrite out of insecurity, stacking clauses to sound authoritative, and Hemingway punctures that habit early. The grade-level score gives you an objective target when your own judgment is too close to the draft. And the free tier has no word limit worth worrying about for normal working sessions, which is rare among free editing tools.
Finally, the pricing is honest. The most useful part of the product costs nothing, the desktop app is a one-time $19.99, and the AI tier undercuts most competing subscriptions.
Where the Hemingway App Falls Short
The free editor does not check spelling or grammar, so it cannot be your only pass before publishing. There is no undo history to speak of, and the free web version does not save your work, so a closed tab can eat an editing session. The desktop app or Plus subscription solves the saving problem, but the workflow still assumes short pieces, not managed projects.
The deeper limitation is judgment. The app measures sentence mechanics, not meaning, tone, or intent. It cannot tell a rambling sentence from a deliberately long one, and it will flag a rhythmic, cadenced passage just as loudly as a bureaucratic mess. Great prose sometimes needs a sixty-word sentence. Hemingway will always vote no.
That is why I tell novelists to use it as an occasional diagnostic, not a standard. Fiction lives on voice and rhythm, and sanding every sentence to grade six flattens both, which is its own entry on my list of writing mistakes to avoid in a novel. Run a chapter through it to find genuinely tangled passages, then override it freely everywhere your voice is doing intentional work. If you are drafting fast, for instance during National Novel Writing Month, keep it closed until revision.
Hemingway App vs Grammarly and ProWritingAid
The comparison everyone asks about is Grammarly. They solve different problems. Grammarly is a correctness and clarity engine that follows you across your browser and documents, catching typos, grammar errors, and tone issues as you type. Hemingway is a readability X-ray you visit deliberately. My full review of Grammarly Premium goes deeper, but the practical answer is that they stack well: Grammarly for correctness everywhere, Hemingway for structure when a piece matters.
ProWritingAid sits between them, with twenty-plus analytical reports covering readability, repetition, pacing, and style, and better long-document support for manuscript work. It is the more complete tool and the more overwhelming one. My ProWritingAid review covers who benefits from that depth. If you want one guiding principle: Hemingway is the fastest and cheapest, and its narrowness is the feature.
Is the Hemingway App Worth It?
The free Hemingway editor is worth it for anyone who writes nonfiction on the internet, full stop. It costs nothing, takes seconds, and reliably makes blog posts, emails, essays, and documentation easier to read. That is as close to free value as writing software gets.
Editor Plus is worth the $100 a year if you edit a steady volume of professional prose and want rewrites, grammar checking, and tone control in one quiet interface at a lower price than most rivals. If you already pay for Grammarly Premium or ProWritingAid, you do not need it. The $19.99 Classic desktop app remains a fine buy for offline writers and bloggers who publish straight to WordPress. And if your goal is a novel with a voice worth protecting, use Hemingway the way you would use a smoke detector: essential when something is actually on fire, and not the authority on how your home should look. Every serious writer eventually learns which rules to break, and building that judgment is a bigger career step than any tool. If you are still early in that journey, my guide on how to become a writer covers the foundations that no editor app can supply.
Related Resources
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are the most frequently asked questions about the Hemingway App.
Is the Hemingway App free?
Yes. The web editor at hemingwayapp.com is free and includes all the readability highlights and the grade-level score. You pay only for Hemingway Editor Plus, the AI version with rewrites and grammar checking, or for the one-time-purchase desktop app.
What is the difference between the Hemingway Editor and Hemingway Editor Plus?
The standard editor highlights problems and leaves the fixing to you. Editor Plus adds AI that rewrites flagged sentences, corrects grammar, adjusts tone, suggests synonyms, and reviews whole documents. Plus starts at $8.33 per month billed annually, after a two-week free trial.
Does the Hemingway App check grammar and spelling?
The free version does not. It measures readability only, so typos and grammar errors pass through untouched. Advanced grammar checking is included in the paid Editor Plus tier, or you can pair the free editor with a separate grammar checker.
What readability grade should I aim for?
For web content, business writing, and most nonfiction, grade nine or below is a sensible target, and many strong writers land around grade six. The score reflects sentence complexity, not intelligence, and famous literary prose often scores in the low single digits.
Is the Hemingway App good for fiction writers?
Only in moderation. It is useful for finding genuinely tangled passages in a draft, but it cannot recognize voice, rhythm, or intentional style, and obeying every highlight will flatten your prose. Novelists should treat its suggestions as questions rather than instructions.
Is Hemingway better than Grammarly?
They do different jobs. Grammarly is stronger for correctness, catching grammar, spelling, and tone issues everywhere you type. Hemingway is stronger for readability and concision. Many writers use both: Grammarly continuously, and Hemingway as a deliberate final pass on important pieces.