Updated July 2026 · every claim about Grammarly is sourced from grammarly.com and re-checked monthly
The short version: Rewrite cleans up what you're typing, in place, in any Mac app — but names, emails, and numbers are swapped for placeholders on your Mac before any text reaches an AI. The rewrite runs on the ChatGPT or Claude account you already have; Rewrite has no content servers and never sees your text. Free while in beta.
Grammarly is a genuinely good product — that's why it's the default. The three reasons people search for a way off it, in the order we hear them:
This is the part no other Mac writing tool does. Before your text leaves your Mac, Rewrite detects sensitive details — names, organizations, places, email addresses, phone numbers, card numbers, SSNs, URLs, filenames — using pattern matching and on-device machine learning, and replaces them with placeholders. Only the masked version is sent, and it goes directly to your own signed-in ChatGPT or Claude account. The real values are restored on your Mac afterward.
You don't have to take that on faith: the app's "What the AI sees" tab shows the exact payload of every request, and you can watch the traffic yourself in Little Snitch or Proxyman. Detection is best-effort, not guaranteed — unusual formats can slip through, which is exactly why the payload tab exists. Details in the privacy policy.
| Rewrite | Grammarly | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your text is processed | Pseudonymized on-device, then your own ChatGPT/Claude account. No Rewrite servers. | Grammarly's cloud servers |
| Who sees names & numbers | No one — replaced with placeholders before sending; the map never leaves your Mac | Sent with your text and processed under Grammarly's privacy policy |
| Price | Free while in beta — no card, no account with us | Free tier (basics); Pro $12/mo billed annually ($144/yr) or $30 month-to-month |
| How you invoke it | Double-tap ⌥ in any Mac app; result replaces your draft at the caret | Real-time underlines as you type, plus suggestions UI |
| Rewriting style | Smallest edit that fixes the sentence — keeps your voice | Corrections plus tone/full-sentence suggestions |
| Reply drafting | Double-tap ⌃ on a highlighted message drafts the reply | — |
| Platforms | macOS 14+, Apple Silicon — native Swift menu-bar app | Mac, Windows, web, mobile, browser extensions |
| Grammar-checking depth | Rewrites on demand; no passive proofreading layer | Continuous grammar/spelling/punctuation checking — its core strength |
| Plagiarism checker | — | Yes, on Pro (limited free scan on the website) |
| Account required | Your existing ChatGPT or Claude sign-in; none with Rewrite | Grammarly account |
If what you actually want is "make this sentence say what I meant, everywhere I type, without shipping my clients' names to anyone" — that's the exact job Rewrite was built for.
Free while in beta · macOS 14+ · Apple Silicon · signed & notarized direct download
No — and you should distrust any cloud-quality tool that claims to be. The rewrite itself runs on a cloud model via your own ChatGPT or Claude account. What stays local is the detection and masking of sensitive details, and the map that restores them. The structure of your sentence leaves your Mac; the identifiers in it don't.
A free ChatGPT account works; Claude needs a Pro or Max plan. Rewrite rides whichever you sign into and can fall back to the other automatically at usage limits.
Rewrite never stores or trains on your text — it has no servers to do so. What your AI provider does is governed by your own account settings with OpenAI or Anthropic, which you control directly; the text they receive has names, emails, and numbers already masked.
No. There are no underlines and no background scanning — by design, since continuous checking means continuous reading of your screen. You invoke Rewrite on the sentence you're unsure about, and it returns the cleaned-up version in place.
The beta is free — no card, no trial clock. If pricing ever lands, you'll hear about it in the app first, and nothing converts automatically.