Best AI Essay Writers in 2026

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 12 essay writing AI tools – shortlist

1. EssayDone − overall best essay writing AI tool
2. Grammarly – AI-powered editor
3. Paperpal – strong AI essay writing tool for academics
4. Quillbot – AI writing tool for polishing up essays
5. Writesonic – business-oriented AI writing tool
6. Smodin – AI writing tool for essay drafting
7. Jasper – powerful AI tool for brainstorming
8. ChatGPT – best for idea generation
9. MyEssayWriter.ai – great for high-school essays
10. Scribbr.com – solid AI tool for non-English speakers
11. PerfectEssayWriter.ai – AI essay writer for middle-school students
12. Yomu – AI writing tool with Sourcely integration

The best 12 AI essay writing tools – our detailed list

The following section will provide detailed reviews of my picks for the 12 best AI essay writing tools. Each overview will show you what makes the tool great for essay writing, its standout features, and the pros and cons that should make your choice easier.

1. EssayDone – overall best essay writing AI tool

Best for:	Academic writers who consider human-like content a must
Starting price:	$19/month
Free version:	No, but you get a free trial limited to 2,000 words for WriterGPT and 1,500 for Humanizer
Top features:	Humanizer, content creation, AI detector, and hook generator

Visit EssayDone

EssayDone is the best AI for essay writing, especially if you want to generate personalized texts with an academic,human-like tone that can bypass AI detectors while keeping the original meaning.

I used the same prompt for testing all of the AI writing tools on this list. Before generating the text, EssayDone lets you choose the writing level (high school to doctorant), type of text, number of pages, and language. You can also ask it to just generate a title or an outline.

Here’s what EssayDone generated with my prompt. I selected the undergraduate writing level.

Overall, the generated essay is strong, and fits the style and expectations of an undergraduate student. It’s a great starting point for your essay, but like everything generated with AI, needs polishing up.

The WriterGPT supports over 60 languages. It also takes charge of time-consuming tasks such as looking up synonyms and references for your paper. It searches the best citations and automatically adds them to the text so that you can approve or discard them with a click. However, like any generative AI tool, it can hallucinate information, so always make sure to double-check the sources.

In addition to WriterGPT, EssayDone includes 12 tools that can handle your essay writing from topic generation to text refinement. For instance, the hook crafter helps you increase reader engagement, whilst the essay enhancer improves clarity and style. It’s an okay tool, but not the best – generating essays is where EssayDone truly shines. I wouldn’t even use the add-ons, since there are better options available for proofreading and editing, which you will find below.

2. Grammarly – best for editing and proofreading

Best for:	High-school and university students who want to polish their essays
Starting price:	$12.00/month
Free version:	Yes
Top features:	Live editing and suggestions, over 500,000 integrations

Visit Grammarly

Grammarly is my second pick and is a tool that I use on a daily basis. It’s ideal for editing, proofreading, and improving readability of your essay – all in real time. I recommend it for high-school and university students as well as professionals who want to catch grammar mistakes and improve the clarity of their text.

Grammarly also has a generative AI tool, but I found it nowhere near as good as EssayDone and other tools on this list. It’s not surprising since generating text isn’t the main goal of Grammarly and you shouldn’t use it as such.

Here’s the text Grammarly generated with the same prompt.

The generated essay itself is decent, but Grammarly hallucinates a lot when generating text. So, most of the citations it uses don’t even exist – not great when you’re trying to generate a first draft to draw ideas from.

Grammarly shines at live editing, and that’s what I recommend using it for. In fact, you can use it with other AI essay tools like EssayDone to edit and make the text more human-like.

3. PaperPal – best for academics

Best for:	University students, academics, and researchers
Starting price:	$11.50/month
Free version:	Yes
Top features:	University-level text, PDF reader, integrations with Microsoft Word and Google Docs

Visit Paperpal

Paperpal is our third pick because of its comprehensive approach to academic needs. It generates clear and nuanced text, so you won’t be getting generalized output. Paperpal is also a great helper for gathering research – most of its citations come from existing sources, so you don’t have to worry as much about AI hallucinations.

Here’s what Paperpal generated with the same prompt I used for EssayDone and Grammarly.

The essay is good and all of the cited sources were real, which is what impressed me the most, especially compared to other AI tools which tend to hallucinate at least a little bit. So, generating a first draft with Paperpal is a great way to gather your research as well. However, Paperpal generated only 730 words instead of what I prompted, so you may need multiple prompts to get to the final draft of your essay.

I also like that a plagiarism checker and an AI detector are included. This way, you can immediately check what is flagged and fix it – a real time saver.

4. 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:	$8.33/month
Free version:	Yes
Top features:	Paraphraser, grammar checker, plagiarism checker, translator

Visit QuillBot

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.

In essence, QuillBot is 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.

It’s mainly marketed as a paraphraser, but Quillbot can generate completely new text. Here’s what it generated with the same prompt I used above.

While the generated essay was too short based on my prompt, the text itself was solid. The language was clear and concise, and Quillbot maintained a formal tone throughout. Most importantly, all of the cited sources were real, so it doesn’t hallucinate as much as other AI tools. Still, always fact-check every source, even if the tool rarely hallucinates.

