Best essay writing AI tool 2025
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We’re already seeing how AI is improving and even revolutionizing various spheres, including essay writing. AI for essay writing can help you in many ways, from fixing grammar mistakes to making research easier since it can break down long videos and texts into key points.
My expert team of researchers here at Cybernews and I worked together to find the best essay-writing AI tools available. We’ve researched and reviewed numerous essay AI tools to identify the top ones. You can read my reviews in this detailed guide, as well as compare and learn how I selected them.
Best 5 essay writing AI tools – shortlist
- Rytr – overall best essay writing AI
- QuillBot – ideal for refining and polishing essays
- Scalenut – excels at topic structuring and keyword research
- KoalaWriter – GPT-4 tool with a quality outline editor
- ChatGPT – best for idea generation and ease of use
- Jasper AI – great for brainstorming ideas
- GrowthBar – plan, write, and optimize long texts
- Kafkai – designed to generate longer-form content
The best essay writer AI tools compared
I’ve put together a table with all the tools on this list and their key aspects, including what they’re made for, their pricing, limits, and features to give you a more detailed comparison.
| Tool | Best for | Pricing | Free version | Key features |
| Rytr | Writers in need of texts with various styles and tones | $9/month | Yes, but it is limited and lacks features like plagiarism checks | Content generation, tone and style selection, outline generation, paraphrasing |
| QuillBot | Essay writers looking to quickly polish their essays, most notably for grammar checks and paraphrasing | $9.95/month | Yes, but limited features | Paraphraser, grammar checker, plagiarism checker, translator |
| Scalenut | Essay writers who need help structuring essays and finding keyword | $49/month | No, but there is a 7-day free trial | Keyword research, topic structuring, AI writing assistant |
| KoalaWriter | People interested in robust outline editing | $9/month | Yes, but limited to 500 words | Outline editor, readability improvement, SEO optimization |
| ChatGPT | Virtually every segment of essay writing | $20/month | Yes, but limited access to the latest GPT-4o | Language enhancement, AI-assisted proofreading, data analysis |
| Jasper AI | Generating content to get ideas and overcome writer's block | $49/month | No, but it has a 7-day free trial | Content generation, essay templates, SEO optimization |
| GrowthBar | Writers in need of robust SEO-friendly AI writers for long-form content | $36/month | No, but comes with a 7-day free trial | Topic idea generation, keyword research, competitor analysis |
| Kafkai | Creating full essays in bulk in order to get ideas with minimal effort | $19/month | No, but you can try the tool for free | Bulk article generation, niche topic generation |
The best 8 AI essay writing tools – our detailed list
The following section will provide detailed reviews of my picks for the 8 best AI writing tools. From each review, you’ll learn what makes the tool great for essay writing, its features, and the pros and cons that should make your choice easier.
1. Rytr – overall best essay writing AI
| Best for: | Writers in need of texts with various styles and tones |
| Starting price: | $9/month |
| Free version: | Yes, but it is limited and lacks features like plagiarism checks |
| Top features: | Content generation, tone and style selection, outline generation, paraphrasing |
Rytr is the best AI for essay writing, especially if you want to generate texts in different styles and tones, from formal and persuasive to informal, and you can use the tool to paraphrase and reword existing texts.
The AI also operates in multiple languages, so you don’t have to use only English. You can also create essay outlines and brainstorm ideas.
Interestingly, Rytr also has a strong autocomplete feature, which can finish sentences or entire paragraphs while preserving the quality and flow of existing text.
2. QuillBot – ideal for refining and polishing essays
| Best for: | Essay writers looking to quickly polish their essays, particularly for grammar checks and paraphrasing |
| Starting price: | $9.95/month |
| Free version: | Yes, but limited features |
| Top features: | Paraphraser, grammar checker, plagiarism checker, translator |
QuillBot is an AI tool designed to improve your writing, so if that’s what you’re looking for, it is perhaps the best essay AI tool.
QuillBot is effectively one platform that combines eight tools: paraphrasing, grammar checking, summarizing, flow improvements, plagiarism checking, and citation generation.
It can be instrumental in polishing your essay, especially the citation generator that can help you create citations in various formats, which many other essay AI tools cannot do.
3. Scalenut – excels at topic structuring and keyword research
| Best for: | Essay writers in need of structuring essays and finding keywords |
| Starting price: | $49/month |
| Free version: | No, but there is a 7-day free trial |
| Top features: | Keyword research, topic structuring, AI writing assistant |
Scalenut is an AI-powered content marketing platform designed to help marketers create SEO-friendly content. However, many of its features can be leveraged in essay writing. For instance, the tool excels at keyword research and content structuring, which can be incredibly helpful in this context.
