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QuillBot AI

by QuillBot (owned by Course Hero)
Freemium Writing
★★★★½ 4.5 (12,000+ reviews)

QuillBot is an AI-powered writing assistant used by over 35 million people — primarily as a paraphrasing tool, but also covering grammar checking, summarizing, citation generation, and plagiarism detection. It's the dominant tool for students and writers who need to rephrase content while keeping the original meaning intact. The browser extension and Microsoft Word / Google Docs integrations make it work wherever you write.

How to Get the Most Out of QuillBot AI

Use the Right Paraphrasing Mode for Your Goal

QuillBot Premium offers 8 paraphrasing modes, and choosing the right one matters more than most users realize. Fluency — the default — corrects errors while making minimal changes, best for polishing your own writing. Standard restructures sentences more aggressively. Formal elevates tone for professional documents. Creative makes the most dramatic changes and is best when you need output that sounds genuinely different from the source. Free users have access to Standard and Fluency only — if you're hitting the limits of those two, Premium's Creative and Expand modes are the main reasons to upgrade.

Use the Synonym Slider and Word-Level Control

After QuillBot paraphrases your text, hover over any word it changed and you'll see a dropdown of alternatives it considered. This word-level control is QuillBot's most underused feature. When the paraphrase isn't quite right — the word choice feels off, the sentence is technically correct but awkward — clicking individual words lets you swap to a synonym that fits better without rerunning the whole paraphrase. The synonym slider (1 to 7) also controls how aggressively it replaces vocabulary across the whole passage. Starting at 3-4 for most tasks keeps output natural; 6-7 for maximum divergence from the original.

Install the Chrome Extension for In-Context Editing

QuillBot's Chrome extension lets you paraphrase text directly in Gmail, Google Docs, LinkedIn, and virtually any web text field — select text, right-click, and choose QuillBot. This is significantly faster than copying content to the QuillBot website and back. The Microsoft Word and Google Docs add-ins work similarly: highlight a passage, click QuillBot in the sidebar, and replace in one step. For anyone writing in these environments daily, the add-in integration is the real workflow advantage over just using the website.

Use Summarizer for Research and Note-Taking

QuillBot's Summarizer can condense articles, papers, and reports into key points or a concise paragraph. Paste an article up to 6,000 words (Premium) or 1,200 words (free) and choose between Key Sentences mode (extracts the most important sentences verbatim) or Paragraph mode (generates a summary in QuillBot's own words). For researchers and students reading large volumes of material, running each source through QuillBot Summarizer before deciding whether to read fully is a practical time-saver. Key Sentences mode is more reliable for academic use because it doesn't fabricate — it only pulls from what's in the text.

The Plagiarism Checker Limitation to Know

QuillBot Premium includes plagiarism checking — but it's powered by Copyleaks and has a limit of 20 pages per month. This is adequate for individual assignment checking but insufficient for professionals who need to check large volumes of content. For that volume, a dedicated tool like Turnitin or Grammarly's plagiarism checker (unlimited on Business plan) is more practical. That said, for students checking their own work before submission, QuillBot's built-in checker covers the use case without needing a separate subscription.

Our Take

QuillBot occupies a specific and genuinely useful niche — it's the best tool available for paraphrasing and light rewriting at speed. The synonym control and multiple modes give more fine-grained control than simply asking ChatGPT to "rewrite this." That said, for complex rewriting tasks where you want the output to sound completely different from the source, Claude or ChatGPT will generally produce more natural, varied results. QuillBot's strength is in volume and workflow integration: the Chrome extension and Word/Docs add-ins make it genuinely faster than copying text into a separate AI chatbot. For students and professionals who frequently need to rephrase, the free tier covers casual use and Premium justifies itself for heavy daily use. It's not a replacement for more powerful AI writing tools — it's a complement to them.