5. Writesonic – best for marketing and SEO

Best for:	Marketing and business students, marketing and SEO teams
Starting price:	$39.00/month
Free version:	No, but there is a 7-day free trial
Top features:	Article writer, built-in marketing and SEO tools

Visit Writesonic AI

Writesonic is a strong AI writing tool, and can be a great addition to marketing and business students to learn how to write articles and content pieces for marketing and SEO needs. You can select keywords to include, top websites to reference to, and play around with other marketing tools.

While it’s not designed for essays, Writesonic has an AI article writer, which is mainly used for blog and social media posts. Here’s what it generated with the same prompt I used for other AI tools above.

Its AI article writer is not designed for essays, and it shows. The text itself is more casual and even salesy. However, it does great with sources, as most of them actually exist – you can choose whether you want Writesonic to include them in your text. All in all, you can use Writesonic for essays, but you’ll have to do a lot of polishing up, particularly for that formal, academic tone and style.

6. Smodin – best for essay drafts

Best for:	High-school students and undergraduates for outlining, creating the first draft, gathering relevant sources
Starting price:	$9.00/month
Free version:	Yes
Top features:	AI writer, rewriter, humanizer, summarizer, Chrome extension

Visit Smodin

Smodin is an AI writing tool that can generate essays, research papers, and articles. I found it best for creating an outline and generating that first draft to get inspiration from. It’s great if you don’t know where to start or need to turn messy notes into something structured, but will need your touch to turn it into a great essay.

It markets itself as a tool that helps you to detect and bypass AI detectors and has a variety of tools to help with that. Smodin also includes a few extra features like a rewriter, humanizer, and summarizer, all powered by AI. You can add it to your Chrome browser for live suggestions.

Here’s the essay provided by Smodin. I tried generating both essay and research paper, and, in the end, stuck with research paper because the output was more academic and provided easier reference management.

The generated text has solid structure but needs a lot of polishing up. Overall, it sounds more editorial than academic, even though I selected a research paper. Still, I liked that all of the statements Smodin made were backed up with real, relevant sources, and provided citations.

There’s also a grader feature, which can give feedback about the essay, and help you improve.

7. Jasper AI – great for brainstorming ideas

Best for:	Generating content to get ideas and overcome writer's block
Starting price:	$59.00/month
Free version:	No, but there is a 7-day free trial
Top features:	Content generation, essay templates, SEO optimization

Visit Jasper AI

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.

8. ChatGPT – best for idea generation and ease of use

Best for:	Virtually every segment of essay writing, from brainstorming to researching to generating the first draft
Starting price:	$20/month
Free version:	Yes, but limited access to the latest GPT-4o
Top features:	Language enhancement, AI-assisted proofreading, data analysis

Visit ChatGPT

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. Here’s what I got with my prompt.

The first draft was decent. It provided a thorough analysis on the topic, which sounded like someone with an academic background would write. ChatGPT uses a lot of sources, and can provide citations when prompted, which is great.

The best part about ChatGPT is that you can ask it to adapt to any style, but you have to get good at prompting to get polished results. Overall, it’s a versatile tool for both high-school and university students as well as researchers and professionals. It’s one of the best tools for gathering and summarizing research and is a powerful idea generator.

It’s important to remember that this is what’s generated with the first prompt, with no build-up prompts, which is what I always recommend when using generative AI. By going into as much detail as possible, you’re going to be able to get truly unique essays that will sound human and won’t be easily flagged by AI detectors.

9. MyEssayWriter.ai – best for high-school essays

Best for:	Generating an essay from start to finish, high-school to early undergraduate level
Starting price:	$9.00/month
Free version:	Yes
Top features:	AI writer, paraphraser, citations, plagiarism checker, summarizer

Visit MyEssayWriter

MyEssayWriter.ai is a generative AI tool specifically designed to write essays. I like it because it lets you choose a writing level (high-school, college, master, and doctoral) similar to our top pick, EssayDone. This adjusts the style and tone to fit your personal needs. In addition, you can choose the type of essay you’re writing from over 30 essay types.

During my testing, I found it’s best for high-school or undergraduate-level essays as it doesn’t write very argumentatively that’s necessary for master’s or higher level students. Here’s what I got with the same prompt I used before. I selected a Master level for this prompt.

It followed my prompt pretty well, but the tone doesn’t fit someone with a master’s. One crucial thing missing, particularly for university students, is citations, which it didn’t provide. It also seemed like it was hallucinating information, but I wasn’t able to check since the citations weren’t provided.

10. Scribbr – best for non-English speakers

Best for:	Paraphrasing, summarizing, non-English speakers
Starting price:	$8.33/month
Free version:	Yes
Top features:	Paraphraser, AI editor and proofreader, citation generator, plagiarism checker

Visit Scribbr

Scribbr can’t generate an essay, but it’s a solid AI tool for paraphrasing your text to make it more clear and easy to read. It’s particularly useful for non-native English speakers, as it can make your text sound more natural.