Although not the best AI for essay writing, primarily for the price that’s a bit high for this specific use case, you’ll still find Scalenut’s AI writing assistant competent at answering your prompts and helping you overcome writer’s block.
More than that, you can use Scalenut to outline your essay and ensure flow, while its SEO features can improve the clarity and readability of your text.
4. KoalaWriter – GPT-4 tool with a quality outline editor
| Best for: | People interested in robust outline editing |
| Starting price: | $9/month |
| Free version: | Yes, but limited to 500 words |
| Top features: | Outline editor, readability improvement, SEO optimization |
KoalaWriter is another AI-powered tool designed for content marketers. Thanks to its quality selection of AI writing features, it can be the best AI for college essays.
It’s best suited for creating long-form SEO-friendly content, which can also be helpful in essay writing. You can also adjust the tone of your content to match essay requirements.
Most importantly, KoalaWriter has a robust feature for creating and editing outlines. This tool is handy for structuring essays and ensuring their logical flow.
5. ChatGPT – best for idea generation and ease of use
| Best for: | Virtually every segment of essay writing |
| Starting price: | $20/month |
| Free version: | Yes, but limited access to the latest GPT-4o |
| Top features: | Language enhancement, AI-assisted proofreading, data analysis |
ChatGPT is one of the most recognizable tools on this list and the one that effectively kicked off the modern AI space. Academic writing is one of its many applications, offering several features tailored to that purpose.
First and foremost, you can brainstorm with ChatGPT to find new ideas, but you can also outline and structure a whole essay with its help.
You can generate content that might help you get ideas on how to write your own. You can also paraphrase and reword sentences and even longer paragraphs. Ultimately, you can use the best AI essay writer to correct your style and grammar.
6. Jasper AI – great for brainstorming ideas
| Best for: | Generating content to get ideas and overcome writer's block |
| Starting price: | $49/month |
| Free version: | No, but there is a 7-day free trial |
| Top features: | Content generation, essay templates, SEO optimization |
Although primarily built for marketers, Jasper AI can be the best AI for writing essays if used correctly. It’s excellent at generating content from simple prompts, which can be ideal for getting ideas for your essay or overcoming writer’s block.
The tool also has various templates, some designed for essays. These templates are excellent for creating a structure for your essay or as a starting point.
More than that, you can use this AI essay helper to paraphrase and rewrite content to get better clarity and avoid plagiarism. You can even alter the tone and style of content. Grammar and spelling checks are also there, while SEO features Jasper AI offers can be helpful with essays you want to post online.
7. GrowthBar – plan, write, and optimize long texts
| Best for: | Writers in need of robust SEO-friendly AI tools for long-form content |
| Starting price: | $36/month |
| Free version: | No, but comes with a 7-day free trial |
| Top features: | Topic idea generation, keyword research, competitor analysis |
GrowthBar is not a standard AI writing tool but one designed to help writers create quality long-form content for the web. Its features can also be leveraged in essay writing, making it one of the best AI for essay creation.
Its competitor analysis features can help you better understand the landscape of your topic. You can also use its outline generation capabilities to structure your essay better.
Lastly, you can also benefit from the tool’s paragraph rewriter features to optimize your paper once it’s finished.
8. Kafkai – designed to generate longer-form content
| Best for: | Creating full essays in bulk in order to get ideas with minimal effort |
| Starting price: | $19/month |
| Free version: | No, but you can try the tool for free |
| Top features: | Bulk article creation, niche topic generation |
Kafkai is an AI writing tool designed to quickly create large amounts of content and unique, highly readable articles. It’s primarily for content marketers, but some of its features can also be utilized in essay writing.
It may not be the best AI for essays when it comes to rewriting and style and grammar checks, but it can create large amounts of text with minimal input. This can be useful in generating several essays at once to get ideas on how to approach your topic.
More than that, the tool creates highly readable text in almost any niche, which can also be helpful when brainstorming.
Our methodology for testing the best AI paper writer tools
My team here at Cybernews and I have a particular and carefully developed strategy for reviewing the best free essay-writing AI tools on the market. It was created to narrow down the list for our readers and always recommend only top-of-the-line platforms.
The strategy involves reviewing AI tools based on specific criteria. I do all this by researching review sites and user feedback. The better the tool meets my requirements, the better it will be ranked. Here’s how that works and the main criteria I check:
- User experience (20%): I always check how easy a tool is to use. Its interface needs to be easy to navigate because the best AI essay writers are straightforward tools.