✅ Strengths
  • Best-in-class paraphrasing with word-level control
  • 8 paraphrasing modes (Premium) covering every tone and style
  • Chrome extension + Word + Google Docs integration
  • Free tier is genuinely useful for occasional use
  • Summarizer works reliably on long-form content
  • Citation generator supports APA, MLA, Chicago styles
  • Used by 35M+ users — well-established reliability
⚠️ Limitations
  • Free tier: 125-word paraphrasing limit per pass
  • Plagiarism checker capped at 20 pages/month (Premium)
  • Not a content generator — only reworks existing text
  • Creative mode sometimes produces unnatural phrasing
  • No chat interface or conversation memory
  • For complex rewrites, ChatGPT/Claude produce better results
Pricing
Free tier: Yes — 125 words/pass · Last verified: July 2026
Free
$0/mo
125-word paraphraser (2 modes), grammar checker, 1,200-word summarizer
POPULAR
Premium Annual
$8.33/mo
All 8 modes, unlimited words, plagiarism checker (20 pages/mo), faster processing
Premium Monthly
$19.95/mo
Same as annual but billed monthly. Annual plan saves 58%.
Teams
$6.67/user/mo
3+ users, annual billing, centralised billing, team management
⚠️ Prices verified July 2026 — confirm at quillbot.com before purchasing.
QuillBot vs Alternatives
Tool Best for Free tier Starting price
QuillBot Paraphrasing, volume rewriting, Word/Docs integration ✓ (125 words) $8.33/mo (annual)
Grammarly Grammar, tone, real-time suggestions everywhere $12/mo (Premium)
Wordtune Sentence-level rewrites with multiple variations ✓ (10/day) $9.99/mo
Claude Complex rewrites, tone transformation, long documents ✓ (daily cap) $20/mo (Pro)
ChatGPT Versatile rewriting with instruction control $20/mo (Plus)
Who QuillBot Is (and Isn't) For
✅ Great fit for
  • • Students who need to paraphrase research without copy-pasting
  • • Content marketers repurposing existing material at scale
  • • Non-native English speakers polishing written work
  • • Professionals summarizing long reports quickly
  • • Anyone who already writes in Word or Google Docs and wants AI in their existing workflow
❌ Not the best fit for
  • • Writing original content from scratch (use ChatGPT or Claude)
  • • Professional writers who need complex tonal transformation
  • • Developers or technical users (no API, limited automation)
  • • Heavy plagiarism checking needs (>20 pages/month)
  • • Teams who need advanced analytics or brand voice training
Frequently Asked Questions
Is QuillBot free?+
Yes. QuillBot's free tier includes the paraphrasing tool with 2 modes and a 125-word input limit per pass, a grammar checker, and a summarizer with a 1,200-word limit. Premium starts at $8.33/month (annual billing) and removes all limits while adding 6 additional paraphrasing modes and plagiarism detection.
What does QuillBot actually do?+
QuillBot is primarily a paraphrasing tool — it takes text you paste in and rewrites it while preserving the original meaning. Beyond that, it includes a grammar checker, article summarizer, citation generator (APA, MLA, Chicago), plagiarism detector (Premium), and translator. A Co-Writer feature combines all of these in a single document editing interface.
Is QuillBot better than ChatGPT for paraphrasing?+
For fast, volume paraphrasing with fine-grained word-level control, QuillBot is better. It's purpose-built for the task, integrates directly into Word and Google Docs, and gives you mode and synonym control ChatGPT doesn't offer. For complex rewrites where you need significant tonal or structural change, ChatGPT or Claude produce more natural results. Most professional writers use both: QuillBot for routine rephrasing, ChatGPT/Claude for heavier transformation.
Can QuillBot be detected by AI detectors?+
It depends on the mode and how much change the paraphrase makes. QuillBot rewrites existing text rather than generating new content, so it behaves differently from ChatGPT. Standard and Fluency modes make conservative changes that may retain patterns from the original. Creative mode produces more divergent output. There is no guaranteed way to evade AI detectors — and for academic use, the ethical question of whether you should is separate from whether you can.
What are the best QuillBot alternatives?+
For grammar and real-time editing: Grammarly. For sentence-by-sentence rewrite options: Wordtune. For complex rewriting and tone transformation: Claude or ChatGPT. For teams needing brand voice consistency at scale: Jasper. QuillBot is the strongest for pure paraphrasing speed and workflow integration; Claude is stronger when quality of transformation matters more than speed.
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