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Quillbot Review scaled

QuillBot Review: Features, Price, Pros & Cons

Quillbot is an AI-based paraphrasing and summary software for writers, students & marketers.

Price

There is a free Quillbot account offered with restrictions on features and limited usage quotas. A premium plan is offered for $14.99 a month or $79.99 a year when paid annually.

Features

Utilize the Quillbot web interface, Google Doc, or Chrome extension to paraphrase, summarize or generate official source citations based on a select piece of content or paragraphs.

Function

With just a few clicks, Quillbot can achieve a solid output of paraphrased or summarized content. Premium users have access to much more versatility and functionality

Pros

  • Generous free account usage
  • Advanced features & limits for paid accounts
  • Grammar checker replaces the need for Grammarly
  • Paraphrasing, summarizing & citation generation
  • Offers a Google Doc & Chrome Extension
  • 100% money-back guarantee (72 hr period)

Cons

  • Only 2 writing modes for free accounts
  • No GPT-3 AI free writing like Jasper AI
  • Manual intervention is often needed to pick the sentence structure and synonym choices that sound best

Review Summary

If you are looking for an effective paraphrasing tool, QuillBot does provide an effective solution that integrates both high-quality functionality combined with a good price.

Like most other machine learning writing software, the best features and functionality aren't available in the free plan, but it does offer quality results for those who can afford it.

Unfortunately, even with Quillbot Premium, the tool isn't as capable of producing Google level quality content like some other tools on the market like Jasper AI and there is still room for improvement with machine learning.

However, it is a step in the right direction for creating better, more readable articles based on a source piece of content which is fed into the software.

PRICE
INTERFACE
FEATURES
PERFORMANCE
OVERALL

A Solid Buy

The Ideal Buyer

This is a great option for college and university students since QuillBot is a superb writing tool for academic purposes. Those in the news, media, or marketing industries can also benefit from Quillbot's fast and simple approach to enhance their writing time, which is particularly useful when working with press releases or related public materials.


Alternate Recommendations


Jarvis AI Logo

Jasper AI

Jasper AI is a smart and innovative new tool in the realm of GPT-3 software that could be a writer's best kept secret. While it's perfect, it does provide a number of significant advantages and impressive capabilities that you will not see with comparable GPT-3 services. Furthermore, it is reasonably priced for the potential that is capable when using this tool. Here is our full Jasper review.

WordTune logo

WordTune

The closest direct competitor to Quillbot, WordTune offers strictly paraphrasing functionality with the ability to rewrite, choose tone of voice and perform actions like shortening or expanding. However, it is priced significantly higher with fewer features, so you really aren't getting your money's worth when compared to Quillbot.


Introduction

Artificial intelligence and machine learning have taken over the world of writing in recent years and in this Quillbot review we are going to take a look at a powerful online tool for rephrasing content that is appropriate for academic writing standards. QuillBot is an AI paraphrasing tool that rewrites content to make it easier for you to read, understand and learn.

The Quillbot team boasts that their tool is used by millions worldwide for a variety of different uses from academics to business people. The most popular use of Quillbot is for generating readable content by rewriting sentences from existing articles. We will also take a look at some other features available with this tool such as the ability to generate paraphrases, quotes, and summarise text among others.


Quillbot Pricing & Differences: Free vs Premium Plan

One of the cool things about Quillbot is that they offer a pretty generous free plan that can be used if you are on a tight budget. While it suffers from some limitations that keep it from reaching its maximum capabilities, it is still very useful.

Free Version

Without spending a cent (not need to even enter a credit card), you can sign up for free Quillbot registered account and utilize the service's basic feature set with strict limitations on input characters and sentences (we will get into these in the next section).

Quillbot Premium Version

By signing up for the premium plan, you'll gain access to higher limitations and an increased set of features.

The Premium version of Quillbot is available at three different price points depending on how long you sign-up for at once:

  • $14.95 ($179.40/yr) for the monthly subscription
  • $59.99 ($119.98/yr) for the 6-month subscription
  • $79.95/yr for the annual subscription

If you aren't happy with your Quillbot Premium subscription, they do offer a 3-day money-back guarantee which saves you from any major disappointment shortly after you've shelled out the cash.

