33 Amazingly Helpful Free Writing Tools and Websites to Use in 2021

Looking for free writing tools to help your craft? Look no further

“A good tool improves the way you work. A great tool improves the way you think.” — Jeff Duntemann

Putting your thoughts on paper can be a daunting task even for the most confident among us. But whether you’re a professional writer or an amateur scribbler, we all have room to improve.

That’s why I love using these tools to accomplish just that. In the past year since starting writing, I’ve gone from 0 views to over 250,000 every single month. And it’s still growing.

The better a writer I become, the more people view my work. It’s both simple and thrilling at the same time. But I owe an incredible amount of thanks to the below tools for helping me get here.

Not only do all of these tools offer a free version, but some of them allow me to earn a living from my passion. Even better, almost every single one helped me practice, improve, and expand my writing skills.

That’s definitely a win-win-win in my books. Hopefully, they can help you accomplish some of the same things (or even more). Enjoy!

Tools to help upgrade your writing

Most of us aren’t the next Hemingway — yet. He also never had access to the internet. But we do. And we can use the wonderful tools and knowledge available online to help us inch closer to writing the next Man in the Sea much faster than authors of old were able to.

These are the main writing improvement tools I use, some daily.

Grammarly

• Most of you have heard of Grammarly for a reason — it’s just fantastic. It catches hundreds of mistakes that are often overlooked when writing. It's vs it’s. Your vs you’re. Were vs we’re. These are rookie mistakes but many of us keep making them. I sure do, but Grammarly catches 95% of them so you don’t usually see it. I tried the paid version for a month, I think it was around $30 — I did not find it worth the price at all compared to the free version. But then again, I’m a native English speaker. A good Ph.D. friend of mine swears by the professional version for helping his writing — he’s not a native English speaker. So that may be the difference.
• Pros: This software is amazing for catching 95% of common mistakes. It sometimes helps with phrasing etc, but that can be a bit iffy. It’s also a free program you can use as a browser extension (like I do) or even download to use offline.
• Cons: From my experience, about 5% of the suggestions are incorrect. That’s completely forgivable since it’s a machine trying to assess my meaning. And since I don’t even know what I’m trying to say 50% of the time, a machine guessing correctly 95% of the time is pretty damn great. The paid upgraded version wasn’t worth it for me, but the free one is just plain awesome.

Hemmingway

• I occasionally use Hemmingway just to switch things up from Grammarly. One other reason is for its automatic reading-grade calculator. If you weren’t aware, writing for a lower grade reading level has been statistically shown to increase the number of reads your work gets. While I don’t always follow this rule, I do more often than not. Hemmingway is a quick way to help with that.
• Pros: Free! The website browser version also points out hard to read sentences, passive voice, and other errors it thinks you should take a look at. I haven’t tried the desktop app but I imagine it would be similar.
• Cons: The desktop version is paid ($19.99). I don’t believe there is a free Chrome extension — at least an official one — so you have to copy and paste your text into their free browser version. While not a big pain in the butt, I’m lazy and so are many of us. Still, try it out if you want to see something different from Grammarly.

Coschedule

• If you’ve ever struggled with your headlines (like I have for a long time), this app is a great way to start improving. While far from perfect, it does give a general roboticized viewpoint of what makes a good, clickable headline. If you’d like to see 332 HUGE article headlines on Medium with over 10,000 claps each, here’s a big analysis I did previously.
• Pros: It’s free and there’s a Chrome browser extension so you can use it in Medium/WordPress. It also sometimes gives you access to big lists of power words that are neat to learn.
• Cons: The software very occasionally doesn’t work, which seems related to when the home website is down. Other than that, the headlines shouldn’t be taken as the be-all-end-all of things. Many of the top-performing headlines don’t rank very high in the end. But it’s a great way to start improving.

Advanced Marketing Institute

• This is another headline analyzer I sometimes play with. I just use it as an alternative to Coschedule when I care particularly about a big article and want it to do exceptionally well. Some big writers argue we should be doing this for every single article, but hey, I’m here to have fun.
• Pros: Free and simple to use.
• Cons: Not in a Chrome extension (as far as I know). I don’t use it as often as I should because of this.

