10 content editing tools for busy marketing teams
By Matt McGregor
By Matt McGregor
The best editing tools to help you remove errors, check for plagiarism, and rewrite your content.
Content teams are increasingly asked to do more with less, without sacrificing quality. To do this, you can improve your processes, work longer hours, or use better tools.
With the rise of AI, many teams are choosing to focus on their tools — and with good reason. Modern content editing tools can do more than just find your typos and fix your grammar. They can check for plagiarism, make SEO suggestions, and even rewrite your content without changing its original meaning.
In this guide, we’ll introduce you to the best content editing tools on the market. But first, let’s run through some of the main features to look out for.
Join the BBC, Tripadvisor, and Penguin, and publish stunning, multimedia web content with Shorthand.
Publish your first story for free — no code or web design skills required.
Get started.
What to look for in your content editing tools
Identify errors
The most common use case for content editing tools is to find embarrassing typos and errors in grammar and formatting. This includes spelling errors, punctuation errors, and improper sentence structure. Some of the tools on this list can also help you detect factual errors by highlighting inconsistencies or inaccurate information.
Improve style and clarity
The best content editing tools can also help you improve the style and clarity of your writing, so that it’s a pleasure to read and can be easily understood. Content editing tools help you improve your writing style by suggesting different sentence structures and word choices, with the aim of eliminating wordiness, clichés, and jargon.
Check for plagiarism
As generative AI tools become more widespread in content writing, so too does plagiarism. Even the most sophisticated generative AI tools produce plagiarised content, especially those asked to replicate a small set of existing web content.
This is one reason why many content editing tools now include plagiarism checkers. These checkers can help you avoid reputational damage, ensure the integrity of new writers in your team, and ensure you are delivering original, high-quality content.
Suggest rewrites
Many tools now have a generative AI add-on which you can use to rewrite sections of your content. As with all generative AI tools, the quality of the suggested rewrite will vary widely, so don’t outsource your editorial judgement to the machines just yet. Make sure you have a great human content editor on hand to make any final decisions.
Now, let’s turn to our list of tools.
The Hemingway Editor
The Hemingway Editor is a free online app that will help you to improve your writing style and enhance the readability of your content.
The Hemingway app is available as a free tool, but you can also download it for Mac or Windows if you prefer to work offline. The paid version allows direct publishing to WordPress and Medium, which can be very handy for bloggers.
Key features:
- The app identifies hard-to-read sentences.
- It’s an excellent style checker that picks up on everything from the overuse of adverbs to the use of passive voice.
- Hemingway suggests simpler alternatives for complex words or phrases.
The desktop version of Hemingway is US$19.99.
Grammarly
Grammarly is one of the most established grammar checkers on the market, and has recently expanded into AI.
Grammarly offers a plagiarism checker in its premium version, ensuring your content is unique. It also integrates with third-party apps, including web browsers, Google Docs, and social media sites. This allows you to check your writing wherever you are.
Key features:
- Grammarly says it can correct more than 250 types of grammar errors.
- It detects plagiarism by comparing your text against millions of web pages.
- You can get quite a lot done with Grammarly’s free content editor.
Premium pricing starts at US$30 per month.
ProWritingAid
ProWritingAid is another established editing tool. Beyond standard grammar and spelling checks, ProWritingAid is able to analyse your overall writing patterns and highlight your strengths and weaknesses.
This can help you understand your writing habits better and work on areas that need improvement.
Key features:
- ProWritingAid integrates with a wide range of writing platforms, including Scrivener, Google Docs, and Microsoft Word.
- The app offers a contextual thesaurus to help you find the perfect synonyms to use in your writing.
Premium pricing starts at US$30 per month, with steep discounts for annual plans.
Readable
Readable is a specialist tool that focuses on improving the readability of your content. It provides a readability score based on various tests and gives you detailed insights into your text's complexity, word density, sentence length, and more.
Key features:
- The app claims greater accuracy across readability formulas, including Flesch-Kincaid and SMOG. If this is critical to your use case, then Readable is for you.
