Free Passive Voice Checker — No Grammarly or QuillBot Subscription Needed
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Several popular writing tools check passive voice — but most lock the useful features behind a paywall. Grammarly flags passive voice but requires a Premium subscription for full passive voice control. QuillBot can paraphrase passive sentences but does not show you how much passive voice is in your document overall.
The free passive voice checker covers the two things that matter most: your passive percentage score and highlighted sentences showing exactly where the problems are. No subscription, no character limit, no account required.
What Grammarly Does for Passive Voice — and What It Costs
Grammarly detects passive voice and flags it in your document. The free plan shows the flag but limits how many suggestions you can act on per session. The full passive voice feature — including suggestions for converting to active voice and clarity score breakdowns — is part of Grammarly Premium, which runs around $30 per month on a monthly plan.
Grammarly also does not show you a passive voice percentage for your document. It surfaces individual sentences one at a time, so you cannot easily assess whether you have a systemic passive voice habit or just a few sentences to clean up.
For writers who already have Grammarly Premium for other features (tone detection, plagiarism checking, advanced style suggestions), the passive voice flags are a useful bonus. If you only need passive voice checking, the cost is hard to justify.
QuillBot and Passive Voice — Paraphrasing vs. Detection
QuillBot approaches passive voice differently: its paraphraser can rewrite passive sentences into active ones as part of a broader rephrasing pass. This works reasonably well for individual sentences, but QuillBot does not function as a passive voice detector in the traditional sense — it does not highlight passive sentences in your original text or tell you what percentage of your writing is passive.
The paraphraser is also a blunt instrument. It rewrites for fluency, not specifically for passive-to-active conversion, which means the output may change meaning slightly or sound generic. Using it on a full article can strip out your voice along with the passive constructions.
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The free passive voice checker focuses on detection and scoring — the part of the workflow that none of these tools do well for free:
| Feature | Grammarly Free | QuillBot Free | Free Checker |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flags passive sentences | Yes (limited) | No | Yes — all of them |
| Passive voice percentage | No | No | Yes |
| Visual gauge / score | No | No | Yes |
| Highlights all passive at once | No | No | Yes |
| No account required | No | No | Yes |
| No character limit | No | No | Yes |
| Auto-rewrites passive sentences | Premium only | Yes | No |
The trade-off: the free checker does not auto-rewrite for you. You get the detection and the percentage — the rewriting is yours to do. That keeps your original voice intact and forces deliberate choices about which passive sentences actually need fixing.
What About Hemingway App?
The Hemingway App also highlights passive voice (shown in green) and is free to use on the web. It is a solid tool for overall readability assessment — it also flags adverbs, complex phrases, and hard-to-read sentences in different colors.
Where Hemingway differs: it does not show a passive voice percentage and it bundles passive voice into a broader style score rather than isolating it. If you specifically want to know your passive percentage and focus only on passive sentences, a dedicated passive voice checker gives you a cleaner signal.
A practical workflow: use the passive voice percentage checker first to assess the scale of the problem, then use Hemingway to review the broader readability picture after you have made your passive voice fixes.
Check Passive Voice Free — No Subscription
Paste your text and get your passive percentage plus every flagged sentence highlighted. No account, no upgrade prompts, no character limit.
Open Passive Voice DetectorFrequently Asked Questions
Is Grammarly Premium worth it just for passive voice checking?
Probably not — you can get accurate passive voice detection and percentage scoring for free without an account. Grammarly Premium makes more sense if you also need plagiarism detection, tone adjustment, or advanced style suggestions. For passive voice specifically, the free browser checker covers everything you need.
Can QuillBot fix passive voice automatically?
QuillBot's paraphraser can convert passive sentences to active as part of a rephrasing pass, but it does not detect passive voice in your text or show you which sentences are passive. If you want automatic rewrites without controlling which sentences change, QuillBot works for that. If you want to make deliberate, sentence-by-sentence fixes, detect first with the free checker and rewrite manually.
Which free passive voice checker is most accurate?
Accuracy varies by tool. The free passive voice checker uses a to-be-verb plus past-participle pattern and the zombie test logic, which correctly identifies the most common passive constructions. Hemingway uses a similar approach. Grammarly's detection is generally reliable but requires Premium for full access. No tool catches every passive construction perfectly — highly irregular passive forms may be missed by any detector.