QuillBot is an AI-powered writing assistant tool that is rapidly growing in popularity. In this QuillBot review, I look at the main feature of the application, its AI-assisted paraphrasing tool. This means the product is used primarily to rephrase text to avoid plagiarism.
In short, it’s a tool that is ideal for students and others in academia. However, it is also a proofreading tool comparable to Grammarly. QuillBot's Grammar Checker does not cater to only the English language. It's multilingual and caters to all of the following languages: 1. English, 2. French, 3. German, 4. Portuguese, and 5. Spanish.
In addition to the free grammar checker, it has a range of AI-powered writing assistant software applications. Here is a complete list of them:
Paraphraser
Plagiarism Checker
AI Detector
Summarizer
Translator
Citation Generator
Flow
The role of the paraphraser, plagiarism checker, summarizer, and citation generator in academic writing is obvious and doesn't require much explanation. However, Flow is where everything comes together. It's an interface that allows you to write using the entire suite of tools, enabling you to correct and improve your writing in real time.
In short, QuillBot has the ideal set of tools for university students and academic professionals. In this QuillBot review, I discuss the features of QuillBot and how it can help you as a student or research writer. I also discuss how the tool performs in content writing.
Disclosure: The post may contain affiliate links. This means I get a commission if you decide to purchase through my links.
What is QuillBot?
QuillBot is a comprehensive AI-powered writing assistant designed primarily as a writing aid for those in academia. Its suite of AI-assisted features include grammar checking and proofreading, AI detecting, and more importantly paraphrasing.
If you are a student, researcher, or professional in academia, the tool may be an excellent support for your academic writing efforst. The AI Detector helps determine the likelihood of your essay being AI-generated. This has become a major issue. Several universities disapprove of AI-generated content and even penalize students and their work for it.
QuillBot's Paraphraser, Plagiarism Checker, and Summarizer also assist students and researchers regarding plagiarized content. When writing your academic essay or research paper, you can use Quillbot to ensure that your AI and plagiarism scores are passable.
It also helps with summarizing and paraphrasing the abstracts and major ideas from papers that you read, while providing proper citation formats using the citation generator.
To summarize, QuillBot is most suitable as a suite for those in academia, that is, students, researchers, professors, and so on. These various applications mean that QuillBot should not be seen as a simple grammar checker or proofreader but as an entire writing assistant package for students and researchers.
Pricing for QuillBot
The pricing for QuillBot is arranged according to two plans: Free and Premium. The Free Plan or Fremium Plan, as expected, has restricted features. For example, you can paraphrase only up to 125 words. However, the Premium Plan has unlimited features.
The payment options are Annual, Quarterly, and Monthly. The Annual Plan is cheapest at $8.33 per month. The Quarterly Plan is $13.31 per month, and the Monthly Plan is $19.95 per month. Check out the table in this section.
Plan | Pricing |
Annual | $8.33 |
Quarterly | $13.31 |
Monthly | $19.95 |
Quillbot's Fremium Plan can be compared to Grammarly's. It is good enough for professional writers and editors, as well as writers who are highly confident in their English-speaking abilities. This means it can pick up obvious errors in grammar and punctuation.
However, if you are an ESL speaker or if you don't have that much confidence in your English writing abilities, then you would want to sign up for the Premium features. These premium features will be discussed in the following section.
1. AI Grammar Checker
The QuillBot AI Grammar Checker is a traditional proofreading application. It is similar to other proofreading software such as Grammarly.
It highlights errors, explains why they are errors and suggests corrections that you can reject or accept. However, just like other grammar checkers, it is not foolproof. You need to have a proper grasp of English grammar to make sure that you can accept the appropriate suggestions.
Although its grammar checker is the most traditional aspect of QuillBot in terms of its role as a proofreader, it does serve as a kind of AI-powered assistant. It provides explanations as to why something in your writing is an error.
In doing so, it cites language grammar and usage rules. By consistently using QuillBot in this way, it can help you to eventually become a better writer. However, the most prominent feature of QuillBot is its Paraphraser.
