Harper
Harper is an English grammar checker designed to be just right. I created it after years of dealing with the shortcomings of the competition.
Cost / License
- Free
- Open Source
Application type
Platforms
- Self-Hosted
- WebAssembly
- Visual Studio Code
- Mac
- Linux
- Windows
- Homebrew
- Neovim
Features
Properties
- Privacy focused
- Lightweight
Features
- No registration required
- Works Offline
- Ad-free
- No Tracking
- Spell Checking
Tags
- english-grammar
- obsidian-plugin
- webassembly
- zed-extension
- vscode-extension
- Neovim Plugin
Harper News & Activities
Recent activities
- adabru reviewed Harper
Biggest "disadvantage" in my opinion: only English.
I had issues with line-breaking on the Paymo website.
Some of the suggestions given by Harper do not match as well as LT so far.
The extension is disabled by default.
Other than that, I like it. It gets the job done, it is open source and I'm confident that it will stay free and open for ever.
- adabru added Spell Checking as a feature to Harper
help-mydetector added Harper as alternative to AI Plagiarism Checker and GrammarChecker- POX added Harper as alternative to Grammar LLM
steamed_bun_explosion added Harper as alternative to Scraib.app- babsors liked Harper
- ReallyModern added Works Offline as a feature to Harper
Harper information
Developed by
Automattic Inc. Licensing
Open Source (Apache-2.0) and Free product.Written in
Alternatives
59 alternatives listedSupported Languages
- English
AlternativeTo Categories
Development, Education & ReferenceGitHub repository
- 8,940 Stars
- 244 Forks
- 279 Open Issues
- Updated
What is Harper?
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.
Harper is even small enough to load via WebAssembly.
Comments and Reviews
Biggest "disadvantage" in my opinion: only English.
I had issues with line-breaking on the Paymo website.
Some of the suggestions given by Harper do not match as well as LT so far.
The extension is disabled by default.
Other than that, I like it. It gets the job done, it is open source and I'm confident that it will stay free and open for ever.