The Best AI Essay Writers of 2024 (Free & Paid)

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve always had a tough time writing essays, and I imagine that’s the same for most students. There are times that it stems from information overload, or lack of expertise in the subject matter.

Since the release of LLMs like GPT, there has been a significant uptick in AI-powered tools that serve different purposes. Some can be used for image generation, some can generate leads in seconds, and there are some that help you write essays.

As a writer, I’ve tested many AI essay writing software. However, it’s like playing a game of russian roulette with these tools. I was unsure if I’m getting a well-written and accurate essay that’s human-like, or something that resembles the ramblings of a madman.

After realizing what these apps can do there's really no stopping for mental blocks anymore.

Free AI Essay Generators

Are you a student on a tight budget? Or maybe someone who’s just looking for a quick and cost-free way of generating an essay? No matter the case, you can check out these three AI essay writers:

ChatGPT

At this point, everybody knows about ChatGPT — OpenAI’s chatbot. From content ideation to image generation, what you can do on their platform is only limited by your imagination. However, the most popular use-case of ChatGPT, at least for students, is essay writing.

ChatGPT is an excellent choice for generating AI content due to its flexibility. You can adjust its response by giving specific instructions on how it should proceed. Whether it’s the essay length or tone, ChatGPT’s output is easy to modify and allows unlimited regeneration.

Pros of ChatGPT

• Accessible.
• Flexible.
• Essay is well-written and packed with information.
• Free to use — but you can upgrade to ChatGPT Plus which is built on the newer version of their AI model (GPT-4, not to be confused with GPT-4o, which is free for several prompts), and features more robust context handling and creativity.

Cons of ChatGPT

• Longer essays may sound monotonous.
• Knowledge base of the GPT-3.5 and GPT-4o model extends only to August 2023.
• Essays generated on ChatGPT have similar elements that teachers may spot.

Claude

Claude is Anthropic's conversational AI assistant. While newer on the scene than ChatGPT, Claude aims to provide robust, harmless, and honest dialogue through Anthropic's self-supervised training approach.

They recently released three new models: Claude 3.5 Sonnet (most advanced, free for limited prompts per day), Claude 3 Opus (best for writing), and Claude 3 Haiku (for clerical tasks).

Pros of Claude

• Knowledge base extends through April 2023 later than ChatGPT's knowledge cut-off.
• Claude's responses are focused on being harmless, avoiding potential issues like plagiarism and providing inaccurate information that ChatGPT has sometimes exhibited.
• The conversational nature of Claude makes it easy to provide clarification and refine essay requirements compared to static text prompts.
• Claude has been shown to have a 92% accuracy rate on a natural language processing benchmark, surpassing other models. This suggests strong capabilities for writing clear, coherent essays. It's a lot better at conversational writing than ChatGPT.

Cons of Claude

• Claude's knowledge breadth does not yet match ChatGPT's exposure to billions of internet documents for training. There are times that it will avoid giving an answer to your prompt because it doesn’t have enough information.
• Claude's essay capabilities are still being refined, so quality may be inconsistent at times compared to a more mature model. In my experience, it’s also a lot more repetitive than other LLMs. 

Overall, Claude shows promise as an AI assistant for essay generation given its focus on safety and accuracy. But it still has room to grow as its knowledge base and writing abilities expand with more training over time.

Gemini

Gemini is Google’s response to AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT. If you’re confused, Gemini used to be Bard, but Google scrapped the latter as soon as they finished developing the former. I find this tool to be the best AI tool for research, because it uses realtime information.

Pros of Gemini

• Free and user-friendly.
• Quick turnaround time.
• Uses real-time data for essay writing.
• It doesn’t use any fluff, but instead puts as much information as it can.

Cons of Gemini

• Lacks the flexibility of GPT-powered AI essay writers.
• Tends to use bullet points for every response.
• Regularly repeats phrases and is more monotonous than ChatGPT.

Paid AI Essay Generators

Apart from ChatGPT, Claude, and Bard, there are also paid AI essay writers that have more extensive essay writing features.

The question is, are they worth it? Probably not. For the vast majority of users, the free writing tools here are incredible. Start with those and upgrade if needed.

If you want our best picks, here they are:

Jasper

Jasper is a must-have for every copywriter and blogger. Unlike ChatGPT and Bard, Jasper is not a chatbot but, instead, a complete AI writing assistant with features like multi-language support, content templates, and SEO writing enhancers.

Besides creating copies, Jasper is also an excellent choice for students. It can generate essays using only topics or keywords. Jasper also formats your essay based on your specification, and conducts intensive research to ensure you only get high-quality and factual output.

Jasper has two primary pricing options: Creator ($39) which is great for single users and Pro ($59) which targets companies or brands.

You can also read more about Jasper AI on our comprehensive review here.

Pros of Jasper

• Free trial.
• Multilingual.
• Monetization of content.
• User-friendly with onboarding.
• Has multiple templates which you can use to start your essay.

Cons of Jasper

• Prone to repetition.
• Price is too steep for a single essay.
• May sometimes output outdated information.

Textero

Textero is a text generator, content summarizer, outline creator, and research aide wrapped up in one package. These features help propel Textero as one of the most popular AI essay writers among students who are struggling with putting pen to paper.

When you open Textero’s editor, you’ll notice the following fields that you have to fill up:

• Subject: Area of study
• Topic: What Textero should write about
• Description: Additional information regarding the essay
• Pages: How many pages should the output be
• Source Style: APA or MLA

Once you click generate, it’ll direct you to a download page of your output. For example, here’s what Textero gave me when I asked for an essay on “Why it doesn’t snow in Manila”:

Textero has two paid options: Pro, available for $16.99, which gives you 2750 words per day, and Unlimited, $19.99 per month. With their Unlimited plan, you get unlimited generation, text summarizations, and code analysis.