WordCounter

• An alternative to some of the other word counters out there. This is an extremely simple tool that counts how many words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, etc in the work. You simply copy and paste whatever text you want to be analyzed and it quickly does the work for you.
• Pros: Free and incredibly simple to use.
• Cons: No extension (that I’ve seen) and it’s pretty basic as far as features go. Still, it does exactly what it was made for.

Online Utility

• This is an incredibly interesting tool for those of you that are into analyzing text and bodies of work. While I don’t use it often, whenever I’m curious about particular words in the English language, famous authors, or even my own writing — this is my go-to website. It’s also great for non-native English speakers as they have tools specifically to help people learn English.
• Pros: Free and hosts a wide variety of useful and interesting tools for English learning and analyzing.
• Cons: Not all writers would need to use this website. I’d advise checking it out and seeing what tools they have — they’re definitely cool.

Capitalize My Title

• Depending on where you’re submitting your articles, you might be required to use title case or sentence case. Either way, this free website handles your needs for that. You can also choose which style to follow, like APA, AP, Chicago, etc. Note: It changes the letters as you type, not as output after clicking a button.
• Pros: Free and very simple to use. Perfect for improving your title game until you can do it yourself completely. But hey, we all make mistakes sometimes too.
• Cons: Ad-heavy (but everyone needs to eat). The main button also looks like you need to click it but this is an advertisement. See the note above.

Fun with words and becoming a better writer

On my best days, I’m a decent writer. On my average day, I’m probably a bit less than average. But I have a secret weapon — I often use many of these tools to spruce up my writing while I’m editing. And it’s been incredibly helpful — I’ve had over 250,000 views a month recently!

So please, enjoy some of my weapons and be sure not to kill anybody (except with kindness).

RhymeZone

• If you’re ever writing lyrics, puns, or poetry — this is probably one of the best websites out there to help. While my need for this tool isn’t huge, I do find myself using it quite often. It always helps to add a bit of spice to your writing.
• Pros: Free and very simple to use.
• Cons: It’s an algorithm, and algorithms are hardly ever perfect. Some of the results don’t really make sense, but over 95% do.

Thesaurus

• Did you know you can learn 75% of spoken English by only learning 800 lemmas? Lemmas are kind of like root or headwords, and I’m always shocked at how few we need to know versus what we say. This extends to our writing — we tend to overuse a subset of words. This can lead to boring repetition and readers leaving our work in a yawn. Step in thesaurus.com. While you’re editing, look for a few important sentences, then find some fancier, more flavorful language to use instead of boring words like ‘big,’ ‘very’, or ‘small’. Trust me, it makes a huge difference.
• Pros: Free and easy to use.
• Cons: It would be awesome to have this as a Chrome extension but I’m not sure if that exists. Some of the word suggestions are also lacking in creativity, so see the next option.

Power Thesaurus

• Who doesn’t like a sexy power word to spice up their writing and possibly love life? Power Thesaurus aims to help the above problem by promoting more visual synonyms for your writing. If I’m using these tools, I’ll often try out both this and Thesaurus.com to see which has better words for my article.
• Pros: Free and easy to use (are you starting to see a commonality here?).
• Cons: The navigation isn’t perfect, but it’s easy enough to learn. Try changing what type of words you want to see (verbs, nouns, etc) to drive down to specific meanings.

Related Words

• Sometimes you’re stuck on a paragraph and just can’t catch the right topic or wording to use. Next time you experience that, try going to RelatedWords.org and entering in your specific subject. It plops out as many related words as its algorithm can think of. This is great for concept building, poetry, and rapping — if that’s your thing.
• Pros: Simple and free, as we all should be.
• Cons: Sometimes the suggested words are a bit mismatched. Lots of English words have multiple meanings and these especially seem to confuse the poor beast.

Urban Thesaurus

• Are you hip to be square? Are you ever on the trolley? Do you yeet yeet more than you skeet skeet? Worry no more, because this website helps you understand the crazy youth and all their slang. While not perfect, it will give you some eye-opening suggestions when you need to use some modern colloquialisms.
• Pros: Free and a quite simple tool.
• Cons: My younger friends assure me it’s not as accurate as I think it is. Then again, they’ve never listened to Dre, so what do they know?

