This post looks at 8 best Longshot alternatives, with different alternatives for various use cases – from content generation to research to checking for plagiarism and AI-written content.
Specifically, we review these alternatives:
- Smodin
- Grammarly
- Spinbot
- Jasper
- ProWritingAid
- Hemingway Editor
- Turnitin
- Writesonic
1. Smodin – Best Alternative Overall
Smodin is our AI-powered, all-in-one writing tool.
Smodin is used by marketers, teachers, students, and other professional writers – making it a great alternative to Longshot, no matter your use case.
You can use Smodin’s:
- AI writing tools – Smodin AI can write all types of essays (including research papers and persuasive essays), cover letters, reference letters, blogs, product descriptions, and more.
- Rewriter/Paraphraser – You can use the Smodin rewriter to re-phrase/re-write existing content. This helps you turn existing content into new content while keeping the original message of the original content.
- Homework assistant – Smodin’s AI tutor is perfect for students. You can use it to answer questions from your homework. You can also use Smodin’s Chatbot to help with research.
- Grading – Both teachers and students can use Smodin to grade their written content. You can customize what rubric to evaluate your content with. For teachers, this frees up a lot of your time so you can work more directly with your students (and spend less time on grading). For students, this helps you see how your essay would do if you had turned it in, and gives you the feedback you need to improve your writing.
- Plagiarism Checker – You can use Smodin to see if your writing would get flagged for plagiarism. This is also a great way to find resources, as Smodin will tell you where your content originally appeared.
- AI Content Detector – You can use Smodin to see if a piece of content was most likely written by AI.
Let’s look at some key Smodin features in more detail. But you can also try Smodin for free – click here to get started.
AI Article Generator
As a direct Longshot alternative, you can use Smodin to write full-blown articles. You can also have Smodin include citations, which is great if you liked Longshot’ “fact-based” article writing approach.
To write your first article with Smodin (for free), just:
- Choose the language you want to write in. Smodin is a multi-lingual writing tool so you can use it to write articles in various languages, like Spanish, French, and German.
- Choose the title or keyword. If your article is for SEO writing (meant to rank in organic search results), then you’d put in the keyword you’re trying to optimize your writing towards.
- Choose many sections you want your article to have. You can have up to 3 sections on the free plan, but can get access to longer articles when you upgrade.
- Choose whether or not you need an image.
- Choose whether or not you need a conclusion.
What happens next is that Smodin will propose an outline that you can edit if needed. Once you’ve approved the outline, Smodin will write the article in minutes.
You can edit the article, request revisions, or accept the article as it’s been delivered.
AI Essay Writer
Unlike Longshot, Smodin has a dedicated essay writer. This is a perfect tool for students, regardless of age, from junior high through an advanced college degree.
You can get started on your essay for free by describing your essay in as little as five words
Then you:
- Choose your title. You can put in your title, and Smodin will make suggestions to your title to make it more engaging.
- Choose the length of the essay. You can confirm the number of paragraphs needed. Smodin’s free plan limits your essay’s length, but you can upgrade your account if you need longer essays.
- Review Smodin’s proposed outline. Smodin will propose an essay outline. You can review it and either accept it as is or make suggestions.
Plus, with Smodin’s AI essay writer, you get:
- An AI-powered research assistant: You can use this tool to find a source that fits for any part in your essay. This helps you avoid allegations of plagiarism. Our advanced AI algorithm lets you find relevant sources for any sentence or text. This is perfect for research papers and academic writing.
- Structured text: Smodin’s AI essay writer produces a piece of writing with structured text – that is, there’s a logical argument in the piece.
- Multiple essay types: You can use Smodin to write a descriptive essay, an expository essay, a compare and contrast essay, a narrative essay, and more.
AI Grader
Unlike Longshot, Smodin has a powerful AI grader. Teachers and students can use this tool to grade their essays.
- For teachers: This lets you grade essays faster, which lets you spend more time directly working with your students.
- For students: You can upload your first draft into Smodin and see what letter grade you would get. You also get informed feedback that you can use to improve your score.
When using the AI Grader, you can choose what rubric you want to use to evaluate your essay.
You can choose criteria pre-loaded into Smodin, such as “organization,” “originality,” and “support.” You can also upload your custom rubric. This is great, as you can use the AI grader for all types of courses.
After you’ve chosen your rubric, upload your essay. Smodin grades it instantly, providing both a letter grade and the rationale behind your grade.
