AutoCrit Alternative for Structural, Not Just Line-Level, Editing

I have run entire manuscripts through AutoCrit, and I want to say this clearly before I say anything else: it is a good tool. If your sentences are the problem, AutoCrit is one of the sharpest editors you can put a draft in front of. So if you are shopping for an AutoCrit alternative, the first thing to figure out is whether you actually dislike AutoCrit, or whether you have simply outgrown the layer of editing it works on.

Here is the distinction that matters. AutoCrit is largely a line-level editor. It reads your prose sentence by sentence and benchmarks it against genre norms: pacing, dialogue tags, repetition, adverbs, filler words, showing versus telling. What it does not do well is stand back and tell you whether the story itself holds together, whether the third act earns its ending, whether the plot has a hole a reader will fall through. That developmental, structural layer is a different job, and it is the reason a lot of writers go looking for something else after a while.

I will be upfront: StoryWith AI is our own product, so weigh my praise accordingly. I have paid for AutoCrit and a stack of other tools out of my own pocket across a self-publishing career, and I will tell you plainly where AutoCrit stays the better pick. A recommendation with no downside is just an ad.

Key takeaways

• AutoCrit is strongest at line-level, genre-aware editing: pacing, dialogue tags, repetition, and prose benchmarks against bestsellers in your genre.
• AutoCrit does not do deep developmental analysis. It will not tell you your midpoint is weak or that a subplot never resolves.
• If you want the structural layer above line editing, structure, emotional arc, continuity, plot holes, and scene purpose, you want a different kind of tool.
• AutoCrit's Free Forever plan gives you a few tools and unlimited word count; Pro is around $30/month, or roughly half that billed annually. Pricing changes, so check.
• StoryWith AI analyzes the manuscript at the story level and adds real reader feedback, but it does not polish your sentences the way AutoCrit does. They solve different problems.

What AutoCrit is actually good at

AutoCrit's whole design philosophy is comparison. When it flags your dialogue or your pacing, it does not just say the number is high, it shows you how that number stacks up against typical books in your chosen genre, whether that is thriller, romance, or fantasy. That genre-aware benchmarking is the feature people rightly love, and you can see how the tools are organized on AutoCrit's Writer's Desk.

The line-level reports are the core. The pacing report analyzes sentence and paragraph rhythm to show where a draft drags or races, and the dialogue report catches overused tags and stiff exchanges. On top of that sit repetition, adverb, and word-choice reports, more than twenty-five of them in total on the paid tier. On pricing, AutoCrit's plans page lists a Free Forever tier with a limited set of interactive tools and unlimited word count, and a Pro tier at about $30 per month, or roughly half that when billed annually. Those numbers move around with promotions, so confirm before you buy.

If your feedback from readers and editors is "the writing is a little clunky at the sentence level," AutoCrit will fix that faster than almost anything. That is genuinely its lane.

Where AutoCrit runs out of road

The limit shows up the moment your problem stops being sentences and starts being story. AutoCrit can tell you that a chapter has too many dialogue tags. It cannot tell you that the chapter has no reason to exist. It can flag repeated words on page 200. It cannot notice that the character who dies on page 200 was described as alive on page 240.

Those are developmental problems, and they are the ones that sink books. A manuscript can pass every line-level check AutoCrit runs and still have a saggy middle, an unmotivated antagonist, a theme that never lands, and a plot hole a reviewer will happily point out in one star. Line editing is the last mile. Structure is the road. Polishing sentences in a story that is structurally broken is a common and expensive mistake, which is why I wrote up how to use AI to edit your novel as a layered process rather than a single pass.

This is not a knock on AutoCrit. It is simply not built for the developmental layer, and pretending otherwise would set you up to ship a well-polished draft of the wrong book.

The alternatives, by what they actually do

If you want to move up a layer, here is the honest landscape. Some of these overlap with AutoCrit; some sit above it.

ProWritingAid is the closest true peer to AutoCrit, another strong line editor with a wider general-writing focus. Fictionary is the one that pushes hardest into structure, walking you through a manual scene-by-scene developmental edit, and it is worth a serious look if you want to do the structural thinking yourself. Marlowe generates a single big analytical report on a finished manuscript. If you are weighing the whole field, I keep an honest running comparison in the best AI writing tools for authors.

Where StoryWith fits, and who should skip it

StoryWith AI, which again is ours, is built specifically for the layer AutoCrit leaves alone. It reads the manuscript you wrote and analyzes it at the story level: structure, emotional arc and pacing, dialogue, continuity with plot-hole and conflict detection, readability, theme, and whether each scene actually earns its place. Every finding lands in one ranked list on a diagnostics dashboard we call Book Health, and each one deep-links to the exact scene it is talking about, so "your midpoint is weak" comes with a click straight to the midpoint. Finding those structural cracks is the specific job I broke down in how to find plot holes in your novel.

The other thing AutoCrit does not do at all: real readers. StoryWith lets you share excerpts privately with beta readers through share links and also simulates reader personas, so you get a machine's structural read and actual human reactions side by side. If getting honest reactions is your bottleneck, I wrote a whole guide on how to get feedback on your novel. There is a free plan with the full toolset and a one-time AI allowance, then paid tiers from $19 a month, so you can test it on a real chapter first at storywith.ai.

Now the honest part. If what you want is sentence-level polish, tightening dialogue tags, cutting adverbs, benchmarking your prose density against bestsellers in your genre, StoryWith is not the tool and AutoCrit is genuinely better at it. We analyze the story; we do not sit inside your sentences the way a dedicated line editor does. And one more thing StoryWith deliberately does not do: it does not generate prose for you. It stays on the assisted side of Amazon KDP and publisher disclosure rules, which matters if you care about that line, and I explain it plainly in assisted versus AI-generated writing. If you wanted a tool to draft scenes for you, neither AutoCrit nor StoryWith is your answer.

Frequently asked questions

Is AutoCrit worth it for developmental editing? Not really, and that is by design. AutoCrit is built for line-level, genre-aware editing: pacing, dialogue tags, repetition, word choice. It is very good at that. It does not do developmental analysis of structure, character arc, or plot holes, so if that is what you need, pair it with a story-level tool or choose one built for the developmental layer instead.

What is the best free AutoCrit alternative? It depends which layer you want. For a free line editor, ProWritingAid has a word-limited free version. For free story-level analysis, StoryWith AI has a free plan that includes its analyzers with a one-time AI allowance, and Marlowe offers a free basic report. AutoCrit's own Free Forever tier gives you a handful of tools with unlimited word count, so try that before paying too.

Should I switch from AutoCrit or add another tool? Most writers should add, not switch. If AutoCrit's line editing is working for you, keep it for the final polish and add a structural tool earlier in the process, when the story shape is still movable. Fixing structure after you have polished every sentence means re-polishing the sentences you cut, which is the expensive way around.