Filter & Compare Writing Software
Filter verified writing, Markdown, note-taking, and book formatting tools by platform, export format, and multi-year cost. Everything runs in your browser.
What are you writing?
Platform
Price & Billing Model
Export Format & Offline
Book Writing & Long-Form
Pricing: $59.99 one-time (macOS/Windows), $23.99 (iOS), $50.99 (Educational)
Binder, corkboard, and split-screen research built for 80,000+ word manuscripts. One-time license per desktop platform with a 30-day free trial of actual use days.
Book Writing & Long-Form
Pricing: $39.99/yr or $5.99/mo
Distraction-free Markdown studio for Mac, iPad, and iPhone with built-in iCloud sync, writing goals, and direct publishing to WordPress, Ghost, and Medium.
Book Formatting & Publishing
Pricing: $199.99 (Ebooks) / $249.99 (Press) one-time
Mac-native book layout tool that imports DOCX manuscripts and generates store-ready EPUB files and print-ready PDF interiors. Free to preview; pay once to export.
Book Formatting & Publishing
Pricing: $147 one-time
Cross-platform book writing and formatting app that runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chromebook with offline support and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Markdown & Note-Taking
Pricing: $49.99 (Mac/iOS), $29.99 (Windows) one-time
Plain-text Markdown editor with Focus Mode, syntax highlighting for weak verbs and cliches, and AI authorship tracking. Sold as a one-time purchase on desktop and iOS.
Markdown & Note-Taking
Pricing: Free (optional Sync $4/mo annual or $5/mo)
Local-first Markdown knowledge base with bidirectional linking, graph view, and plugins. Free without limits for personal and work use on local vaults.
Book Writing & Long-Form
Pricing: Free core app (optional add-ons from $4.99/mo)
Browser-based book writing and formatting workspace that exports clean EPUB and print-ready PDF files at zero cost, with optional paid planning boards.
Editing & Grammar
Pricing: Free (500-word limit); Premium $120/yr or $30/mo
Long-form style, pacing, and grammar checker with 25+ manuscript reports and direct Scrivener integration. Free tier checks up to 500 words at a time.
Editing & Grammar
Pricing: Free basic; Pro $144/yr ($12/mo annual) or $30/mo
Real-time grammar, spelling, and tone assistant across browsers, desktop apps, and mobile keyboards. Free tier covers core correctness; Pro unlocks full-sentence rewrites.
Editing & Grammar
Pricing: Free web editor; Desktop $19.99 one-time; Plus $120/yr
Highlights dense sentences, passive voice, and adverbs with an instant grade-level readability score. Free in any browser, or $19.99 once for the offline Mac and Windows app.
Book Writing & Long-Form
Pricing: Free
Real-time collaborative word processor with commenting, Suggesting mode, document tabs, and automatic cloud revision history.
Book Writing & Long-Form
Pricing: Free (open source)
Full-featured open-source desktop word processor with paragraph styles, master documents, and native DOCX, EPUB, and PDF export without subscriptions.
Book Writing & Long-Form
Pricing: Free (open source)
Full-screen distraction-free drafting tool that hides toolbars until you move your mouse to the edge, complete with daily word-count goals and timers.
Book Writing & Long-Form
Pricing: Free (included with Mac, iPad, and iPhone)
Pre-installed Apple word processor and page layout app with clean book templates, automatic iCloud sync, and direct EPUB export for Apple Books.
Markdown & Note-Taking
Pricing: Free local notes; Pro $29.99/yr or $2.99/mo
Fast Apple-native Markdown note app using nested hashtag organization. Free for local writing and TXT/Markdown export; Bear Pro adds iCloud sync and DOCX/EPUB/PDF export.
Markdown & Note-Taking
Pricing: Free for individuals (paid team plans optional)
All-in-one workspace combining relational databases, wikis, and block-based writing pages for story bibles, editorial calendars, and research.
Markdown & Note-Taking
Pricing: Free tier (limited notes/devices); paid plans optional
Research clipper and notebook manager with OCR search inside scanned PDFs and images. Best used as a digital filing cabinet alongside a dedicated manuscript editor.
Quick Drafting & Collaboration
Pricing: Free (included with Dropbox account)
Minimalist collaborative document workspace with clean formatting, inline tasks, and real-time co-authoring for teams already using Dropbox.
Quick Drafting & Collaboration
Pricing: Free (included with Windows)
Instant-launch plain-text editor built into every Windows PC with tabs, dark mode, and zero formatting distractions for quick scratchpad drafting.
Multi-year cost figures use each tool's primary individual license or annual plan in USD. Everything runs in your browser over our verified software dataset.