Use AI to grade your writing today
Smodin AI Rewriter
Smodin is also a re-writer.
Smodin can take your content and re-write it for you, putting it in new words. This helps you vary your content across platforms and avoid plagiarism when starting with someone else’s content.
You can see the original copy on the left and the re-written copy (with the changes highlighted) on the right.
Plagiarism Checker
You can use Smodin to see if your content will get flagged for plagiarism.
Simply paste your content into the plagiarism checker.
If Smodin finds similar content, it lists them after giving your content a score on how plagiarized it is (or isn’t).
The plagiarism checker is great for:
- Students – Make sure you’re not handing in plagiarized content
- Teachers – Check to confirm that your students aren’t handing in work that isn’t theirs.
- Bloggers/online writers – While different than academia, you still don’t want to be found guilty of plagiarizing content you’ve found online.
Click here to check for plagiarism
AI Content Detector
Similar to the plagiarism detector, you can use Smodin to check to see if content was written by AI or not.
For example, see below, where we run a paragraph written by ChatGPT through the tool.
As you can see, it was correctly flagged by Smodin as AI-written.
Click here to start using the AI Detector
The above is a partial list of what Smodin offers. Here are some other key features:
- Story script generator
- Recommendation Letter generator
- Reference letter generator
- Personal bio benerator
- Thesis generator
- Research paper generator
- Story Generator
- Title Generator and Headline Generator
Start using Smodin to elevate your writing.
2. Grammarly – Good for Grammar Edits
Grammarly is listed as a Longshot alternative, not because it can be used to generate content with AI, but because it can be used to improve your content.
Grammarly can be used to:
- Correct spelling and grammar mistakes
- Improve clarity
- Improve style and tone
- Check for plagiarism
When you use Grammarly, you can quickly see how your content is scored, and you can review suggested edits.
Some of our writers at Smodin use Grammarly. They connect the Grammarly Google Doc integration, which lets them review Grammarly’s suggested edits live in the Google Doc. Here’s a screenshot of an early draft of an article about Quillbot alternatives. You can see Grammarly’s suggested edits on the right.
Grammarly is overall a very good tool for writers to use, but there are some drawbacks to consider.
- Cost – Grammarly isn’t overly expensive. You can use its services for around $12 a month. But it is an extra cost on top of the cost of using another AI generative tool. So before investing in Grammarly, ensure your team will benefit from its features.
- Skill level – Not every Grammarly suggested edit will make sense, fit with your style, or be an overall improvement. Grammarly’s suggested edits are simply suggested edits. This means that Grammarly is only as good as the writer/editor using them.
You can try using Grammarly for free first. On Grammarly’s free plan, you can check for grammar & spelling errors, punctuation mistakes like missing a period or too many commas, and whether or not your content is coming across as too wordy.
If you like its free program, it might make sense to upgrade to its paid plans, where you get advanced grammar checks, style and tone edits, sentence structure edits, a plagiarism detector, and more.
3. Spinbot: Good for Content Rephrasing
Spinbot is a free online spinner, which makes it a free alternative to Longshot’s content rephraser.
If you need a content rephraser, you can see if Spinbot will do the trick. It’s easy for you. You just paste your content into the box on the left, and Spinbot will re-write the content for you.
The goal of any good content rephrasing tool – Spinbot included – is to give you brand new content that retains the message/meaning of the original.
But keep in mind, that Spinbot’s free plan is limited. It has usage limits, so you may not be able to use it as much as you want, especially if you’re trying to rewrite a long blog article or essay.
And if you’re going to pay for Spinbot, you can instead pay for a more comprehensive AI writing tool, like Smodin, which comes with AI generators, rephrasers, plagiarism detectors, and more.
4. Jasper – Good for Marketing Teams
Jasper AI is an artificial intelligence-powered virtual assistant. Here are some key details. You can customize its AI features for different industry verticals and integrate it with different CRM tools, help desks, and other similar platforms.
It’s also great for marketing writing. Jasper has templates and tools for marketing teams to deliver quality content.
You can use Jasper to help you write blog posts, professional emails, newsletters, case studies, product descriptions, social media posts, and blog posts.
Here’s a non-exhaustive list of what you can get from Jasper:
- AI-powered copywriting
- AI-led content strategy
- AI blog writing
- AI-powered SEO
- ChatGPT-3 integration
But JasperAI might be too pricey for some. At the time of this writing, the cheapest option is $39 per month (when paid monthly), and that’s only for individuals. So you’ll pay more if you’re part of a marketing team.