- Readable can scan and score your entire published website for readability, and offers concrete suggestions on how to make your content more readable.
- As you might expect, it includes spelling and grammar checking functionality.
Starts at US$4 per month for individual content creators and digital marketers, with prices rising to US$24 per month for team plans.
Wordtune
Wordtune is an AI-powered writing assistant that can help you express your ideas more clearly and effectively. It offers different ways to rewrite your sentences without changing their original meaning, allowing you to choose the one that sounds best.
Key features:
- The app offers tone adjustment options, so you can make your text more formal or casual, depending on your audience.
- It’s available as a Google Chrome extension, making it easy to use with any online writing platform.
- Wordtune can also perform common AI tasks, such as summarising documents and answering questions.
Wordtune has a free plan, with paid plans starting at US$24.99 per month.
Google Docs
This might seem like an unusual inclusion in this list, but before you pay for additional tools, it’s worth exploring the capabilities of what you already use. Google Docs is a powerful, cloud-based word processing tool that allows real-time collaboration. Google Docs incorporates basic editing and proofreading tools, making it an excellent choice for teams working together on content creation.
Key features:
- Real-time collaboration and editing.
Integrated chat for instant communication. - Editing, suggesting, and viewing modes for different stages of proofreading.
- Integrated Google Search for quick fact-checking.
Google Docs is free for individual users. It’s also included as part of Google Workspace plans, which start at US$6 monthly per user.
Copyscape
Copyscape is a leading plagiarism detection tool. The tool checks content against millions of web pages to ensure that it is truly original. This is becoming increasingly important for SEO content produced by AI tools, as search engines can penalise plagiarised content — sometimes severely.
Key features:
- Copyscape scans your text against millions of web pages for duplicate content.
- The app alerts you of any identical content found online and highlights what needs to be changed.
- It can check an entire site of up to 10,000 pages in one go.
Premium pricing starts at 3c per search (up to 200 words).
Ginger
Ginger offers an AI writing assistant that integrates with your browser to ensure you never make grammatical or spelling errors. Primarily used as a Chrome extension, Ginger provides live suggestions to improve your writing.
Key features:
- Available as a browser plugin, desktop app, and mobile app. This means you can check your writing on any platform you use.
- Ginger integrates directly with Microsoft Word.
- The service is available for business and education use cases, with an API to integrate directly into your own applications.
Like most of the tools on our list, Ginger has a free version. Its premium version for individuals starts at US$14.99 per month.
Reword
Reword is an generative AI tool that trains itself on the content on your existing blog, making it a powerful option for content marketers. This allows the tool to make suggestions that are specifically tailored to your brand voice, tone, and style.
Reword can create new content from scratch, but can also help you optimise your existing content. Its editor can give suggestions alongside your human editors, potentially streamlining your content workflow.
Key features:
- Research and citation tools are built in, ensuring that your AI-generated content doesn’t introduce factual errors.
- Reword works in over thirty languages.
- It connects with common CMS platforms, including Wordpress and Shopify.
Reword’s paid plan starts at US$49 per month.
Outwrite
Outwrite is an editing tool that checks for spelling, grammar, and style errors in your writing. It also offers suggestions to improve sentence structure, word choice, and punctuation.
Like many of the other tools on our list, Outwrite has rebranded itself as an AI writer tool, though its core functionality is its spell checker, grammar checker, and style suggestions.
Key features:
- Outwrite includes an AI-powered paraphrasing tool, which can help you rewrite troublesome sections.
- It integrates with Chrome, Edge, Google Docs, and Wordpress.
- The app checks for plagiarism by comparing your content to publicly available text on the internet.
Outwrite’s paid plans start at US$24.95 per month.
Conclusion
Finding the right tools can help alleviate some of the demands on modern content teams.
From AI writing assistants to classic spelling and grammar checkers, we hope you've found something on this list to empower and enable your storytelling process.
Looking for more? Our Writing and Design Tips are full of insight and inspiration. Or, sign up to The Craft newsletter and receive the web's best storytelling in your inbox.
Built with Shorthand