17 Free Text Tools for Writers, Students and Marketers

Writing for work involves a surprising amount of mechanical drudgery that has nothing to do with writing: stripping stray whitespace from a pasted paragraph, checking a word limit, de-duplicating a list of names, converting something into a URL slug.

These seventeen tools are for that part of the job. They all run locally in the browser, which is not a small detail — the draft you paste is often unpublished, and the list you are sorting is often somebody's personal data.

Word count sounds solved until a client asks for exactly 800 words and your editor says 820, or a form rejects your text at 1,995 characters with no explanation of where the newline went.

A note on what "a word" means: different counters disagree on hyphenation, numbers and URLs. If an exact number matters, use the same counter the person checking your work uses, and agree on it in advance. This is a genuinely common source of small, pointless arguments.

Most text you receive is slightly damaged: double spaces from a copy-paste, a stray tab, inconsistent capitalisation from someone typing in a hurry. Fixing it by hand is slow and error-prone.

The slug generator has one use beyond URLs: it is a fast way to make a readable filename or anchor that a human can parse at a glance, which beats `final_final_v3`.

Listicles, inventories, mail merges, tag cleanups, survey responses, spreadsheet columns — at some point everything becomes a list and every list needs sorting, de-duplicating or randomising.

Markdown has won, but not uniformly. Half your tools render it, half do not, and the half that does not is usually the one someone senior has to paste into.

The Markdown preview is the tool that quietly saves the most time in this whole set, because a broken table in a rendered document is far more visible — and far more embarrassing — than a broken table in raw text.

These are lower-frequency tools, but they cost nothing to keep bookmarked and they solve the specific problem of "I need a random-looking value right now and I do not trust myself to make one up".

Here is the order that works when a draft arrives from someone else and needs to go out under your name.

The whole pass takes a few minutes and eliminates the category of mistake where a document is technically correct and visibly wrong.

Does my unpublished text leave my computer? No. These tools process text in your browser and nothing is stored or transmitted.

Is there a length limit? There is no server-side limit because there is no server call. Extremely large inputs are limited by your own device's memory.

Can I use the output commercially? Yes, freely, with no attribution.

Do they work on a phone? Yes. The layout adapts, and the same code runs.

Worth being blunt about the limits, because a tool that mechanises the wrong thing just produces a faster mistake.

None of these utilities can tell you whether a sentence is clear, whether a claim is sourced, or whether a tone is right for the audience. They count characters; they do not judge prose. A text that scores beautifully on every metric on this page can still be unreadable.

Nor do they edit. The moment you find yourself rewriting individual clauses by hand at scale, you have outgrown a text tool and you want either a proper editor, a find-and-replace with regex — which the Regex Tester is genuinely good for rehearsing — or a script. Use the browser for the mechanical layer, and keep your own judgement for everything above it.

One more thing they will not do is fix a bad source. If your spreadsheet is full of inconsistent naming — "Dr", "DR", "Dr." all in one column — a tool will sort and de-duplicate what you gave it faithfully, and you will still have three entries where there should be one. Cleaning the data is a decision, not a mechanical step. Decide the canonical form first, then apply it, then check.

If you maintain a list of leads, links, references or terms, it degrades quietly. The failure mode is always the same: entries that look identical are not, and one merge removes nothing.

A maintenance pass that works is boring: trim whitespace, standardise capitalisation, strip trailing punctuation, then de-duplicate. In that order — trimming after de-duplicating loses entries. Doing this once a month on an active list turns a two-hour unrecoverable mess into a ten-minute chore.

When two lists need reconciling — say, a registration list against an attendance list — sort both with the List Sorter first, so they line up, then compare by eye. Sorting both sides before comparing is the difference between a two-minute check and a twenty-minute hunt.

None of these tools is clever. That is the point: they remove the mechanical five percent of writing that is not writing, so the remaining ninety-five percent is actually about sentences. Bookmark the ones you use monthly, ignore the rest, and stop fixing whitespace by hand.