Pros of Textero

• Accessible and user-friendly.
• The output is well-formatted for academic writing.
• Generous free trial complete with 550 words per day, outline generator, and programming aide.
• It includes the sources it used for the essay which can then be written in APA or MLA format.

Cons of Textero

• Two to three minute turnaround time.
• The output has some fluff that could be trimmed.

Writesonic

Writesonic is the most comprehensive AI writing assistant I’ve seen. True to its goal of being “Your One-Stop Solution for Content Creation” — Writesonic’s library includes a wide variety of use cases including blog writing, ideation, ad copywriting, social media content ghostwriting, and more. I'd say it's more for marketing than academic writing though.

They also house several tools to assist you in writing like a keyword generator, citations creator, summarizer, and a chatbot.

Unfortunately, Writesonic doesn’t have a specific template for essays but you use their AI Article Writer 5.0 to mimic your pre-existing essays or any article online so it could emulate academic writing.

You can choose between four pricing plans in Writesonic: Free Trial (25 credits), Individual (starts at $16), and Standard ($79 per month).

Pros of Writesonic

• Generous free plan.
• Uses real-time data.
• Customizable outputs.
• Consists of many useful features and tools.
• Can mimic any piece of writing, whether it’s online or your own.
• Generates creative and informational essays, considering it’s using the GPT language model.

Cons of Writesonic

• No essay template.
• Unnecessarily long outputs even for light topics. I used Writesonic to generate three essays and all of them exceeded 3000 words.

Simplified

Simplified allows you to create exceptional essays in just a few seconds. This tool uses artificial intelligence to produce academic work with relevant information in different writing styles and languages.

Like the name suggests, it’s simple to write essays with Simplified. All you have to do is input the topic, number of variations, creativity level, tone, and language. Wait for a few seconds, and you’re going to get something like this:

Simplified starts at $29.99 per month for 100,000 words and one user, with prices up subject to negotiation for unlimited words and 10 users.

Pros of Simplified

• User-friendly.
• Flexible pricing.
• Generous free trial.
• Uses real-time data for essays.
• Extensive output customization.
• More than 25 different languages.

Cons of Simplified

Turnaround time is on the slower side.

Rytr

With the power of GPT, Rytr can generate high-quality and customizable essays. This tool is perfect for anyone looking for a quick way to make content, whether it's for marketing or niche industries like education and creative writing.

One thing I found curious about Rytr, however, is why it has use cases like song lyrics and story plot, but none for essays? No matter, I was still able to use Rytr to create an essay using their blog section use case and here’s what I got:

Rytr is currently priced at $9 for the Unlimited plan which allows you to create content for one website, and $29 for the Premium plan if you need Rytr for multiple brands and extensive customer support.

If you pay annually instead of monthly, you also get two months off.

Pros of Rytr

• Fair pricing for students.
• Allows output customization.
• Comprehensive knowledge base for new users.
• It has robust features, even in its free trial version.

Cons of Rytr

• No specific use case for essays.
• Outputs often have issues in their format.

Koala Writer

Koala Writer is a multilingual, prompt-based content creation tool for writers that’s based on either GPT-3 or GPT-4. Apart from being a great addition to a copywriter’s arsenal, it can also be used to write essays with real-time data. One thing that I like about Koala Writer is how hands-on their team is on updating its user base about updates in their Discord server.

Among the AI writing assistants I’ve tested, Koala Writer has the most pricing options at nine. However, for individuals looking to write a quick essay, you should only concern yourself with their two most inexpensive plans:

• Essentials: $9 with 15,000 generated words per month.
• Starter: $25 with 45,000 generated words per month.

Pros of Koala Writer

• User-friendly.
• Feature-rich free version.
• Supports 100+ languages.
• Integrated with real-time data.
• Extensive output customization.

Cons of Koala Writer

• Free version can only output 5000 words and 25 chatbot prompts.
• No specific use case for essays (but their blog post use case is an adequate substitute)

Essay Genius

True to its name, Essay Genius creates creative essays with a quick turnaround time. It has a minimalistic interface which allows you to generate an essay based on a brief, content suggestion, or pre-existing text. Essay Genius also has a built-in plagiarism checker to ensure your essays won’t raise any red flags with your instructor.

Essay Genius only has one premium plan available which lets you generate up to 100 essays. Its cost depends on whether you pay monthly ($14.99) or annually ($12).

Pros of Essay Genius

• Quick turnaround time.
• Output is packed with information.

Cons of Essay Genius

• Price doesn’t justify the features you get.

Wrapping Up

We live in a fast-paced world, and those who can’t catch up will be left behind.

Using AI essay writers is not strictly cheating — it’s taking advantage of the tools available to you as a student. Aside from saving time and effort, it’s also an effective way of overcoming writer’s block.

However, like how plagiarism checkers kept bad actors from abusing the search engine, disruptive technologies will always be subject to course correction through a different, equally disruptive technology. For AI essay writers, AI detection tools are their countermeasure.

So, here’s what you should do: Use any of the tools I listed above. They’re quick and creative enough — but always exercise caution. Tweak their output a little so you won’t get flagged by AI detectors. Not only does this lessen the risk of receiving academic sanctions, it also ensures that you learned something and didn’t just rely on AI alone to do work for you.

That’s how you use new technologies responsibly.