Private Grammar Checker - Harper
Extension Actions
CRX ID
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Status
- Extension status: Featured
- Live on Store
Description from extension meta
The private grammar checker for 21st Century English
Image from store
Description from store
Harper is an English grammar checker designed to be just right. I created it after years of dealing with the shortcomings of the competition.
Grammarly was too expensive and too overbearing. Its suggestions lacked context, and were often just plain wrong. Not to mention: it's a privacy nightmare. Everything you write with Grammarly is sent to their servers. Their privacy policy claims they don't sell the data, but that doesn't mean they don't use it to train large language models and god knows what else. Not only that, but the round-trip-time of the network request makes revising your work all the more tedious.
LanguageTool is great, if you have gigabytes of RAM to spare and are willing to download the ~16GB n-gram dataset. Besides the memory requirements, I found LanguageTool too slow: it would take several seconds to lint even a moderate-size document.
That's why I created Harper: it is the grammar checker that fits my needs. Not only does it take milliseconds to lint a document, take less than 1/50th of LanguageTool's memory footprint, but it is also completely private. That's the power of open source.
Latest reviews
- Peter Laws
- Zendesk functionality is unreliable, works about 40% of the time, requiring a page refresh to restore functionality, sometimes just cutting out mid writing. The UI is really nice but the spell checker is quite limited, it really struggles to handle words where a letter should be repeated and has been missed.
- Steve B
- Not a very intelligent spell checker. Laggy, bad corrections, missing words, if it even finds a word to suggest. Uses punctuation that really is not relevant. Tries too hard to insert itself to make itself seem more useful than it really needs to be. Overall, it could be a great extension if it smartened up in some ways, and dumbed itself down in other ways. All the people want is a simple, straight forward spell checker that does not make constant or unnecessary corrections and has smarter suggestions for misspelled words.
- hemanth kumar
- Great effort unfortunately fails a basic test. Examples:(Too many False flags) "extention" will suggest extent<space>ion unless the split-word rule is disabled. "Ok" is being suggested by the spellchecker as oak / of / oh.
- Edin Abdulahi
- It's not working on zendesk
- Parth Pathak
- Why is it not working for me on Brave, i can see there is no mention of brave but all the other extension with spell checking capabilities are working properly but this is not working even for a second, its like i have installed it but it is not turning on or what, i tried clicking the extension and tried turning On/Off but nothing worked. I would really love to use this private open source Grammar checker. Note- giving one star so that you can guide me to fix this issue or provide an update (I couldn't find a fix online that would have worked for me)
- Christiana osuji
- it was great
- Yingjie Liu
- Amazing grammar tool, clean and effective, always like compact tools like this!
- Michael Newbeing
- It is very nice if you use only one language (English). If you are a multilingual writer and English is your second language, things become more complicated. The extension doesn't detect that text is not in English and is aggressively trying to correct every word, which is a bit disturbing. Still deciding whether to keep it or uninstall.
- Michael Coles
- I got rid of Grammarly after it added ai slop, and this is a basically perfect replacement! It gets stuff wrong now and then but no biggie. My one issue is that it reads lists as sentences, so it keeps highlighting my entire document and saying it's a hundred-word-long sentence or something. Otherwise, chef's kiss!
- Emrik Östling
- Works extremely well! Sometimes the highlight gets misplaced but it is probably the sites fault and not harpers and a reload often fixes it
- Aymen Chraf
- it does not work on every website (especially google websites) but it is good overall!
- Justin Quinn
- 5 stars until it stopped working, turning off spellcheck without being able to be turned on again.
- Kai Al
- great tool i love it
- Madison Dillard
- this is exactly what I was looking for. A free grammar correcter without AI that can be customized to you.
- rahul ganesh
- now with google docs support, it's just an objectively better grammarly, as it is signifigantly faster and free
- Jonno Andrews
- Brilliant. Exactly what I was looking for
- Rogerio Taques
- Usually, I don't rate products with 5 starts because I believe there is always room for improvements. However, while Harper still has to improve in some aspects, it is an outstanding initiative and great effort to bring such a feature for FREE. I can't thank you guys enough for doing it, so the minimum I can do is definitely rating it with 5 starts. Maintaining tool like this is, indeed, a piece of work, and I'm really glad these guys have been doing a great job on it. It has been a while since I started using Harper (replacing Grammarly entirely). I do use it as a browser extension and, also, as an LSP in Zed/VScode when working on my projects.
- Alexander Dalat
- I love the hard work put into the details of this extension. Some features are missing, yes, but it's progress towards the decaying open-source support for grammar checking (looking at you, LT). Showing love so that support can expand to Google Docs! Edit: also, as an extension developer myself, I know how difficult it is to support features involving input boxes, so show some love in the reviews and keep in mind that the developer is going out of their way to respond to most feedback (rare these days)! This is why it deserves a 5 in my eyes.
- Jazz-axy
- Unimpressed by the actual correction. It detects mistakes quickly, yes, but the suggested correction is too often wrong and makes no sense. Then I have to manually fix the word anyway, basically doing its job. There's no way to give feedback that the suggestions were incorrect. Uninstalled from it giving me more work to do instead of less.
- Paul Matthews
- Great extension, so refreshing to have one that isn't trying to get you to subscribe every five minutes.
- Ceb Bec
- Just perfect. The sweet spot between incredible speed and relevant suggestions.
- David Swanson
- Thank you to all the developers for such an awesome, free extension. Works great!