The paraphraser is solid, but it tends to oversimplify ideas and almost dumb them down. It’s great if your goal is to simplify, especially for complex topics. However, in my experience, the end results can make it seem like a middle-schooler wrote it. So, you’ll need to polish the final draft before turning it in.

While Scribbr does include a free AI detector and plagiarism checker, I wasn’t too impressed, since both tools negatively flagged unique, human-written text.

11. PerfectEssayWriter – best for middle-school students

Best for:	Middle-school and high-school essays
Starting price:	$9.99/month
Free version:	Yes
Top features:	Essay generator, humanizer, AI detector, essay grader

Visit PerfectEssayWriter

PerfectEssayWriter is a good AI essay generator. All you have to do is input the topic and select the writing level, and the AI will do the work for you. You can also add special instructions, choose the length of the essay, and select the citation style. Overall, I found its output is best for middle-school and high-school students as it doesn’t meet the requirements of university students or academics.

Here’s what PerfectEssayWriter generated with my prompt.

The essay followed some of my guidelines, but it only generated around 400 words, which is nowhere near what I asked. Again, it doesn’t sound like someone studying for a master’s degree would write, so I wouldn’t recommend it for university students. In addition, it made loads of statements but didn’t cite any sources, so it’s not great for researching either, as we don’t know if it’s hallucinating or not.

I liked the Refine this Output feature, which lets you generate more paragraphs (great since it usually doesn’t meet your required length), humanize the text, analyze readability and sentence structure, and even grade it. Great for improving your essay before handing it in.

12. Yomu – best for citations

Best for:	Research and proper citations
Starting price:	$11.00/month
Free version:	Yes
Top features:	Integration with Sourcely, citations

Visit Yomu

Yomu is a solid AI-powered essay generator with strong integrations for research. It makes gathering sources and citing them in your selected academic style easy and convenient.

However, I wasn’t too impressed with the AI writer. Here’s what I got using the same prompt as above.

The generated essay was thorough but lacked nuance, and may require quite a lot of editing. The best part about Yomu is its integration with Sourcely, which helps finding accurate and relevant sources and automatically cites them in your preferred citation style. Overall, I recommend it for anyone who needs solid references for their article and wants to save time on gathering and citing them.

Comparing top AI essay writers

	Best for	Free version	Starting price	Readability and coherence	Academic Sophistication and nuance	Plagiarism checker included	AI detector included	Cost-efficiency rating
EssayDone	Writing essays from start to finish	✅ Yes	$19.00/month	Medium	Low	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	Low
Grammarly	Editing, proofreading, improving clarity	✅ Yes	$12.00/user/month	High	Low	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	Medium
Paperpal	Academic level writing, research	✅ Yes	$11.50/month	Medium	Medium	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	High
Quillbot	Editing, proofreading, polishing essays	✅ Yes	$8.33/month with our exclusive coupon code CYBERNEWSQB40	High	Medium to high	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	High
Writesonic	Marketing, SEO, business students	✅ Yes	$39.00/month	Medium	Low	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	Low
Smodin	Outlining, drafting	✅ Yes	$9.00/month	High	Medium	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	Low
Jasper	Brainstorming, marketing, SEO	❌ No	$59.00/user/month	High	Medium	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	Low
ChatGPT	Idea generation, research, general writing	✅ Yes	$20.00/month/user	High	High	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	High
MyEssayWriter.ai	High-school essays	✅ Yes	$9.00/month	Low	Low	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	Medium
Scribbr.com	Editing, non-English speakers	✅ Yes	$8.33/month	-	-	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	Medium
PerfectEssayWriter.ai	Middle-school and high-school students	✅ Yes	$9.99/month	Low	Low	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	High
Yomu	Research, citations	✅ Yes	$11.00/month	Medium	Medium	✅ Yes	✅ Yes	Low

Our methodology for testing the best AI paper writer tools

The Cybernews research team has a particular and carefully developed strategy for reviewing the best 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.

Do academic institutions allow using AI writing tools?

Whether using AI is allowed depends on the academic institution. Since AI has become so prevalent, schools and universities have had to make official statements explaining their take on AI.

The answer from top universities like Oxford, Stanford, Harvard, and others is clear: AI should not replace you as the writer and should only be used as a tool to help you through the process. Simply put, you can’t use AI writing tools to generate an essay and claim you wrote it, but you can use it to streamline the essay writing process.

However, since students continue to use AI to write their articles for them, many schools and universities have turned to AI detection tools. The overall opinion on AI detection tools is mixed because they tend to be unreliable and often flag human text as AI. Simply put, AI detection tools should be used in conjunction with human judgement, but some teachers and professors rely on it 100%, so it’s something you should keep in mind when handing in your essay.

So, what can you do to prove that you’ve written the essay? Here’s what I recommend:

• Keep the draft as evidence of your essay writing process
• Don’t copy/paste the text, instead use AI as a writing assistant to help you brainstorm, generate ideas, and outline your essay
• Use an AI detector yourself to see what it flags and improve the essay

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, EssayDone. 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