this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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Harper: Free, Open Source Grammar Checker (writewithharper.com)
submitted 6 days ago by cm0002@suppo.fi to c/opensource@programming.dev
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What is it?

Harper is a free English grammar checker designed to be just right. You can think of it as an open-source alternative to Grammarly. I created it after years of dealing with the shortcomings of the competition.

Private

Harper is completely private, in every sense of the word.

Since Harper runs on-device, your data doesn't go anywhere you don't want it to.

That means you have 100% certainty we don't violate your copyright by training large language models.

Harper also intentionally avoids including any kind of generative AI in any part of our processing pipeline.

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[–] thatonecoder@lemmy.ca 17 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I've used it for 5 months already, at the very least. 9/10, considering how new it is.

[–] Kissaki@programming.dev 5 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Do you have a comparison to other tools like Grammarly? Were you sometimes missing suggestions or linting rules?

[–] thatonecoder@lemmy.ca 4 points 6 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Haven't used Grammarly in years; however, I can tell you a couple of cons Harper has, compared to Grammarly:

1: It is English-only, for now, although it has all common English dialects

2: It sometimes gets pronunciations of abbreviations wrong, although this is getting less and less common, since the developers work a lot on it

3: There aren't plugins for it on certain editors (e.g. Notepad++), although it has for Chromium/Firefox, VS Code, among others

4: It does lack many style suggestions, but I shall reiterate that they're working on it