Harper icon
Harper icon

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.

Harper screenshot 1

Cost / License

Application type

Platforms

  • Self-Hosted
  • WebAssembly
  • Visual Studio Code
  • Mac
  • Linux
  • Windows
  • Homebrew
  • Neovim
Harper alternatives  
16likes
74alternatives
0articles

Features

Properties

  1.  Privacy focused
  2.  Lightweight

Features

  1.  No registration required
  2.  Works Offline
  3.  Ad-free
  4.  No Tracking
  5.  Spell Checking
  6.  Dark Mode

 Tags

Harper News & Activities

Highlights All activities

Recent activities

  • xplosionmind added Dark Mode as a feature to Harper
  • xplosionmind liked Harper
  • ProofKey icon
    jirulabs added Harper as alternative to ProofKey
  • BlinkWrite icon
    Diana-Dobra added Harper as alternative to BlinkWrite
  • mooovemaker liked Harper
  • sserpolar added Harper as alternative to Offline Spell Check for Web Pages
  • ReverseGPT icon
    reversegpt added Harper as alternative to ReverseGPT
  • Lexicon Writer icon
    Aashish-Harishchandre added Harper as alternative to Lexicon Writer
  • chartreuseraven reviewed Harper  

    The Firefox extension is perplexing. The underlined parts don't match with the errors it's highlighting. It detects smart/angled quotes and apostrophes as errors or different spellings ("it's" vs “it’s” for example, the latter is an error). I will try it on a Chrome-based browser, and if it works as intended there, I will be very disappointed the dev didn't bother with the Firefox version.

  • chartreuseraven liked Harper
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Harper information

AlternativeTo Categories

Development, Education & Reference

GitHub repository

  •  15,650 Stars
  •  649 Forks
  •  923 Open Issues
  •   Updated  
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Our users have written 2 comments and reviews about Harper, and it has gotten 16 likes

Harper was added to AlternativeTo by Paul on and this page was last updated .

Comments and Reviews

   
chartreuseraven
0

The Firefox extension is perplexing. The underlined parts don't match with the errors it's highlighting. It detects smart/angled quotes and apostrophes as errors or different spellings ("it's" vs “it’s” for example, the latter is an error). I will try it on a Chrome-based browser, and if it works as intended there, I will be very disappointed the dev didn't bother with the Firefox version.

adabru
0

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.

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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.