The proofreading and grammar-checking interface for QuillBot is intuitive and easy to navigate. The tool works with a wide variety of English dialects, as well as being multilingual. It supports English, German, French, Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese.
It is also highly versatile and practical. Just like Grammarly, it can be integrated into 1. Word, 2. Google, 3. Chrome, 4. macOS, and 5. Edge. This means you can work in a wide range of formats. This includes applications like Microsoft Word, which do not require the Internet, as well as Internet-powered apps like Google Docs.
In summary, as a proofreader and grammar checker, QuillBot is as good as Grammarly. It is a good option for businesses that rely on proofreading SaaS for emails, reports, and other examples of business writing.
In addition, students, academic writers, and content writers can also rely on QuillBot's grammar checker and proofreader to ensure that their writing is free of basic errors. It can also be useful as a writing aid that teaches university students about the basic rules of grammar and word usage, eventually helping them becoem better writers over time.
2. Paraphraser
As mentioned earlier, QuillBot is best suited for academia. As you know, paraphrasing and summarizing are essential skills that all academic researchers and students should have.
The QuillBot paraphrasing tool can ideally protect you from plagiarism charges. It does so by rewriting content from academic text to preserve the intended meaning without copy-pasting what the author says.
Any university or college student who has to write an essay understands the necessity of doing so. However, it is more important for graduate students. For example, master’s or PhD students who have to write their theses or dissertations.
Anyone who has had to write a literature review knows how difficult it is to paraphrase. The main goal of paraphrasing is to avoid plagiarism. However, even when you paraphrase using your own efforts, your plagiarism scores suggest that you have copy-pasted content. So this would be welcome help for students.
How does QuillBot paraphrasing work?
So how exactly does the paraphraser work? QuillBot will reword sentences by reordering the syntax of the sentence and replacing words with synonyms. On the right, there is a feature labeled "Synonyms." It allows you to adjust the frequency and extent to which words from the original text are changed with synonyms. Let’s look at the interface:
On the right, you have ten modes. They include 1. Standard; 2. Fluency, 3. Humanize, 4. Formal; 5. Academic; 6. Simple; 7. Creative; 8. Expand; 9. Shorten; and 10. Custom. Each of these modes are supposed to have a specific effect on the resulting paraphrased text. The most basic mode is Standard. With Standard, text is rewritten with new vocabulary and word order.
Fluency allows you to improve the clarity and readability of your text. Humanize and Creative are interesting modes. Creativity would be ideal for creative writers working on text in creative fields such as literature. Humanize has especially become useful in the age of AI-generated content. AI-generated content, such as what you can get from ChatGPT, has several advantages. It is fast. It is cheap. It is easy.
However, it remains content written by a machine, and most people can tell. This is an issue in both academic and commercial settings. Your professor or journal editors would not be impressed by the idea that your manuscript in large part isn't original and may consider it as being unoriginal and even plagiarized content.
In business or content writing, the concern is with tone of voice or ToV. The point of content writing is to sell a product with blog articles and other content. However, if the writing comes across as fake or robotic, then readers or potential customers may be turned off and not want to buy. This is a kind of dilemma as AI-generated content for business blogs has become quite popular.
I have written about this elsewhere. I wrote an article about how to edit AI-generated content. You can check out the article here: How to Edit AI-Written Content. In addition to issues such as thin content, hallucinations, and plagiarism, human editors of AI-generated content should focus on fixing its robotic tone to ensure that readers can trust such content and be convinced to make a purchase.
QuillBot and other "humanizers" aim to solve this problem. It is somewhat ironic: AI being used to humanize content generated by AI. If it actually works, it means that the large volume of content that business blogs are in the habit of publishing can be fixed with a click of a button.
Let's begin by taking a look at how QuillBot's paraphrasing tool works on academic writing. Please note, that in this QuillBot review, I used the Fremium model to test. This means that I wasn't able to check out many of the other modes besides Standard. These other modes come with the Premium Plan.
