Free Hemingway Editor alternative

Readability Check is a free Hemingway Editor alternative — $0 vs $19.99 for the Hemingway desktop app — that scores writing across six industry-standard formulas (Flesch Reading Ease, Flesch-Kincaid, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, and the Automated Readability Index) and highlights every sentence dragging the score down. No signup, no download, no paywall. It runs entirely in your browser.

Last updated 9 October 2026

Side-by-side comparison

Details about Hemingway come from its own site and help pages, read on 8 October 2026. "Not stated" and "not listed" mean its pages didn't say.

What Hemingway gets right

Hemingway Editor made a simple idea popular: highlighting the sentences to fix is more useful than a single readability number. "Take this from grade 12 to grade 8" is now a common editing instruction, and Hemingway is a big part of why.

The product has three real strengths. The sentence-level colour coding is immediately legible. The style flags — adverbs, passive voice, qualifiers, and words with simpler alternatives — catch common weak-prose patterns. And the single grade-level readout at the top of the page is honest, not jargon-laden.

Where Hemingway falls short

Three meaningful gaps for users who need more than a creative-writing coach:

• One grade, not six formulas. Hemingway shows a single grade level. Its help page doesn't name the formula, but an article on its site says its online readability test "uses the Automated Readability Index." For most writing one grade is enough. But formulas can disagree, most often on technical or jargon-heavy text, and one number can't show you that.
• Audience targets are a paid feature. A "good" grade depends on who you are writing for. Hemingway Editor Plus lets you choose from three target levels: Accessible, Default and Technical. The free editor shows one grade against one default.
• The extras cost money. Working offline needs the $19.99 desktop app. Grammar fixes, AI rewrites and target levels need Hemingway Editor Plus, which starts at $8.33 a month billed yearly, after a 2-week trial.

What this calculator does differently

• Six formulas, one consensus. The home page shows all six scores live — Flesch Reading Ease (0–100), Flesch-Kincaid Grade, Gunning Fog, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, and ARI — plus an averaged consensus grade. Outliers across the six tell you what's actually wrong: Gunning Fog spike means jargon; SMOG spike means complex-word density; Flesch-Kincaid alone moving means sentence length.
• Audience presets. Pick "general public", "middle school", "legal / compliance", "technical / professional", "academic", or "children K–6" and every score card shows a ✓ / ⚠ indicator against the target range. Edit until everything is green.
• Sentence-length distribution chart. A live chart shows the words-per-sentence curve across your draft. Long-tail spikes flag the rewrites that will move the score the most.
• Free forever, no account. It works offline once the page has loaded, with nothing to buy. Funded by display advertising on reference pages, not on the calculator itself.
• Embeddable. Drop a single iframe tag into your own site to share the tool with readers — useful for writing-craft blogs, style-guide internal docs, and content-marketing teams.

When Hemingway is still the right choice

Three cases:

• You want passive-voice and adverb flagging. Readability Check does not replicate these style flags — they are not part of any standard readability formula. If your editing pass is focused on prose style rather than reading level, Hemingway's flags are useful in a way our tool is not.
• You prefer one number to six. Hemingway's single grade is honest and unambiguous. The six-formula consensus we show is more defensible but takes a beat longer to read.
• You already own the $19.99 desktop app and the offline-document workflow fits your team. Switching tools mid-stream rarely pays off.

Hemingway is also the better choice if you want grammar fixes or AI rewrites, which are Plus features. Readability Check does neither.

For multi-formula scoring, free audience targets, embedding the tool, and free use at any volume, Readability Check is the simpler fit.

How the sentence highlighting works

The annotated text panel applies the same colour vocabulary Hemingway popularised, but with calibrated thresholds:

• Green — sentences of 15 words or fewer. Comfortable to read.
• Amber — 16–25 words. Medium; should be split if the sentence is dense.
• Red — over 25 words. Rewrite candidate.
• Wavy amber underline — words of four or more syllables. These drive Gunning Fog and SMOG scores aggressively.

Select any highlighted sentence to see its word count and fix suggestions. The summary line above the annotated panel reports the count of red sentences and complex words.

Audience match: free here, a Plus feature in Hemingway

Pick a preset from the dropdown above the verdict panel. Each preset defines a target Flesch-Kincaid grade ceiling and a Flesch Reading Ease floor:

• General public: FK ≤ 9, FRE ≥ 60
• Middle school: FK ≤ 8, FRE ≥ 65
• Legal / compliance: FK ≤ 11, FRE ≥ 45
• Technical / professional: FK ≤ 14, FRE ≥ 30
• Academic: FK ≤ 16, FRE ≥ 20
• Children K–6: FK ≤ 6, FRE ≥ 80

Each formula row gets a ✓ "in target" or ⚠ "above target" indicator that updates as you edit. The same readability number means different things for different readers, and the preset shows that as you edit. Hemingway offers three target levels in its paid Plus version; here the six presets are free.

Frequently asked questions