Cliché Finder

• Similar to the above tool but in the opposite direction this time. Instead of aiming to help you become more youthful in word-form, this aims to prevent you from being too old. The purpose of the website is to point out any cliches in your text. Overused phrases, tired passages, contrite sentences begone!
• Pros: Free and a simple copy and paste.
• Cons: The usefulness of this tool is probably better suited for longer pieces like huge articles or even books. Unless you find yourself hearing complaints of using cliches way too often — then bookmark this and use it every day.

Sources for free images

When writing articles, I usually save the image searching for the very end as I know the entire feeling of a piece by that point.

In most articles, you can get away with something not too specific, but sometimes you’ll need exactly one horse, one man, and one clown-with-a-gun chasing them.

Sometimes I just draw my images for more fun and some practice. Whatever your need, the below should help you out.

Unsplash

• If you’re using Medium.com, there is an embedded function to search Unsplash’s database. Just press the ‘+’ button and then the magnifying glass to search. It also auto-populates the image source so you don’t have to worry about it.
• Pros: Free and easy to use (on Medium) with a good selection of free images.
• Cons: The images are often overused because of tens of thousands of writers on Medium using them. One way to get around this is to search deep within each data set, ie. Go to page 10 and up for any images rather than on the first page.

Pexels

• This is my go-to for most of my articles. They seem to have a good grasp of free images for what I want to find about 80% of the time. You can also download images in different sizes and easily copy/paste the image credit.
• Pros: Free and with a good selection. Simple enough to download and copy image credits. You can also select by orientation which really helps for articles (Hint: Choose horizontal.)
• Cons: Certain word combinations are impossible to search for, either due to lack of content or I’m confusing the algorithm.

Pixabay

• If I can’t find a generic piece on Unsplash or Pexels, I go to Pixabay.
• Pros: Free and mostly easy to use. Their content is usually different from the other websites so I’ll check here if I can’t find it elsewhere.
• Cons: The copy and paste function is a bit clunky. There’s also a paywall if you want to download certain images at a large size.

WikiMedia Commons

• Their tagline states: “A collection of 68,233,518 freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.” I’ll go here whenever I’m looking for an image of a person from history or politics or business. Double-check to make sure the images are actually free to use.
• Pros: Free and easy to use.
• Cons: Not all of the images should be there for sharing (from my understanding). The images are pretty specific so you might not find what you’re looking for.

Google Images

• I’ll use this as a last resort for certain articles if I can’t find an appropriate image elsewhere. The trick is to go to Google.com, then click on Images and search in there. You then go to ‘Tools’ → ‘Usage Rights’ →and select ‘Creative Commons licenses.’ That ensures any image showing up should be legal to use in your articles. Double-check to make sure.
• Pros: Free and easy to search through.
• Cons: The images can sometimes be lacking if you’re using the ‘CC license’ search function. But you never know and it doesn’t take long to check.

Drawing and sketching

I’m not a great artist. Hell, I hesitate to even use that word as an adjective to describe myself. But I do like to use my Surface Pro and its digital drawing pad to do some doodling for my more humorous articles.

If you have Windows, these apps and websites can help you out — for free.

Snip & Sketch

• This is a default tool in Windows. Whenever you need to ‘snip’ a portion of your screen to use in an image, use this. The alternative is using a combination of PrintScreen and an image editor. This tool makes that process much faster.
• Pros: Free to use and it’s already installed on your Windows machine. You can also do some light modifications like writing or highlighting. It saves me time — always a big plus in my book.
• Cons: Only available on Windows (as far as I know). The editing tools leave a lot to be desired.

Microsoft Paint 3D

• I’ve been using this default Windows program for as long as I’ve had my hands on a Windows computer. It’s easy to use, it’s free, and it’s right there in the search bar at the bottom of your screen.
• Pros: If you have simple editing to do like resizing, adding some text, or cropping an image — this is a go-to for me.
• Cons: It’s a pretty basic piece of software so I wouldn’t bother using it to create images (although there are some very amusing ones available on the web).

Canva

• This is a great tool that I haven’t explored too in-depth. I’ve used it maybe about 50 times for different projects and it suited my exact needs. It has templates, the ability to download, you can manipulate text and images quite effectively. A great all-around tool with a massive free option. I’ve only recently learned some people use it to make GIFs for their articles — something I plan on exploring later.
• Pros: A free account option available and it has a plethora of tools for 90% of your image editing needs. I use this when I want to make a more ‘formal’ header image using text.
• Cons: The layout can take a bit of getting used to although it’s not relatively bad. The image manipulation can be slightly clunky depending on your computer’s graphics card etc.