At the time of this writing, Jasper has over 1800 reviews with an average star rating of 4.8/5.
5. ProWritingAid: Best for Creative Writing
If you don’t need Longshot’s fact-based content generation and instead focus on long-term creative content, such as short story collections, novels, or poetry collections, then consider purchasing ProWritingAid.
This is a fairly detailed writing assistant. You can use it to check grammar, spelling, and style suggestions. Additionally, you can receive detailed reports on the structure of your content and its overall readability.
ProWritingAid has helpful features for:
- Creative writers
- Professional (non-creative) writers
- Higher education
- Teachers
- Tools for non-native English speakers
This tool is relatively affordable. As of this writing, you can enjoy its features for just around $10 per month. However, keep in mind that ProWritingAid is more similar to Grammarly than JasperAI, Smodin, or Longshot.
This means it’s great for writers who want to improve their writing, but it’s overkill for most bloggers, marketers, and students who just want to create informative, engaging, and engaging content.
However, if you don’t think much about editing and writing, you may find yourself overthinking, slowing down the drafting process. Therefore, it is not a good choice for marketing, SEO, business and advertising copywriting.
At the time of this writing, ProWritingAid has over 430 reviews with an average star rating of 4.6/5.
Read ProWritingAid reviews here
6. Hemingway Editor: Good Free Editing Alternative
If you’re leaving Longshot because you don’t need AI content generation but still want to improve your writing skills – or the quality and readability of your content – then consider the Hemingway Editor.
Hemingway uses easy-to-see color-coded grading to let you know:
- How many adverbs you’re using
- When you’re using passive voice
- When you’re using hard-to-read sentences
- When you’re using very hard-to-read sentences
- Your content’s grade level
Hemingway is simple to use, free, and gives you instant feedback. You can also integrate the app with WordPress or Medium.
But the thing is. . .
- Hemingway’s suggested edits aren’t always worth listening to. Hemingway can tell you what an adverb is, what passive voice is, and what is (likely) a complex sentence. But those things are not inherently negative in your content. And removing them from your piece of writing doesn’t mean your writing is now better. In fact, it could get worse.
- Hemingway is limited. Thankfully, Hemingway is free, as you will be using it alongside another tool if you want to use content generation or re-phrasing.
7. Turnitin: Good for Avoiding Plagiarism
Longshot is a tool that helps with fact-based content generation – but it doesn’t have a plagiarism checker. So if you’re a writer (or teacher or student) who needs to verify whether or not a piece of content has been plagiarized, then you’ll need something else.
If you want a standalone plagiarizer, consider something like Turnitin. Turnitin is a popular plagiarism detection software.
This software is used by teachers, students, researchers, and academics alike.
However, this tool doesn’t work well for individual writers or teachers who need to verify whether or not something has been plagiarized. Due to its cost, it’s more for larger companies/institutions.
If you’re looking for a more straightforward plagarizer, consider using the Smodin plagiarism checker. It’ll be less expensive than Turnitin, plus Smodin comes with other features, like AI content detection, article generation, and essay grading.
8. Writesonic – Good for Copywriting
Writesonic is similar to Longshot, minus the fact-based researching tools. But marketers can use it for ad copy, copywriting, blog posts, and more. It has several templates, chatbots, and even an AI image-generation tool.
Here are Writesonic’s core features that make it a good Growthbar alternative for marketing teams:
- AI Writing: Writesonic offers an AI-powered article writer, a paraphrasing tool, a summarization tool, and more.
- Chatsonic: Chatsonic serves as an alternative to ChatGPT, enabling you to engage in conversations, integrate with Google Search, communicate with PDF documents, and generate AI-powered images.
- Botsonic: With Botsonic, you can effortlessly design your custom chatbot, making it an excellent choice for programmers or business owners seeking to incorporate chatbots into their websites.
- AI Art Generator: Besides its text capabilities, Writesonic can generate AI-driven art and images. Simply provide prompts and style preferences, and Writesonic will produce captivating visuals.
- Audiosonic: If you wish to transform your written content into podcasts or voiceovers, Writesonic’s Audiosonic feature empowers you to do so seamlessly.
At the time of this writing, Writesonic has over 1800 reviews with an average star rating of 4.8/5.
Next Steps: Trying the Best Longshot Alternative for Free
Above, we looked at 8 of the best Longshot alternatives, including Smodin.
To see if Smodin will work for you, you can try its main features for free, including the: