I write in markdown because it saves me the step between finishing an article and getting it formatted for the web. No HTML, no fighting with pasted formatting from Word, no cleaning up stray tags in WordPress.
If you have not used it: a hash makes a heading, an asterisk makes italics, two asterisks make bold, a greater-than sign makes a block quote, square brackets and parentheses make a link. That is most of it. It takes five or ten minutes to learn and a bit longer to work into your habits.
I have tested a lot of markdown editors over the years. These are the eight I would actually recommend, with pricing verified in August 2026. At the end there is a trick for using markdown inside Google Docs without installing anything.
Price: $5.99 per month or $39.99 per year, verified on ulysses.app/pricing on 21 August 2026. Reduced student pricing is available. Platforms: Mac, iPad, iPhone. Best for: Writing and publishing to the web, and managing long projects.
This is the markdown app I use the most. It handles short-form and long-form equally well, and the document library on the left holds every article I have written. On the right you get word count, keywords and publication status.
The part that keeps me in it is publishing. Ulysses connects to WordPress, Ghost and Medium, and I hit publish rather than logging in and pasting. You can live-preview the same piece as HTML, ePub, PDF or DOCX, which matters when you switch between blogging and book work.
The two objections are real: it is a subscription, and it is Apple only.
Read the full Ulysses review.
Price: One-time per platform. Mac $49.99, Windows $29.99, iPhone and iPad $49.99, Android by subscription. 7-day free trial. Verified on ia.net/writer/pricing on 21 August 2026. Platforms: Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, Android. Best for: Short-form writing, and owning your software outright.
A bare-bones minimalist editor: black text on white, or white on black, and nothing else. I have used it on and off for years and it is excellent for articles and blog posts.
It syncs through iCloud or Dropbox, supports hashtags for organising, and lets you hide every last piece of interface for full-screen writing. Focus mode narrows you to a single sentence. Newer versions added interlinking between notes with double square brackets.
Where it falls behind Ulysses is document management. For a folder of articles it is fine. For a book it is not.
Read the full iA Writer review.
Price: The app is free. Optional Sync is $4 per user per month billed annually, or $5 monthly. Publish is $8 per site per month billed annually, or $10 monthly. A commercial licence for work use is $50 per user per year. Verified on obsidian.md/pricing on 21 August 2026. Platforms: Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, Android. Best for: Interlinking notes and building a personal knowledge base.
Obsidian is a personal knowledge management system that happens to be a very good markdown editor. It sits on top of a folder of plain markdown files, so you are never locked in.
Its distinguishing feature is linking. Type two square brackets, search your other files, and Obsidian builds the link. If you follow a system like the Zettelkasten method, this is the tool for it. I use it heavily for exactly that.
You can sync through iCloud or Dropbox for free, or pay for Obsidian’s own encrypted sync. Publishing to the web is a paid add-on.
There is a learning curve, and there are more features here than a writer who just wants to draft an article needs. But it is free, so trying it costs nothing.
Price: $10.99 for the Mac app, $5.99 for the iPhone and iPad app. Separate purchases. Verified on both App Store listings on 21 August 2026. Platforms: Mac and iOS. Not Windows or Android. Best for: A cheap, simple markdown editor for short pieces.
Byword is a minimalist text editor with solid markdown support: keyboard shortcuts, syntax highlighting, tables, footnotes, typewriter mode and line or paragraph focus. It publishes to WordPress, Medium, Evernote, Blogger and Tumblr.
You open a file, pick markdown, plain text or rich text, and write. Because everything is plain text, you can write in Ulysses and edit in Byword or the other way round.
Honest note on maintenance: the most recent Mac version is 2.9.6 from October 2023, and the iOS version is 2.9.3 from April 2020. It still works, and it is cheap, but it is not under active development the way the others here are, and the mobile app especially has been left alone for years. It is also not the app for long-form work, and it has no library or templates.
Price: $14.99 one-time, covering up to three devices, with a 15-day free trial. Verified on typora.io on 21 August 2026. Platforms: macOS, Windows, Linux. Best for: A minimalist markdown editor that is not Apple-only.
Typora reminds me of iA Writer. It hides the markdown characters as you type and shows you the formatted result instead, so there is no separate preview window.
It supports images, headers, lists, tables, diagrams and code, has custom themes, tracks word count, and imports and exports PDF, Word, OpenOffice, LaTeX and ePub. It has file management, though I would not run a book through it when Ulysses does that better.
If you want something like iA Writer but you are on Windows or Linux, this is the pick.
Price: $4.99. Verified on the App Store on 21 August 2026. Last updated September 2025. Platforms: iPhone, iPad, Mac (Apple silicon), Apple Vision. Best for: Writing on a phone or tablet.
1Writer is a small, well-made markdown editor for iOS, with a built-in browser and a distraction-free interface. I use it occasionally when I am writing on a phone.
What I like is how it handles files. It shows the text notes on the device, and you can add anything in iCloud, plus Dropbox, WebDAV and other sources, which is a good demonstration of why markdown is worth using at all: the files are just files, and any app can open them.
At $4.99 it is the cheapest thing here that is still actively maintained. The interface is not as polished as Ulysses or iA Writer.
Price: Free, MIT licence. Platforms: macOS. Best for: Coding and technical notes on a Mac.
MacDown is an open-source markdown editor built with coders in mind, though writers can use it. It exists because the developer of Mou, an earlier and popular markdown app, stopped developing it.
Syntax highlighting, auto-completion and plenty of export options. It is not as polished as the paid apps, and the site shows version 0.7.3 with a copyright range ending in 2021, so treat it as stable rather than actively developed. It is free, which makes it easy to try.
Price: Free and open source, verified on code.visualstudio.com on 21 August 2026. Platforms: macOS, Windows, Linux, and in the browser. Best for: Coders who write markdown as part of the job.
VS Code is not a dedicated markdown editor, but it handles markdown out of the box and there are extensions that add shortcuts, a table of contents and live preview locking. If you are already a developer, you almost certainly already have it, and there is no reason to buy anything else for documentation and README files.
For a writer with no coding background it is overkill.
I have removed two apps that were here in earlier versions of this guide, because I check that these links still go somewhere real.
Dimer was a markdown tool for technical documentation. Its site is now serving unrelated spam links, so I am not sending readers to it.
Quiver, the programmer’s notebook, is no longer the product its developer leads with, and I cannot verify current pricing or support for it.
If either comes back properly maintained I will put it back.
You can write markdown inside Google Docs, and almost nobody knows it because it is off by default.
Open Google Docs, click Tools, then Preferences, then tick “automatically detect markdown.”
After that, typing a hash and a space makes a heading, asterisks make bold and italics, and asterisk-space makes a bullet list. When I tested this, headings, bold, italics and lists all worked; block quotes did not. Note that you generally need the space after the hash for it to trigger.
It is not a substitute for a real markdown app, but if your workflow lives in Google Docs and you just want to stop reaching for the toolbar, it does the job.
Whichever you choose, the files are plain text, so this is a reversible decision. Do not let picking the perfect app become a way of not writing.
For the wider field, see the best writing apps for iPad, the best note-taking apps, or the writing software guide.
A run through the markdown apps Bryan uses, plus the setting that lets Google Docs detect markdown as you type.
Obsidian, because it is free on every platform and you cannot waste money finding out whether markdown suits you. If you are on a Mac and want the simplest possible surface, iA Writer's 7-day trial is the other place to start.
No. Obsidian, MacDown and Visual Studio Code are all free and all handle markdown properly. You pay for polish, document management and one-click publishing to your site.
Yes, and this is the main argument for writing in markdown at all. Every file is plain text sitting in a folder on your computer or in iCloud. Any of these apps can open any of the others' files.
Yes, but it is off by default. Open Google Docs, go to Tools, then Preferences, and tick automatically detect markdown. It handles headings, bold, italics and bullet lists. Block quotes were unreliable when I tested it.
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