- Features (40%): The more features a tool has, the better. You want an AI essay writer to be able to generate text and ideas, improve your style and grammar, and check for plagiarism, for example
- Pricing (25%): Some of these tools have free versions, which I consider in my reviews. However, the best are never free, at least not their full versions. Naturally, this still means that the price shouldn’t be restrictive and should be transparent.
- Support (15%): I always check user feedback to see what the opinion is about the customer support of a tool. More than that, I look into how many educational resources are available.
What is an AI app for writing essays, and how does it work?
An AI essay writing tool is software designed to assist in writing using artificial intelligence (AI). The exact tasks of an AI essay writing tool differ from platform to platform, but most cover content generation, topic and idea generation, outlining and structuring, paraphrasing and rewording, and grammar and style checks.
Many AI writing solutions are all-in-one tools that can do all this, while some focus on specific features. The most common types are summarizers, generators, and rewriters. Summarizers are made for creating text summaries, generators create content, and rewriters primarily paraphrase and reword texts.
Bear in mind that most of them are not made explicitly for essay writing. They simply use natural language processing (NLP), a technology that can assist with most types of writing. That’s also one of the reasons why many of the best AI writer tools I recommend are made primarily for other use cases.
Essay writers rely on large language models (LLMs) to generate text and deliver other features. LLMs are trained on massive amounts of data to generate, predict, and interpret the meaning of text and answer user prompts.
Users are only required to input prompts, or better said, to ask the tool to do something, just as you would a human. AI paper writer tools don’t truly understand questions, but they are trained on massive amounts of data, so they can provide adequate answers nonetheless, effectively mimicking understanding. However, this is also why they can occasionally misunderstand simple queries and even provide inaccurate information.
What benefits and features should AI essay writing tools have?
AI essay writing tools offer a wide range of benefits and features, so let’s discuss the most important ones, starting with the features:
- Content generation: Generates text based on user prompts. The text can be a sentence, paragraph, or a whole essay.
- Outline generation: Creates outlines for essays or other articles.
- Tone and style change: You can generate text with a specific tone and style or alter existing content.
- Research and brainstorming: You can research almost any topic available online and even brainstorm ideas with the tool.
- Rewriting: You can rewrite or paraphrase content with these tools.
- Grammar editing: Proofreads texts and checks grammar.
- Citations: Help with citations in various formats.
- Plagiarism check: Some AI for writing essays can check the originality of your text and tell you if there’s plagiarism.
And now, let’s look at the main benefits:
- Time-saving: Regardless of what you use the tool for and which features you employ, you’ll save time, as you’d otherwise need to do this manually.
- Grammar and layout improvement: The tool can help you correct grammar mistakes and improve the overall layout of your essay.
- Creative ideas: The best AI for writing papers can help you find new ideas and directions to take your essay.
- Detailed research: You can find information, data, and studies you need to write your essay relatively quickly, so you don’t have to search Google and complex databases.
- Customization: With careful prompting, you can use the tool to alter and customize your essay to meet requirements.
Pros and cons of AI essay writing tools
If you’re still unsure about AI for essays, my list of pros and cons should help steer you in the right direction.
Final word on the best essay AI writer tools
Choosing the best AI to write essays is crucial if you want to create high-quality papers. The right tool will help you generate ideas, overcome writer’s block, reword sections, improve flow and style, and generate outlines.
To get all that, it’s best to use my number one pick, Rytr. It’s still the best AI writing tool and can effectively do everything covered above. You only need to ask through an easily navigable interface, making this the most user-friendly option.
FAQ
Is it OK to use AI to write essays?
No, using an AI tool to write a whole essay is unethical. However, it’s perfectly fine to use it to get help with research, grammar, style, and tone. As long as you’re not generating the entire essay with AI, it’s OK to use.
Is there an AI that writes essays like a human?
Yes, many AI writer tools can mimic human writing, but none can be as original as humans. These tools generate content based on available information and datasets but cannot create original content. To write like a human, you need to be a human, it’s as simple as that.
Is there an AI that can rewrite essays?
Yes, there is. Many of the tools mentioned above can rewrite or paraphrase sections or whole texts. One of the best examples is Rytr, which is my top pick. It can generate texts in different styles and tones, paraphrase existing ones, and generate outlines.
Can universities detect AI essays?
Yes, many universities use AI detection tools to determine whether or not students are using AI tools to generate texts, be it essays existing students send or application essays. Just as there is AI software that writes essays, there are tools that detect AI-written content.
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