GIMP

• Probably the most popular open text image editing software out there. GIMP has been around for years as open-source software (I think?). Either way, it’s free to download and it has an incredible amount of image editing options. When I dabbled in making printable items from my cartoon series, I always used this to spruce up the images before uploading them.
• Pros: Free and with a complex set of options. The paid-software equivalent of this on the market is easily $20 to $30 a month. While this may not be as good, it goes a long way towards it.
• Cons: Using this software at first can be a bit of a pain, to say the least. It’s not intuitive for a person brand new to image editing. Luckily, for almost any problem there are 10 YouTube videos out there explaining how to do it step-by-step.

Make money writing online

Many modern aspiring writers would love to practice their craft every day. But that requires earning enough income to live off of by doing it.

I’m lucky enough to live off my savings while learning and improving at the craft. I’m still not anywhere near my old corporate salary, but I am slowly increasing every month and I hope to be there someday.

Here are a few ways people make money from writing in 2021, including myself.

Medium.com

• I’ve been writing on this platform for about 14 months now, and I’m earning a bit over $1,000 a month. Not bad for writing down my thoughts every day. Think of Medium like the YouTube of writing. If you’re new here and want a complete breakdown, this is an in-depth guide to the website. Some people here make up to $50,000 USD a month…but it’s very few and far between.
• Pros: You can write here for free — even publishing articles that earn without requiring you to pay any fees. It’s a very smooth platform that doesn’t take too long to learn how to use, at least at a basic level. It also has a very high readership, estimated to be 100–300 million readers per month in 2021. The community here is also fantastically positive and helpful.
• Cons: Like any form of social media, it can take quite a while before you start gaining traction. It took me a year before I made over $1,000. The first 6 months were very little as well. Somewhere around 95% of writers on the platform make below $100 a month. So please set your expectations and match them to the level of effort you’re willing to put in over the long-term.

Amazon affiliates

• While I don’t make much money from affiliate marketing, I do dabble a bit. One of my side projects will almost entirely depend on it after it’s up and running. If you have an audience on any social media, this is also a great way to earn some extra money while recommending products you love. If you’d like to support my writing, please consider using this Amazon link next time you shop there. I’ll earn a tiny commission on anything you buy there shortly after, at no cost to you. It just costs Mr. Bezos.
• Pros: If you’re good at SEO, have a lot of products you want to review, or even run a niche website on the side, Amazon affiliate marketing can be one of your major sources of income. This is one of the main ways to create passive income online with writing.
• Cons: It can take a lot of traffic to earn anything approaching decent. Amazon has twice reduced their commission rates in recent years. Currently, I’ll earn in the area of 1–3% on most purchases. And as people tend to only spend $20-$50 on most shopping ‘trips’, you can see the volume required.

Kindle Store

• Another Amazon company but different for writing. On here you can self-publish a hardcopy or a digital book in the biggest book marketplace on the planet. You may not be a fan of Amazon’s hold on the world these days, but if you’re looking to make money from writing books, you probably shouldn’t ignore this option. I wrote my first satire book back in October 2020 and found the process of using Kindle not great, but not insurmountable. I now know it’s much easier to publish written books, rather than illustrated ones as mine was. If you’re curious about how many books the bestsellers sell, here’s a big analysis I did previously.
• Pros: Access to an absolutely massive book marketplace. You can self-publish — so every last choice is up to you on how you want your work to appear.
• Cons: Amazon takes a hefty fee. You’ll usually hear they take a 30% commission on e-books, but they also have a download fee which is somewhat hidden at first. For hardcopy books, they’ll take a printing fee as well, which is of course understandable but reduces your margins.

Newsbreak

• For bloggers and article writers out there, this is a decent alternative to Medium and WordPress. Their payment structure is different but based on views and thresholds. Some of the top writers on Medium now repost their articles on Newsbreak for an extra paycheck — essentially double-dipping on these article earnings.
• Pros: Newly popular and actively looking for great writers.
• Cons: There are frequent complaints about the spamminess of the app and other features online if you do some digging. So far, none of them are touching on ethics so that’s a good thing at least.

Vocal

• Probably the third best option for article writers currently, outside of being hired directly by a publication or news outlet. They pay based on views and claim it is a revenue-sharing structure. The rates aren’t bad but you need to get hundreds of thousands of views before you earn decent amounts.
• Pros: They seem to be pretty open to what type of articles they accept, and I haven’t come across any complaints of non-payment. You can repost content from your other sources.
• Cons: Writers have complained it can be pretty hard to get articles to rank on Google on Vocal, essentially killing most of the money potential of their work.

Substack

• I personally love this new wave of newsletters — an old industry thought did but recently revived. Some authors are earning millions of dollars a year now by having personal subscribers eating up their content. I also like Substack in particular as they only take 10% of any earnings (I currently only run a free newsletter though). Also, their software is free to use as a general email list. Much better for my needs than a paid solution like MailChimp, etc.
• Pros: Free to use and operate. A very simplistic layout and easy enough to navigate setting up an initial newsletter.
• Cons: You can’t use canonical links yet. There are also a few features that are missing, but the company is only a few years old and are releasing timely updates every few months.

Article research

Depending on your writing topics, you may or may not need to conduct a lot of research before you hit publish. Of course, Google is the starting point for a lot of these searches. But beyond that, there are a few sites I visit more often to conduct certain types of research.

Wikipedia

• Wiki used to be a joke when I was in high school. Teachers would scoff at the idea of someone using Wikipedia as a reference. But I learned then a very easy workaround that no teacher ever caught or thought to teach. I simply used the references in Wikipedia articles as my sources. The writers of Wiki articles have to include all of their sources — and there’s no reason we can’t go straight to those references either. Note: Thank you to the tireless efforts of hardcore Wikipedia writers everywhere, it’s such an amazing service to this world.
• Pros: Free to use and an incredibly simple yet powerful tool.
• Cons: The references aren’t always legitimate. People can publicly upload opinions to Wikipedia and they’re rarely unnoticed — as in just be sure to double-check what you read on there. This rule probably applies to everywhere on the internet these days, however.

Google Scholar

• If I need scholarly references for some of my articles, this website will no doubt be a part of the journey. It is a massive collection of formal work on subjects collected from universities and institutions around the world.
• Pros: Free to use and access. It may require a slight learning curve to better navigate the system.
• Cons: While almost every source has a free abstract available, some items are behind a paywall due to their original sources requiring a subscription.

Google Trends

• Another fantastic tool from Google. If you’re ever searching for a niche, the popularity of a product, or just genuinely curious how often something is searched — this is the best free tool for you. It may require an account signup, I can’t remember, but it is free regardless. And worth it.
• Pros: Free to use and play with. You can also sort by region and language. A huge tool if you’re into SEO at all.
• Cons: While great for individual searches, the aggregate functions are lacking. Some of my research requires me to look at thousands of entries and this tool isn’t suited for that.

AnswerThePublic

• Another SEO tool and completely free. I personally use SEMrush, but it is a pricy paid tool ($99+ /mth) so I wanted to provide an alternative here. It also has a creepy vibe to it as part of its, uh, marketing? I really have no idea why a man is staring at me in video form every time I open the website. Regardless, it gives you a huge list of geographically sensitive phrases and questions related to whatever keyword you enter.
• Pros: Free and simple to use.
• Cons: It’s creepy AF.

Archive.org

• Have you ever needed to research something that no longer exists on the web? Then please go to this website and search. It has records of over 525 billion (with a B!) websites and archives of the internet. Perfect for any time you need to reference or research something outdated.
• Pros: Free to use and absolutely massive.
• Cons: The search functions could be more helpful but I can’t really complain too much.

Takeaway

I hope the above has been helpful for you and not just a complete repeat of tools you already knew about. I use most of the above regularly, if not a few times a month at least.

I know there are 100’s of other great tools out there but I wanted to keep this list to the most useful apps and tools I personally use.

That being said, if you feel incredibly strongly about the usefulness of an app or website, please mention it in the comments and I’ll look at adding it to the list.

Good luck with your writing and thanks for reading!

J.J. Pryor

For more of my shenanigans, come join my free weekly-ish newsletter!

Some of the Amazon links are affiliate links. If you click them and purchase something shortly after, I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thanks for any support!