- Becky Foshee
- I love that it is private! It's helps to review your text for mistakes and gives suggestions. It does not do as well as Grammarly; however, I prefer Harper because it values my privacy and does not use AI or sale my data. I recommend Harper to all my privacy conscious friends and family. I also like that it does not change my text for me.
- Tom Lawrence
- Works greats over all, the only issue I would run into from time to time was using it the web interface of Discord.
- John Voegtlin
- put lines of code into all of my back-end website edit boxes that caused invisible errors why must it add a harper-render-box with a popover and style attribute everytime I open a page with an editable text box and then just leave them there?
- David
- good and easy
- Edward van Tonder
- Does what is says on the tin.
- m k
- I am going to keep it in my toolkit and disable Gra*** (you know the name) addon for a while - let's spellcheck my dirty texts domestically after about of month of using it - it is still a nice tool for writing features I'm missing: - disable for selected websites - a little bit more "human consumable" settings page (now it is 1km long, very flexible, but ..) - save settings somewhere (so i can use the same settings for more Harper integrations - like in other editors)
- Layman Team
- I love this grammar checker, it's not perfect but its free and private! Harper is a fantastic open source library for grammar checking in English if you need it, and the developer has plugin versions that extend beyond the chrome extension if you need it. The current bug I have is it doesn't automatically work on every site, and it cannot change text directly. Nor does it cover as much as a freemium or paid option. But at least it reminds you to review.
- Paul Grant
- It's fine. The UI is a bit clunky it seems to flag up errors that aren't errors more often than LanguageTool. Doesn't work on every site, but the devs are quick to fix bugs.
- Music Mayer
- Piece of garbage.... does a TERRIBLE job of finding grammar errors. Also, the tool gets in the way more than it helps... it does not easily allow editing an error, forcing you to choose one of its options even if none apply, Disappointed in the LanguageTool going the paid route. It works really well.
- Neveah Vann Edwards
- Could use some work, but overall my experience has been good.
- Thibault Milan
- Works great for English, but trashing LT for not being as fast while it's handling way more language than yourself is a bit cheap.
- Eric Ketzer
- Not bad, but it is only for English. They should add at least few other languages. Also, it literally doesn't do anything on Reddit.
- Sasha Virtpunk
- The extension is only available in English, with no other language options, making it pointless. Furthermore, it doesn't work in Google Docs, making it doubly pointless. It works well, checking text directly on the page, replacing the now-paid Language Tool.
- Tim Harman
- What a great addon. It's not as featureful as the cloud versions, but it's opensource and it's FAST. Thank you!
- victor
- it works great for what i have uses for. 8/10 would recommend. slight issue that brings it down to 4 stars is that in some websites i tested, it didn't work well, if at all.
- narujin
- just needs german support then its perfect
- Sithu
- Great! Small suggestion: Make it so that there's some delay or checks the written word after a space is inputted. Example: If I try to write the word tremendous, when I write "trem", it is already highlighting and saying its misspelled. Add some delay or wait until I type "trem " for it to determine if it's misspelled or not.
- Sash Sashsz
- Overall, good. I'd expect more grammar rules to be implmented and also has dictionary spell check e.g. to check if word "implmented" is missing letters or misspelled.
- Josh Noronha
- I enjoy this more than Grammarly, but it doesn't tend to work on Google Docs. I can only recall seeing it in action briefly, but I have used the Harper website, and it does give great spellchecks and grammar fixes. That being said, if the developer does fix this and gets it to activate on Docs, then this is a five-star extension. Keep up the good work Elijah.
- Adesynn Weber
- Does not work on google docs or outlook. I can't seem to get it to work on Word either, this is really disappointing. I've been trying to find a replacement for languagetool since they now require subscription, and grammerly is awful. Should this be resolved and the extension actually works on docs and outlook, and perhaps create an IOS app version to install on mac for Word I'd reconsider it.
- Nicolas Parot-Alvarez
- Extremely promising, I love the privacy focus, but it does not support enough websites yet. My main use case is Slack in the web browser, and it does not seem to work there, so it is not yet a viable choice for me compared to competitors. I have found a Github discussion mentioning Slack, but it seems dead.
- Amay
- The only grammar extension you need. You should probably also disable the system and browser spell check and use this for that as well as grammar usage. The open-source community is great.
- Nossy Drelich
- Thank you very much for making this! It works great and works smoothly! This is a must install after every new chrome install.
- Cabeza De Termo
- In doesnt work for the only 2 reasons i've installed this: youtube and reddit coments. In youtube doesnt even detect words, and in reddit it underline errors but the correction pop up doesnt show up when you click on it.
- Aziz Mejri
- Works like a charm, better than the overly expensive alternatives.
- Maryellen Williams
- It's helping me catch mistakes I wouldn't have noticed right away. When I looked at some of the flags and thought they were wrong i just looked for a different word or read the sentence out and realized where I went wrong. For my needs it's great. It does have some bugs, but I'm expecting they will eventually get worked out. Like some of the capitalization flags.
- Mar Belle
- I really wanted to like this and escape Grammarly but unfortunately it doesn't seem up to the task, missing many grammar errors that Grammarly picks up and most annoyingly, given that I do most of my writing within the Wordpress editor, marking any sententence which contains a link as an uncapitalised sentence error proceeding and following the link. I might check it out again in the future but as is, Harper feels not at all production ready for what is a very common writing case.
- Rogerio Taques
- I've been using Harper instead of Grammarly for a few months already, and I can't be happier! I can't wait to see the great improvement when this tool reaches version 1.0.0! Great job! I hope that, eventually, it will also support languages other than English.