Best Alternatives to Tidy in 2025

The most direct competitor. It works across all Mac apps with inline suggestions, tone adjustments, and a full rewrite feature. Unlike Tidy, it doesn't require macOS 26 or Apple Intelligence, and it offers a free tier with cloud-based processing (though not fully on-device).

A strong open-source alternative that supports grammar, style, and punctuation in over 30 languages. It integrates with Mac apps via a system-wide keyboard shortcut and can run fully offline with its desktop app, making it a good choice if you want privacy without the Apple ecosystem requirement.

Ideal for writers who need more than quick fixes. It offers deep style analysis, readability scores, and rephrasing suggestions. While it doesn't replace text in-place as seamlessly as Tidy, its Mac desktop app works across many apps and provides a more comprehensive editing suite.

Aimed at customer support and business teams, Sapling provides real-time grammar and tone suggestions in any Mac app. It has a free tier and works on older macOS versions. Its rewrite feature is more context-aware than Tidy's, but it requires an internet connection for most features.

Not a grammar checker, but a powerful text expansion tool that can fix common typos and abbreviations automatically as you type. If your main issue is repetitive errors rather than full-sentence grammar, TextExpander offers a faster, more customizable solution that works on any Mac without AI requirements.

If you're already on macOS 26, Apple's native Writing Tools (part of Apple Intelligence) provide proofread, rewrite, and summarize features across all apps. They are free, on-device, and essentially the same engine Tidy uses—so you may not need a third-party utility at all.