Nevertheless, here is the example of paraphrasing:
The screenshot shows the original academic text from an abstract on the right and the paraphrased text from QuillBot on the left. The results from QuillBot are impressive. We can even go as far as saying that QuillBot does a better job in certain respects. Let’s look at the improved text from QuillBot
Given the prevalence of big data and crowd computing in today's business world, a business graduate must be able to deal with data and produce some significant early findings for management decision-making in order to get employment. Identifying students' end-of-term self-evaluations of statistical methods they feel comfortable applying, classifying statistical models into different levels, and connecting these self-evaluations to understand students' confidence in statistical applications are the three main goals of this study. The third goal is to assess how problem-based learning (PBL) affects student outcomes for the various subjects. Data creation is covered in three courses: (1) Business Forecasting; (2) Regression Analysis; and (3) Statistics I and II.
The first sentence sounds more complete and has better context than the original. “With big data and crowd computing in the contemporary business environment” is missing something. QuillBot can catch what is missing. Namely, “the prevalence of big data.”
This makes the wording sound more complete, natural, fluent, and idiomatic. However, there is just one issue. The phrase “significant early findings” appears to be no more than a synonym or literal definition of “preliminary results” from the original excerpt.
Although the direct meaning of this phrase may be accurate, the contextual meaning is not the same. This means for sure that you may not always be able to rely on this paraphrasing tool without self-editing or even professional copy-editing assistance.
Now there is the whole question of ethics. Plagiarism is unethical, true. What about using AI-powered writing assistant tools to do the same? Well, that’s a tricky question.
You should double-check with your university or professor to verify whether or not AI-powered software such as QuillBot can be used. In the case that its use is not allowed, then try using the paraphrasing generated by QuillBot as a model to base your own writing on.
Is QuillBot good for content writing?
QuillBot is best meant for academia. However, is it any good for content writing? What do I mean by content writing? Content writing refers to content written for blogs, landing pages, and so on.
This can also be referred to as business writing. It is the opposite of academic writing. Writing meant to be used in this way is called “copy.” So, when we speak about long-form copy, we are referring to blog articles. To learn more about the difference between content and academic writing, please check out this previous article: Academic vs. Business Writing | The Essential Differences.
When we mention short-form copy, it means writing for things like landing pages, service pages, product pages, and so on. QuillBot seems ideal for academic writers, as has already been established.
Let’s see how it does with non-academic forms of writing:
This is not bad. It would be useful for content writers who wish to repurpose content from old blog articles. Others may well use it to rewrite content from the blogs of competitors that they wish to outrank. Nonetheless, with its whole suite of academic writing-assistant tools, it is ideal for academic writing students and professionals.
3. Flow
Flow is the all-in-one application that QuillBot provides. As the name suggests, this can make your workflow more efficient as it eliminates the need to switch between tabs. With flow, you can paste or upload your text directly into the application.
The feature relies heavily on AI capabilities. This means while you write, the tool provides you with AI-powered suggestions on what to write next in real-time. This is a controversial aspect of QuillBot. What happens if your writing has to undergo an AI-detection test?
If you rely too heavily on these AI-powered suggestions, your writing may be flagged by AI-detection tools. One supposes that the AI-detection feature that comes with QuillBot would help with that. However, it does seem odd that an AI-powered app would suggest corrections that it may later detect as AI.
A complete writing assistant suite for academics
In addition to the paraphraser, QuillBot also has a Summarizer. In academic writing, summarizing and paraphrasing are different. Paraphrasing means the ability to summarize entire sections of text and even a whole paper into concise evaluations that are only a few sentences long.
The AI Detector is a rather ironic feature coming from QuillBot. It is a feature that helps determine the likelihood of your paper being AI-generated. Well, QuillBot can be described as being a tool that produces AI-generated content.
So is it offering a solution to a problem that it has contributed to? In any event, there are several questions regarding these AI-detecting tools. Many have described them as being subjective and even unreliable.
