Grammarly Doesn't Work in Slack? Here's What I Use Instead on Mac

The Problem: "Why Can't I Fix Grammar in Slack?"

You're typing a message in Slack. It's going to your manager, or a client, or the entire engineering channel. You misspell a word. You write a sentence that sounds awkward. You know something is off, but there's no red underline. No suggestion bubble. No gentle nudge from Grammarly telling you that "could of" should be "could have."

Nothing. Just you, your typo, and the Send button.

Microsoft Teams is even worse. At least Slack has a web version that feels close to the desktop app. Teams on Mac is notorious for being sluggish in a browser, so most people use the desktop client — where Grammarly is completely absent. You're writing messages to your entire organization, joining meetings with chat threads full of typos, and drafting important follow-ups without a single grammar suggestion. For anyone who uses Teams as their primary work communication tool, this isn't a minor annoyance — it's a daily frustration that affects how professional your writing looks.

The same story repeats in Notion desktop, VS Code when you're writing commit messages, Terminal when you're composing a Git commit, Apple Notes, Apple Mail, TextEdit, Xcode, Sublime Text — basically every native Mac application that isn't a web browser.

The reason is straightforward: Grammarly is a browser extension. It hooks into text fields rendered by Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. It can see what you type in Google Docs, Gmail, and WordPress because those are web pages. But desktop apps like Slack use native macOS text views — AppKit's NSTextView or SwiftUI's TextField — and Grammarly simply cannot access them.

Grammarly does offer a desktop app with an "overlay" approach that tries to attach to native text fields, but it's unreliable at best. It doesn't work in many apps, it's resource-heavy (300–500 MB of RAM for an Electron wrapper), and when it does work, it often lags or misaligns with the text you're editing. If you've ever seen Grammarly's suggestion bubble floating in the wrong place or disappearing mid-correction, you know the pain.

What People Actually Do (The Workarounds)

I've watched colleagues do genuinely absurd things to work around this limitation:

• Copy → Grammarly → Fix → Paste back. Select the text in Slack, copy it, open Grammarly's web editor or desktop app, paste it in, wait for suggestions, apply fixes, copy the corrected text, switch back to Slack, paste it over the original. For a single Slack message. Multiple times a day.
• Use Slack in a browser. Abandon the desktop app entirely so Grammarly's browser extension works. This means losing native notifications, worse performance, and one more tab in an already overcrowded browser.
• Use Teams in a browser (and suffer). Unlike Slack, Teams in a browser is noticeably slower, drops features like background effects in calls, and constantly nags you to install the desktop app. You end up choosing between grammar checking and a usable Teams experience.
• Just live with typos. This is what most people do. They accept that their Slack messages, Teams chats, and Notion docs will have errors because the friction of fixing them is too high.
• Pay for Grammarly Premium ($30/month) and still can't use it everywhere. The premium tier doesn't solve the desktop app problem. You're paying $360 a year for a tool that only works in half the places you write.

Every one of these workarounds breaks your flow. The copy-paste dance costs 30–60 seconds per correction and completely derails whatever you were thinking about. Using Slack in a browser trades one problem for five others. And living with typos — well, typos in professional communication aren't free either.

How Brow Fixes Grammar in Any Mac App

Here's what I switched to: Brow's AI grammar fix. The mechanic is dead simple:

1. Select text in any Mac app — Slack, Teams, Notion, VS Code, Terminal, literally anything
2. Press Shift twice (double-tap Shift)
3. Text is corrected in place in about one second

That's it. No browser extension. No overlay. No copy-paste. No switching to a different app. The corrected text replaces your selection right where you typed it.

This works because Brow uses macOS accessibility APIs to read and replace selected text system-wide. It doesn't need to hook into a browser. It doesn't need an Electron wrapper floating over your app. It talks directly to macOS, which means it works in every app that supports standard text selection — which is every app.

I've confirmed it works in: Slack, Microsoft Teams, Notion, VS Code, Terminal, Apple Notes, Apple Mail, Pages, TextEdit, Xcode, Sublime Text, Discord, Telegram, and every other Mac app I've tried. If you can select text in it, Brow can fix the grammar.

Speed and Resource Comparison

Since I was paying for Grammarly before switching, I ran a side-by-side comparison on the things that matter most day to day:

Metric	Grammarly	Brow
RAM usage	300–500 MB	~50 MB
Architecture	Electron + browser extension	Native Swift
Correction speed	2–3 seconds	~1 second
Works in Slack desktop	No	Yes
Works in Teams desktop	No	Yes
Works in every Mac app	No	Yes
Monthly cost	$30/month ($360/yr)	Free (beta)

The RAM difference alone is worth the switch. Grammarly's desktop app is built on Electron, which means it's essentially running a hidden Chrome browser just to check your grammar. On a MacBook Air with 8 GB of RAM, that 300–500 MB footprint is a significant chunk of your total memory — memory that could go toward the apps you're actually working in. Brow is built entirely in native Swift, so the entire app — grammar checker, launcher, clipboard manager, screenshots, and 10+ other tools — uses roughly 50 MB total.

On price: Grammarly Premium runs $30 per month, or $360 per year. That's a significant expense for a tool that doesn't even work in most of the places you type. Brow is free during the beta with every feature unlocked, no credit card required. Even when Brow introduces pricing, you're getting a complete productivity suite — not just a grammar checker.

What About Translation?

Here's something Grammarly can't do at all: translate text. If you work with international teams — and in 2026, most of us do — you've probably used Google Translate or DeepL in a separate browser tab, doing the same copy-paste dance you do for grammar fixes.

Brow's same Shift+Shift shortcut handles translation too. Select text in any app, trigger Brow, and choose "translate to Spanish" (or any of 19+ supported languages). The translated text replaces your selection in place. Same speed, same workflow, same works-everywhere approach.

This is particularly useful in Slack and Teams where you might receive a message in one language and need to reply in another. No tab switching, no copy-paste, no breaking your flow. Select, translate, send.

When Grammarly Is Still Better

I want to be honest about this, because we believe in fair comparisons. Grammarly has genuine strengths that Brow doesn't match:

• Deeper writing suggestions. Grammarly offers tone detection, clarity scores, engagement analysis, and genre-specific writing styles. If you're crafting a formal business proposal, Grammarly's suggestions go beyond fixing errors — they help you write better.
• Inline browser suggestions. When you're writing in Google Docs or WordPress, Grammarly's real-time underlines and suggestion popups are excellent. You see errors as you type, not after you've finished a sentence.
• Writing analytics. Grammarly tracks your writing patterns over time and shows you what types of errors you make most frequently. This is genuinely useful for improving your writing long-term.

If you spend most of your day writing long-form content in a browser — blog posts, documentation, emails in Gmail — Grammarly's inline experience is hard to beat. The suggestions are thoughtful, the tone detection is useful, and the real-time feedback loop is well-designed.

Brow is better for a different use case: quick fixes in desktop apps, speed, cost, RAM efficiency, and working everywhere on Mac without friction. If your writing happens in Slack, Teams, Notion, VS Code, and other desktop apps — which for most knowledge workers is the majority of their day — Brow solves the problem Grammarly can't.

Try It Yourself

If you've been frustrated by Grammarly not working in Slack, Teams, or any other Mac desktop app, give Brow a try. It's free during the beta — no credit card, no trial timer, no feature restrictions. Download it, select some text in Slack, press Shift twice, and see what happens. The grammar fix is just one of 15+ built-in tools including a launcher, clipboard manager, window manager, screenshot tool, and more. See the full comparison to learn what else Brow replaces.