Quillbot Pricing
Quillbot free vs premium feature comparison

Features & Capabilities

Since this review is primarily going to focus on Quillbot's Premium service, I will be focusing on the more advanced features and limitations available on the paid plans.

The main feature of Quillbot's is the ability to rewrite sentences from existing articles and make them easier for you to read, understand, and learn.

Summarizer Tool & Limitations

The summarizer tool in QuillBot can be used to help reduce articles, papers, or documents to their most important points. Natural language processing is used by Quillbot's AI to identify crucial data while preserving the original context.

There are two available methods within the summarize tool:

  • Key Sentences is a compilation of the most essential sentences in bullet list form.
  • In the Paragraph format, it will produce a separate paragraph that summarizes the topic with an adjustable length setting.

For the paid plan, the Summarizer tool is limited to 25,000 characters per run whereas the free plan offers this as well with a significantly smaller 10,000 character limit.

Paraphrasing Tool & Limitations

Likely one of the best features within Quillbot is their paraphrasing tool which uses GPT-3 and synonyms to rewrite any pasted text within.

Free version

The free version of the paraphrasing tool gives you a condensed experience only offering:

  • 700 character paraphraser limit
  • Only 2 sentences can be processed at once
  • 3 levels of synonym options
  • 2 writing modes
  • 1 freeze word or phrase
  • Support for Chrome & Doc extensions

Quillbot Premium

The Premium version of Quillbot offers a full experience with the maximized potential of their paraphrasing tool:

  • 10,000 character paraphraser limit
  • Up to 15 sentences processed at once
  • 4 levels of synonym options
  • 6 different writing modes
  • Unlimited freeze words and phrases
  • Support for Chrome & Doc Extensions

Differences in Writing Modes

With the free plan, you only get the option of using the Normal & Fluency modes which are decent but don't give you as many capabilities for coming up with effective yet unique outputs from their paraphrasing tool.

When using QuillBot Premium, you'll have the ability to utilize all six which include the two writing modes from the free plan (Normal & Fluency) as well as Creative mode, Shorten mode, Expand mode and Formal mode.

Grammar Check Tool

There are a lot of great grammar checking tools on the market including Grammarly. The integrated Grammar Check tool within Quillbot detects and corrects a wide range of punctuation and spelling mistakes. This helps save time while you rewrite content by allowing the tool to do all the heavy lifting.

One-click finds all grammatical errors and suggests the proper fixes. When the grammar checker points out errors in your work, it serves as a visual cue to make you aware of the problem(s). Quillbot's grammar checking is claimed to outperform other such tools on the market due to their AI-powered models.

Citation Generator Tool

Not something that I have a lot of experience using as I'm not writing academic papers or studies, but Quillbot offers access to an integrated Citation Generator. The citation generator allows you to produce complete and in-text citations in APA, MLA, and Chicago styles.

It is not difficult to create an MLA, Chicago, or APA book citation, but you must adhere to the citation format's rules. Because referencing a website differs from citing a book due to the medium differences, this tool can assist you with that task as well.

AI Powered Thesaurus

The built-in thesaurus will automatically suggest the various synonyms based on relevancy of the original wording. Similar words are offered by the thesaurus to ensure that it helps create a close connection between the input and output. This feature helps QuillBot make sentences sound natural and cohesive without being repetitive.

Compare Mode

One of the cool premium features of Quillbot offers compared to most paraphrasing tools is the ability to see all the different phrases compare modes to see how they stack up against once another (not available in the free version). This helps save time by offering an easy overview of which sentence structures are the best sounding when paraphrasing content so you can pick and choose which you like best or avoid those using unnecessary words.

Extensions & Workflows

The Quillbot software offers improved workflows through the use of extensions. The three it offers at this current time is are Microsoft Word, Google Docs & Google Chrome. Using an extension such as these will allow you to access the Quillbot features and functionality without having to open up a separate browser tab.

I'm a big fan of the Quillbot Chrome extension as it is easy to use and straight forward. I'm primarily working with online text editors in the form of Jarvis, WordPress and SurferSEO so being able to paraphrase right within the native tools via the extension is convenient.

Something Missing: A Plagiarism Checker

One thing that I think that the Quillbot team missed when adding features to this tool is a way to check for plagiarism. When paraphrasing content at scale like this, it is pretty essential for the vast majority of uses to have a way to check whether your content would pass a plagiarism check.

Other tools like Grammarly, WriterZen and Jasper has integrated plagiarism checkers built-in so it makes a lot of sense for the Quillbot tool to offer it as well. Quillbot does allow you to see how much your text has changed in terms of percentage compared to the original pasted source text, but this doesn't help as much as a plagiarism analysis would.


Performance & Function: How Good Does It Work?

A tool like this is a tough one to evaluate for the masses as what works for me, might not work for your needs. A lot of variables come into play especially the input source text and the desired output usage.

Given that there is a free version available, I'd recommend signing up for a free Quillbot account as a trial as this will give you a glimpse of what is capable to see if it meets your needs.

To give you a better idea of the capabilities of Quillbot Premium, here are some short paragraphs from a sample news article from CNN:


What Are Some Ideal Uses For Quillbot?

Theres a lot of different potential uses for a Quillbot. Here's a few ideal situations where the AI paraphrasing tool might be useful:

Academic & Collegiate Use

Quillbot's quick paraphrasing enables users to quickly turn around original content from various source materials. This is ideal for students at college and university levels, mainly because QuillBot acts as an academic writing tool that comes in handy with essays, dissertations and research papers.

SEO & Marketing

Creating content for the web or social media can be a tricky task, but Quillbot can help assist you with this whether it is a full blown blog post or simply a short paragraph. While it doesn't have any built-in SEO features like Jasper or SurferSEO, it functions much better for paraphrasing than most article rewriters or content spinners.

Media & News Articles

If you are working in the news or media, Quillbot allows for a quick and easy way to improve your writing time especially when working off press releases or related press materials. You'll be able to paraphrase original source content into original, unique paragraphs or summarize long bodies of content to just get to the core elements.


Are There Any Good Quillbot Alternatives?

While the artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities found within this software are impressive, it wouldn't be a fair Quillbot review if it didn't touch on some Quillbot alternatives and other rewriter tools that might be a better fit for your needs.

Jarvis AI 1 scaled

Jasper AI

While Jasper isn't really a direct competitor to Quillbot Premium, Jasper is one of the most popular AI writing software on the market that utilizes state of the art GPT-3 technology. Unlike an article rewriter tool like Quillbot which is only meant to manipulate existing content, Jasper can paraphrase, summarize and expand input content as well as its primary focus which is generating new, unique content.

This cloud-based tool makes writing painless as this tool offers a lot of built in features and functionality to product article from scratch. The only problem that you'll face is that it will sometimes produce incorrect facts and make up random stuff so you'll still need to proofread, fact check and edit the generated AI content.

Wordtune scaled

Wordtune

Probably the closest equivalent to Quillbot, Wordtune is a dedicated paraphrasing tool that has some free functionality with a paid subscription plan available. Wordtune isn't as featured packed at Quillbot with only five writing modes (re-write, casual, formal, expand and shorten).

Similar to Quillbot, there is the ability to utilize a limited set of features without paying a monthly subscription fee. For the real functionality and performance to shine, you'll need to dish out $25/month or $120/year. At the monthly price, you'll be paying $10 more for the subscription than Quillbot with less features.

Grammarly scaled

Grammarly

Arguably the most popular and well-known writing tool on the web, Grammarly does offer some basic word functionality with a built-in thesarus and grammar correction. However, while it will often suggest ideal changes to a sentence structure (but not rewrite the whole sentence), it is much less of an article spinner compared to Quillbot.

You really have to put in a lot of manual work to achieve proper paraphrasing potential in when using Grammarly. There is built-in support for Google Chrome, Google Docs and Microsoft Word which does makes it easy to use across pretty much every application.


Quillbot Review: Is This Tool Worth It?

If you are looking for a paraphrasing tool, QuillBot does provide an effective solution which integrates both high quality and a good price. It isn't as advanced as some other machine learning software which is what you would find on the market, but it does offer a high quality experience for those who understand it's strength and limitations.