Écrivor
Écrivor is a French web platform where pupils from primary school to higher education write, receive instant AI feedback configured by their teacher, then revise. It points at weaknesses and flags error categories but never gives the right answer.
What is Écrivor?
Écrivor is a French web platform built to teach the craft of writing rather than to write on the pupil's behalf. It comes from Alix Callies, a French teacher in Seine-Saint-Denis, and Thomas Ricart, a developer, and is presented as a tool made by teachers for their own pupils. The problem it targets is the one every writing teacher knows: the lag between a text being handed in and feedback coming back, the difficulty of producing a complete and legible correction, and the difficulty of following progress finely. The stated aim is to multiply by ten the number of interactions pupils have with their own texts.
Pupils work in a simplified word processor along a planning, writing and revision cycle. Feedback arrives in two named phases. Améliorer handles substance: respect of the instructions, organisation, sentence length, coherence, vocabulary and the knowledge brought to bear. Corriger then flags errors by the categories the teacher has selected — subject-verb agreement, spelling, capital letters. One rule holds throughout: Écrivor never gives the right answer. The pupil is shown what needs work and fixes it alone.
Coverage runs from primary school to higher education, through French, biology, history and geography, music and visual arts, with German, English and Spanish marked experimental. Texts are capped at 5,000 characters, about 850 words, and mathematical formulas are excluded.
Technically, Google Gemini is the main model, Mistral AI the fallback, Hugging Face hosts proprietary models developed by Écrivor, and in-house NLP algorithms sit alongside. The scientific grounding is unusually explicit for this category: a four-member scientific council — Christophe Benzitoun (ATILF-CNRS/Lorraine), Claire Doquet (Bordeaux), Lydie Feugnet and Arnaud Moysan (Inspé Bordeaux) — around fifteen associated researchers, and the E-CALM corpus.
Access is by direct email sign-up or one-click login from the school digital workspace through the GAR, Écrivor being a resource certified by the Ministère de l'Éducation nationale; Azure and Google sign-in also work. On the pupil side, accessibility is worked hard: RGAA and WCAG 2.1 AA conformity, around ten fonts including OpenDyslexic and Atkinson Hyperlegible, four zoom levels, word or syllable colouring, text-to-speech and translation into more than 31 languages. The publisher reports 8 500 registered teachers and more than 50 000 pupils in 2025/2026, and the tool is supported by the ministry's Édu'Up scheme.
What it does
- Give pupils immediate, teacher-configured feedback on a draft: whether the instructions were followed, organisation, coherence, sentence length, vocabulary and subject knowledge mobilised
- Flag errors by the categories the teacher has chosen — subject-verb agreement, spelling, capital letters — without ever supplying the correct answer
- Build a writing activity from the teacher's own instructions and resources (text, PDF, image, video), or import one from the catalogue
- Generate feedback criteria with an assistant grounded in the national syllabus and the scientific committee's five-axis methodology, or write custom Améliorer and Corriger prompts
- Have pupils write in a simplified, accessible word processor with a scratchpad, a special-character helper and automatic saving
- Steer the activity in real time, add comments, and lock access to the editor or to the feedback
- Translate instructions, resources, feedback and comments into more than 31 languages and have them read aloud
When to use Écrivor / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Écrivor is the right fit.
When to use Écrivor
- French-language teachers in middle and high schools who want pupils to rework their own drafts rather than receive a finished correction
- Primary school teachers in the upper elementary years and inclusion (ULIS) teachers equipping a single class
- Teachers of non-literary subjects who set structured written answers: history and geography, biology, visual arts, music
- Teachers working with pupils who have special educational needs (dyslexia, individual learning plans, teaching assistants) or who are newly arrived non-French speakers
- Heads of school and digital coordinators rolling a tool out across a whole institution through the GAR and the school digital workspace
When not to use Écrivor
- Teachers looking for an automated grading tool: the publisher states that the AI's analyses and feedback cannot be used to mark pupils
- Anyone working on long-form writing: texts are capped at 5,000 characters, roughly 850 words, and the publisher advises against the essay format
- Mathematics teachers and anyone dealing with formulas, which the tool excludes explicitly from every subject it otherwise covers
- Product teams wanting to embed the service in their own software: there is no API and no native mobile application, only a browser
- Individual consumers looking for a personal writing assistant: subscriptions run through a teacher, a class or a school, and the interface and syllabus references are entirely French
How to use Écrivor
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Create an account free of charge by email, or request GAR access on the dedicated sign-up page using the school's UAI code
- On the GAR route, the school's GAR coordinator then assigns the licences; access afterwards is one click from the digital workspace
- Attend the free 30-minute discovery webinar held by video call if you want a guided walkthrough before starting
- Create your classes
- Create an activity from your own instructions and resources, or import one from the catalogue and personalise it
- Set the feedback criteria: let the assistant propose them from the Écrivor methodology, or write your own Améliorer and Corriger prompts
- Adjust the activity options: minimum length (30 words by default), maximum sentence length, pasting (disabled by default), audio and translation
- Schedule the activity for the class; pupils reach it through the digital workspace or a unique link
- Pupils read the instructions and resources, use the scratchpad, then write their first draft unaided; they request their Améliorer feedback, rework the text, and move on to the Corriger phase
- Follow the class live, add comments, compare every version of a text and open the detailed analysis per pupil and per class
Pros & Cons
Pros
- An explicit pedagogical stance: the tool never supplies the right answer, only leads, so the pupil stays the author of their own corrections
- Designed and tested by practising teachers, with features requested by name from the classroom — scratchpad, multi-version printing, special-character helper, accessibility settings
- Real scientific grounding: a four-member scientific council, around fifteen associated researchers, the E-CALM corpus, and publications and conferences (NéALA 2025, SIG Writing 2026, Cahiers Pédagogiques June 2026, the ALSIC study day)
- Accessibility worked in depth: RGAA and WCAG 2.1 AA on the pupil side, dyslexia-friendly fonts, syllable colouring, text-to-speech, and translation into more than 31 languages for newly arrived pupils
- Institutional integration: a GAR-certified resource, one-click login from the school digital workspace, and automatic deletion of pupil data on 15 August as the GAR contract requires
- European hosting is declared, no identifying data is sent to the AI models, and no-training agreements are signed with Google, Mistral AI and Hugging Face
- Prices are published in full, including the Établissement tiers, with a one-month free trial that needs no bank card
Cons
- Texts are capped at 5,000 characters, roughly 850 words: the publisher explicitly advises against the essay format, and mathematical formulas are excluded
- Strongly bound to the French education system — GAR, school digital workspaces, Éducation nationale syllabuses, a French-only interface — while German, English and Spanish are marked experimental
- Several features in the pricing matrix are dated for the 2026 school year and not yet delivered: collaborative writing, shared catalogue, teacher-to-teacher collaboration, detailed activity analysis, cross-subject writer profile and school dashboard
- "Unlimited" activities are in fact capped at 30 per month per teacher, a limit that appears only in a footnote on the pricing page
- No direct online payment: orders go through a quote, a purchase order, a bank transfer or the LDE, eMLS, Tabuléo and Chorus Pro platforms; there is no refund on early termination and no automatic renewal, the subscription stopping on 15 August
- RGAA and WCAG 2.1 AA conformity covers the pupil side only, the teacher side being announced as coming soon; no security certification is published (no ISO 27001, no SOC 2) and the full list of sub-processors is supplied only on request to the DPO
- Browser only — no API, no native mobile application, an internet connection required and a physical keyboard recommended — and a very small team: the privacy policy states that the only people with access to the data are Alix and Thomas
Pricing & Plans
There is no permanent free plan. Free access was bounded to the 2025-2026 school year, and paid subscriptions apply from the 2026 school year. The lowest paid entry point is the Classe plan at 49 € TTC / an, that is 49 euros per year including VAT, covering one teacher and their class. A one-month free trial, with no commitment and no bank card, is available on the Classe and Enseignant plans when subscribed by direct payment; it does not apply to subscriptions placed on a quote or a purchase order, for which the subscription is due from the order. Creating an account is free and allows a first activity to be tested.
- one teacher and their class
- up to 40 pupils
- 1 class
- unlimited activities (30 per month per teacher)
- all subjects
- 1 month free trial
- one teacher and all their pupils
- up to 20 classes of 40 pupils
- unlimited activities (30 per month per teacher)
- all subjects
- 1 month free trial
- unlimited access for every teacher and every pupil
- centralised pupil accounts
- teacher collaboration
- one hour of training
- dedicated customer service
- deployment and digital workspace integration. Priced by school roll under article 3 of the sales terms: fewer than 300 pupils 549 € HT
- 300 to 500 pupils 899 € HT
- 500 to 750 pupils 1 499 € HT
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Écrivor handles your data.
GDPR overview
GDPR compliance is claimed in so many words and backed by concrete provisions. The privacy policy was updated on 8 October 2025 and the terms are version 2.0, effective the same day. A DPO is named: Thomas Ricart, the company's director, at contact@ecrivor.com. An article 28 processing annex sits inside the terms (article 10.3), covering purposes, data categories, data subjects, retention, article 32 security and onward processing. Six rights are documented with deadlines: access, objection and email-based erasure within 7 working days, immediate erasure from the interface, and portability. Declared commitments include minimisation, no sale of data, no identifying data sent to the AI models, hosting inside the European Union, availability for audit and no tracking cookies. Alignment with the AI Act and the Éducation nationale AI trust framework is claimed. No independent security certification is published.
Who owns the data?
The publisher is the exclusive owner of Écrivor itself and its exploitation rights, with reverse engineering and competitive analysis forbidden by article 6.1 of the terms. Article 6.2 leaves the intellectual property of submitted content and prompts with the user, who warrants holding those rights; no transfer of pupils' work to the publisher is stipulated. The data controller depends on the access route: the Ministère de l'Éducation nationale for GAR logins, where Écrivor acts as an article 28 processor, and Écrivor itself for direct sign-ups. The publisher undertakes never to sell personal data, while reserving the right to keep anonymised texts, writing processes and prompts for research and product improvement.
Reuse rights
Teachers reuse their own material freely, without asking anyone. They write their instructions, resources and prompts, import an activity from the catalogue and modify it as they wish, and share or import activities between colleagues — a shared catalogue and teacher-to-teacher collaboration are announced for the 2026 school year. They can print pupils' texts (first draft, final version, or both), follow the class live, add comments, compare every version of a text and open a detailed analysis per pupil and per class. Data can be retrieved on request in JSON or CSV under the portability right. Deadlines apply: 30 days after termination to save data (sales terms, article 11), and three months after 15 August to recover activities and prompts when a GAR licence is not renewed. Two contractual limits frame this freedom: article 6.1 forbids using the service for competitive analysis, and article 12 of the terms places a non-compete undertaking on the user.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
The site runs on Vercel Inc (San Francisco, United States), which operates serverless Amazon Web Services infrastructure; the database and authentication sit on Supabase, also hosted on AWS, and analytics run on Posthog on European servers in Frankfurt, Germany. The legal notice states that all data is stored on European AWS servers. The sales terms (article 12), the pricing page and the FAQ all say data is hosted in Europe, in France and Frankfurt, while the home page says hosted in France. One internal discrepancy is worth noting rather than resolving here: the privacy policy describes the AWS eu-west-3 region as corresponding to Frankfurt, Germany, whereas the other pages speak of France and Frankfurt — the publisher is the right party to confirm which. The commitment is that all personal data stays inside the European Union. Traffic is encrypted over HTTPS/TLS, access control uses Supabase Row Level Security, and internal access is restricted and protected by multi-factor authentication. The site's IP address resolves to a Vercel anycast node geolocated in the United States; it indicates a CDN point of presence, not where data is stored.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Écrivor.
- The publisher itself warns that the AI can be wrong and repeats the warning at every use, to teachers and pupils alike; it also forbids using the feedback as a basis for grading, stating that current generative AI cannot assess a pupil's work reliably or fairly
- Personal data a pupil types into their text despite the on-screen alerts is sent to the AI models along with the text; the alert system warns, it does not block, and responsibility for the instruction sits with the teacher
- Reliance on instant machine feedback can crowd out the teacher's judgement and the pupil's own self-assessment, which is precisely the skill the tool claims to build
- Pupils' writing may be kept in anonymised form for research and product improvement; anonymising a pupil's own text is not a trivial operation, and the site never says whether that corpus feeds any training
- Three external AI providers sit in the processing chain (Google Gemini, Mistral AI, Hugging Face); the no-training guarantees are contractual and cannot be audited from outside, and the complete list of sub-processors is given only on request to the DPO
- No independent security certification is published, so security claims rest on the publisher's own statements
- The controller changes with the access route — the Ministère de l'Éducation nationale through the GAR, Écrivor for direct sign-ups — so exercising data rights does not follow the same channel; commercially, there is no refund on early termination and the subscription stops automatically on 15 August
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Very low for an individual teacher. Nothing is installed: everything runs in a browser on computer, tablet or smartphone, an account is created by email, and the publisher advertises a first activity in under two minutes. Pupils log in from the school digital workspace in one click, or by a unique link. School-wide GAR deployment differs: the request needs the UAI code, then the school's GAR coordinator assigns licences, so timing depends on a third party. The Établissement plan includes an hour of training and deployment support. No technical skill is needed; tuning prompts and criteria takes pedagogical practice.
Deployment
Integrations
Supported languages
Behind Écrivor
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Is Écrivor free?
How much does Écrivor cost?
Which subjects does it work in?
Does it correct mistakes in the pupil's place?
How long can a pupil's text be?
What devices does it run on?
How do we connect through the GAR?
Are pupils' texts used to train AI models?
Is it GDPR-compliant?
Can the AI get it wrong?
Should you pick Écrivor?
Écrivor occupies a genuinely unusual position in educational AI: it refuses to produce the text and refuses to hand over the correction. What it targets is the skill of rereading and self-correcting, with the teacher deciding what the machine looks at and what it says. That makes it a tool for teachers who want pupils to do the work, not a productivity shortcut for marking. Its institutional and academic credentials are real: certification by the Ministère de l'Éducation nationale for GAR access, support from the ministry's Édu'Up scheme, a university scientific council, and a mention as an example in the Conseil de l'IA et du numérique report published in June 2026. Commercially it is a young proposition: access was free until the end of the 2025-2026 school year, the paid plans started with the 2026 school year, and online card payment is still unavailable — orders run through quotes, purchase orders, transfers or the education supply platforms. Several advertised capabilities are still ahead of delivery: collaborative writing, a shared catalogue, the school dashboard, the cross-subject writer profile and RGAA conformity on the teacher side. The scope is deliberately narrow — short texts, French, the French education system — which is a strength for its intended users and a wall for anyone else. A buyer should check three things before committing: that the 5,000-character limit and the exclusion of mathematical formulas fit the writing actually set; that the features they are buying for are live rather than scheduled; and that a two-founder company can support an institution-wide rollout, since the privacy policy names those same two people as the only ones with access to the data.
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