iA Writer is a minimalist markdown editor for Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad and Android. It launched in 2011, built by a Tokyo-based design studio, and its whole argument is subtraction: no ribbons, no rulers, no formatting bar, just text on a page.
I have used it extensively. For a long stretch it was the core of my writing workflow, and I wrote and filed freelance articles out of it on a Mac, an iPad and an iPhone. This review is about what it actually did for me, and the point at which I needed something else.
iA Writer is a text editor that encourages focus. You open it and you get a blank screen. That is the product.
It suits bloggers, freelance writers, content creators and anyone drafting short pieces who finds that Word or Google Docs invites them to fiddle with fonts instead of writing. If you are writing a book or a screenplay, it will disappoint you, and I will come back to why.
Verified against iA’s own pricing page on 21 August 2026:
| Platform | Price |
|---|---|
| Mac | $49.99, one-time |
| Windows | $29.99, one-time |
| iPhone and iPad | $49.99, one-time (App Store) |
| Android | Subscription |
There is a 7-day free trial with no credit card required. Purchases are one-time per platform, so buying it on Mac does not get you the iPhone version. That is worth knowing before you budget for it.
The price has gone up substantially since I first bought it. When I recorded the video below, the Mac app was $29. The comparison with Ulysses has changed as a result: Ulysses costs $39.99 a year, so iA Writer stops being the obviously cheaper option and becomes a bet that you will still be using it in two or three years.
Open the app and start typing. There is no setup.
The formatting happens through markdown, which takes about five minutes to learn. A hash makes an H1, two hashes make an H2, asterisks handle bold, italics and bullet lists, and square brackets plus parentheses make a link. The app ships with a cheat sheet, and you can hit the preview button at any point to see the formatted version.
That preview is the part that saved me the most time. I could write an article in markdown, preview it as it would appear on the web, and then export it as a Word file, PDF or HTML, or publish it straight to a WordPress site, a Ghost blog or Medium from inside the app. If you run one or two sites, that removes a whole logging-in-and-pasting step from the process.
Two features I used constantly.
Typewriter mode pins the line you are writing to the middle of the screen instead of letting the cursor march down towards the bottom. On a 27-inch monitor that is the difference between comfortable and irritating.
Focus mode blurs everything except the sentence or paragraph you are currently on. It is genuinely useful for a first draft, when the temptation is to keep scrolling up and editing what you already wrote.
iA Writer has two self-editing tools that sit out of the way until you want them.
Syntax highlighting marks up parts of speech. Turn on adjectives only and the app highlights every adjective in the piece so you can decide which ones to cut. You can do the same with nouns, verbs, adverbs and conjunctions. It is a similar idea to Hemingway App.
Style check flags fillers, clichés and redundancies against the app’s own dictionary. It is not as capable as a dedicated grammar checker, and it will not rewrite a sentence for you, but it is there when you want a quick pass.
Everything you write is a plain text file, and the app’s library sits on top of them. Files sync through iCloud or Dropbox, and you can tag pieces with hashtags that do not export with the document. Save a hashtag as a search and it becomes a smart folder in the sidebar.
I used a simple system of tags for work in progress, and for a folder of freelance articles it worked well.
The document library is the honest weakness.
For short-form writing it is fine. Search or hashtags will find any article in seconds. But if you are writing something long, a book with chapters, you end up with a flat pile of files and no clean way to tell a chapter from an article from a note without inventing your own tagging scheme. There is no outline of the whole project.
That is not a flaw so much as a boundary. Ulysses solves it with groups and subgroups. Scrivener solves it with a binder and index cards you can drag around. iA Writer does not try, and if you need it, you need a different app.
The second boundary is screenwriting. There are no templates or formatting tools for it here at all.
This is where I liked it most.
The iPad app replicates the desktop experience, keyboard shortcuts included, and syncs over iCloud or Dropbox. Paired with a keyboard, an iPad running iA Writer is a portable writing setup with nothing to distract you and nothing to configure. It is a calmer thing to work on than the same app on a large monitor. If I am writing away from my desk, this is still the setup I reach for, ahead of Google Docs or Word.
You can export from the mobile app to Medium, Ghost or WordPress, or out to .doc, .rtf or PDF.
For the wider field, see my roundup of the best writing apps for iPad, and if you are shopping for the keyboard half of that setup, the best keyboards for writers.
I used iA Writer as my main writing app for years as a freelance writer, drafting and filing articles to editors and publishing posts to my own WordPress and Ghost sites. I also tested it on a book-length project, which is where I found the library limits described above. I have used it on Mac, iPad and iPhone.
iA Writer is a good buy if you write short-form pieces, you want to own your software rather than rent it, and you like the idea of your files being plain text you can open in anything for the rest of your life.
It is excellent for freelance writing, and excellent on an iPad. It is not the app for a book, and at $49.99 on Mac it is no longer the budget option it once was, so the case for it now rests on the one-time purchase rather than on the headline price.
If you want to compare it against the rest of the field, start with the best markdown editors or the wider writing software guide.
A screen-share walkthrough of iA Writer: markdown, typewriter and focus modes, the syntax and style checks, and where the document library runs out of road.
If you write short-form pieces and you want the app to disappear while you work, yes. You buy it once per platform and own it, which over a few years works out cheaper than a subscription writing app. If you are writing a book or a screenplay, look at Scrivener or Ulysses instead.
Yes. iA offers a 7-day free trial with no credit card required, per its pricing page as of August 2026.
Ulysses is the closest comparison on Apple hardware and adds much stronger document management, at the cost of a subscription. Byword is a cheaper, simpler markdown editor for Mac. Scrivener is the alternative if you need to manage a book rather than a folder of articles.
Yes, and it takes about five or ten minutes. Hashes make headings, asterisks make bold and italics and bullet lists, square brackets and parentheses make links. iA Writer ships with a cheat sheet.
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