To a certain extent, we all can tell when a piece of text relies too heavily on AI-generated content that has not been edited by human hands. However, if you are a professor or content marketer who has to deal with several thousand words written by several hundred writers, then you can’t really rely on the “eye test.”
The QuillBot AI detector claims to solve that problem by providing a “scientific” means of doing just that. AI detection will always be a controversial topic and full of subjectivity.
However, if the institutions you are writing for also rely on QuillBot’s AI detection, then you may have more confidence in using the tool to test for AI detection in your own academic writing.
Lastly, AI has a Citation Generator. It covers the basic styles in academic writing — 1. APA, 2. MLA, and 3. CMoS. However, it doesn’t end here. It has in all over 1000 citation styles. This means you are more likely than not to find whatever academic style that you are working with.
Get a free trial of QuillBot |
A summary of QuillBot reviews
QuillBot Reviews online are not always glowing and can best be described as mixed. This is true for both individual reviewers posting on their personal blogs or websites and for review websites such as Trustpilot. Let's begin with one of the more prominent reviews of QuillBot. It's by Zulie Rane, a writer and blogger who owns Zulie Writes.
It's rather caustic. Her review focuses on the QuillBot paraphraser. The paraphraser was mocked as too stilted and unnatural. However, her QuillBot review focused on the application as a tool for content writers and bloggers as opposed to students and academics. Here's a brief excerpt from it, and this is just the introduction:
No, lol. If you’re wondering if Quillbot is useful for writers, you can bounce off this page right now. My honest Quillbot review is that it’s worse than useless to make your content better.
This is a little harsh. However, if you are a content writer, you should not be relying on the QuillBot paraphraser to begin with. QuillBot is best used as a paraphraser for academic content to protect your work against plagiarism.
Content marketers, instead of relying on tools like the QuillBot Paraphraser, should hire professional content writers and editors. Our team here at EminentEdit is happy to help you with your content writing efforts: Check out our content writing offers.
The average score for the application on Trustpilot is 3.4 out of five stars out of a total of 300 reviews. Many of the complaints concerning QuillBot focused on customer service. This includes people complaining about not being able to access their accounts and not being able to cancel their subscriptions when they wanted to after being unhappy or dissatisfied with the service.
However, the main complaint associated with QuillBot is linked to the nature of AI-powered software. AI-generated writing and editing are not all there yet. The technology, as exciting as it is, remains in the developmental stages. Therefore, it is recommended that you don't rely solely on QuillBot or any other AI-powered writing assistant tool.
A final verdict
As a student, academic professional, or content writer, you can't just accept the suggestions made by the app. You should learn and know enough about English writing to discern what suggestions to accept and what suggestions to reject. It also means that you should be willing or ready to enlist the help of professional editors to review and correct your writing. The table below sums up the pros and cons of QuillBot:
Cons of QuillBot | Pros of QuillBot |
Final paraphrased output may be too stilted and unnatural | A free and useful writing aid for students |
May require professional human editing despite heavy reliance on AI | An affordable and verstaile AI-powered assistant for those in academia |
Flow may contribute to text that fail AI detection | The ability to be integrated into several apps and devices |
QuillBot, at a price that can be as low as $8.33 per month, is affordable. Its proofreading and grammar-checking are versatile and can be easily integrated into Google Chrome, Word, and Google Docs. However, you should also be aware of the drawbacks.
It remains an AI tool, with all the typical issues associated with a technology in its early stages of development. This means that paraphrased content may come across as unnatural and stilted. Therefore, it is recommended that you use QuillBot as a supporting tool and not rely on it entirely to do all the work for you.
This is true of students and researchers as much as it is true of content marketers. As a student and researcher, you should be able to amend paraphrased text so that it comes across as human-written. If you're a content marketer, professional human editors and writers should remain a big part of your content production process.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, February 14). QuillBot Review: Should You Get It? EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/quillbot-review |
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