DeepL Write arrived in January 2023 as a beta with an obvious logic behind it: a company that had spent six years learning how sentences should sound in German, French and English could turn that model inwards and fix sentences instead of converting them. Three years on it is a shipping product with its own subscription — and, importantly, its own limitations, most of which are documented plainly by DeepL rather than hidden.
- Rewrites whole sentences into natural phrasing rather than only flagging errors
- Style and tone presets let you shift a draft between registers
- Free tier works without an account, up to 1,500 characters at a time
- Plugs into Word, Gmail, Google Docs and Slides, browser extensions and desktop apps
- Write Pro does not store your text while you are signed in, per DeepL's documentation
- Only 11 languages and variants — Chinese, English (UK/US), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (and BR), Spanish
- A DeepL Pro subscription does not include paid DeepL Write; it is a separate plan or a bundle
- Free and DeepL Pro accounts are capped at 1,500 and 2,000 characters per pass
- No plagiarism detection, citation help or document-wide style enforcement
- Not supported inside CAT tools, unlike DeepL Translator
- Non-native English, German or French writers sending work to native-speaker audiences
- Anyone who wants phrasing rewritten, not just errors underlined
- Teams already standardised on DeepL who want one vendor for translation and polish
- You write in a language outside the supported eleven
- You need plagiarism checks, citations or academic-integrity tooling
- You want a single tool that both translates and drafts — those are separate DeepL products
Pricing
Up to 1,500 characters per pass in the web editor.
Up to 2,000 characters per pass. This is the free version of Write — paid Write features are not part of a DeepL Pro plan.
Unlimited characters, plus DeepL's maximum data-security handling: texts are not stored while you are logged into your account. Sold on its own or bundled with DeepL Pro.
The improve-text endpoint is not available on the free API plan.
The product in one line
DeepL Write takes text in one language and gives it back improved in that same language. It corrects grammar, spelling and punctuation, and it proposes alternative words and phrasings, with presets that shift the style and tone of a passage. There is no translation involved. If you came here looking for the tool that turns German into English, that is DeepL Translator and it is reviewed separately.
Eleven languages, and why that number matters
The supported list is short and worth stating in full: Chinese, English (UK), English (US), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazilian) and Spanish. DeepL Translator lists more than a hundred languages; Write lists eleven. That gap is the single most useful fact about the product, because it tells you who it is built for — writers working in the major European and East Asian business languages, most often not as their first language.
That framing also explains where Write beats a conventional grammar checker. A checker tells you that a clause is wrong. Write tends to hand back a differently structured sentence that a native speaker would plausibly have written in the first place, which is precisely the failure mode second-language writers cannot self-diagnose. It is the same instinct that made the translator popular, pointed at monolingual text.
Character limits are the real tier boundary
DeepL publishes the limits, and they are the clearest way to understand the pricing. Without an account you can work on 1,500 characters at a time. With a DeepL Pro subscription for the Translator, that rises to 2,000. Only a DeepL Write Pro subscription removes the cap entirely and adds the stronger data-handling commitment, under which your texts are not stored while you are signed in.
Two thousand characters is roughly three or four paragraphs. For an email or a paragraph of marketing copy that is fine. For a report you will be feeding the tool in slices, which is the moment most people either subscribe or stop using it.
The billing wrinkle everyone hits
DeepL states it directly in its own help centre: access to the paid version of DeepL Write is not included in a DeepL Pro plan. Paying for the translator does not buy you the writing assistant. You subscribe to Write Pro separately, or you buy a bundle that combines the two. Whether that is reasonable is a matter of taste — they are genuinely different products with different models behind them — but it surprises people at checkout, and it is worth knowing before you build a team workflow on the assumption that one licence covers both.
The same split shows up in the API. The Write endpoint requires a paid DeepL API Pro subscription; the free API key does not include it. And unlike the translator, Write is not supported inside CAT tools, which rules it out of some professional localisation pipelines.
Where it plugs in
DeepL has done the boring integration work. Write is available on the website, in the Windows and macOS desktop apps, in the iOS and Android apps, through the Chrome, Firefox and Edge extensions, and through add-ins for Microsoft Word, Gmail, Google Docs and Google Slides. In practice that means you can invoke it where you already write rather than pasting into a browser tab, which matters more for adoption than any feature on the list.
Against Grammarly, Claude and ChatGPT
Grammarly is the incumbent and covers more ground: broader surface coverage, team style guides, plagiarism detection, and a decade of enterprise deployment. If your requirement is "enforce house style across forty people writing in English," DeepL Write is not that tool.
General models are the other pressure. Ask Claude or ChatGPT to tighten a paragraph and you get a competent rewrite, plus the ability to restructure, argue with the result, or draft from nothing — none of which Write does. What you lose is determinism. Write does one job with a narrow, predictable output; a chat model will happily rewrite the meaning along with the prose if you are not watching. For editing text you already care about, that predictability is a feature.
The workflow it is unbeatable at
There is one loop where nothing else comes close. You have written something important in a language that is not your first — a proposal, a difficult email, a job application. You know it is grammatically fine and you cannot tell whether it sounds right. A grammar checker will pass it. A general model will rewrite it enthusiastically and may change what you meant.
DeepL Write hands back the same content in phrasing a native speaker would plausibly have chosen, and you can see exactly what moved. Accept the changes you agree with, reject the ones that drift, and the meaning stays yours. That specific, narrow, high-stakes edit is what the product is built for, and it is worth more than the feature list suggests to the people who need it.
The honest recommendation
DeepL Write earns its subscription in one clear situation: you write professionally in a second language, in one of the eleven supported ones, and you need the output to pass as native. In that case it is the best-targeted tool on the market and the character cap will push you to Pro within a week.
If you write in your first language and already pay for Grammarly, or if you are comfortable steering a general model, the case is much weaker — you are buying a narrow tool at full price for the last five per cent of polish. And if your language is not on the list, the decision is made for you.
