this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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Harper: Free, Open Source Grammar Checker (writewithharper.com)
submitted 8 hours ago by cm0002@suppo.fi to c/opensource@programming.dev
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What is it?

Harper is a free English grammar checker designed to be just right. You can think of it as an open-source alternative to Grammarly. I created it after years of dealing with the shortcomings of the competition.

Private

Harper is completely private, in every sense of the word.

Since Harper runs on-device, your data doesn't go anywhere you don't want it to.

That means you have 100% certainty we don't violate your copyright by training large language models.

Harper also intentionally avoids including any kind of generative AI in any part of our processing pipeline.

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[–] BlueKey@fedia.io 5 points 5 hours ago (3 children)

How does it compare to Languagetool (which you can also run locally)?

[–] moonpiedumplings@programming.dev 7 points 4 hours ago

Languagetool's browser extension is no longer open source, which has me concerned. You can still point it at a local server, but yeah.

[–] _hovi_@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago

From the readme:

LanguageTool is great, if you have gigabytes of RAM to spare and are willing to download the ~16GB n-gram dataset. Besides the memory requirements, I found LanguageTool too slow: it would take several seconds to lint even a moderate-size document.

Seems interesting, even if it's still early in development. I'll certainly be trying out the language server in my neovim setup anyway.

[–] Successful_Try543@feddit.org 4 points 5 hours ago

LT supports also languages other than English, Harper doesn't.