Bryan Collins walks through how he writes and publishes articles in Ulysses, and how groups, keywords and material sheets hold a book together.
Ulysses is a minimalist, distraction-free writing app for Mac, iPad and iPhone. It was released in 2011 and won an Apple Design Award, and it is the app I write and publish most of my articles from.
I have used it to write and publish dozens of articles to WordPress sites, a Ghost blog and Medium, and to organise chapters for a book. This review covers what it does, what it costs now, and the two groups of writers I would point somewhere else.
Verified against the Ulysses pricing page and its App Store listing on 21 August 2026:
One subscription covers Ulysses on all your Macs, iPads and iPhones. Local pricing varies by region. There is reduced student pricing too, though Ulysses does not state the billing period for it, so check before you sign up.
This is the app’s most argued-about feature. You are renting it, and if you stop paying you lose the app. The counter-argument is that your writing is plain text sitting in iCloud, so you can walk away with all of it and open it in any other markdown editor. That is genuinely true, and it is why I am comfortable paying.
If a subscription is a dealbreaker, iA Writer is the closest alternative and is a one-time purchase per platform. If you want free, Google Docs and Apple Pages will get the words down.
Ulysses runs on Mac, iPad and iPhone. Windows and Android writers are out of luck.
The upside of that constraint is a tightly built app that feels native and gets consistent attention from its developers. The downside is obvious and there is no way around it. If you are on Windows, stop reading and look at markdown editors that run everywhere instead.
Open the app, press command-N for a new sheet, start typing.
Ulysses recognises markdown, so you format with characters rather than menus: hashes for headings, asterisks for bold and italics, brackets for links. It takes five or ten minutes to learn and the app has a cheat sheet.
Hit preview and you see the formatted version. You can preview the same piece as a web article, a PDF, a .docx, an ePub or plain HTML, which matters if you are switching between blogging and book work.
Three things I use every day:
There is also a notes field, and a markdown comment syntax, for the reminders you want in the draft but not in the published version. I use it to leave myself markers like “image goes here” that never make it to the site.
This is the feature that made Ulysses stick for me.
I connect Ulysses to WordPress, to Ghost and to Medium. When an article is finished I hit publish and it goes to the site as a draft, formatted, without me logging into anything. Over a few hundred articles that saves a serious amount of time and removes the pasting step where formatting usually goes wrong.
You can also export to text, HTML, ePub, PDF or DOCX, with a choice of export styles for each.
A minimalist writing app that could only hold one file would be a text editor. What you are paying for is the library.
Every piece is a sheet. Sheets go into groups, and groups can contain subgroups. If I am writing a book, I make a group for the book and subgroups for its parts or acts, then drag chapters between them. You can search across hundreds of sheets, or bring up a quick-search with command-O and jump straight to anything you have ever written in it.
Material sheets are the other half of this. They hold research, interview transcripts and reference material, and they are excluded from the final compile. I keep an interview transcript open in a second window beside the draft and pull quotes across. Think of it as a markdown-flavoured version of what Scrivener does.
You can also set writing goals per sheet or group, in words or characters, with deadlines.
For a wider comparison of note and research tools, see the best note-taking apps.
Two clear cases.
Screenwriters. There are no screenplay templates or industry formatting tools. You want Final Draft or something built for the job.
Anyone who collaborates in tracked changes. To send work to an editor you export a .docx or a Google Doc and mail it. There is no live commenting or co-editing. That extra step will put some people off entirely.
A third, softer case: if you specifically want to see your chapters as index cards and shuffle them with a mouse, Scrivener does that and Ulysses does not. It is hard to see how it could add that without stopping being a minimalist app.
I have used Ulysses for years as my main writing app. I wrote and published articles from it to WordPress and Ghost, drafted and organised book chapters in it, and kept research in material sheets alongside the drafts. I have used it on an iMac, an iPad and occasionally an iPhone, and tested syncing across all three over iCloud. I compared it against iA Writer, Scrivener and Apple Notes.
Ulysses is my markdown writing app of choice. It is not the cheapest, it is Apple only, and it is a subscription. What you get for that is a writing surface that disappears when you want it to, a library that can hold everything you have ever written, and one-click publishing to your site.
If you write for the web frequently and you are on Apple hardware, it is worth the money.
For more comparisons, see our best writing apps for iPad, best markdown editors, or the complete writing software hub.
$5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, covering Ulysses on all your Macs, iPads and iPhones. Verified on the Ulysses pricing page and its App Store listing on 21 August 2026. Ulysses also offers reduced student pricing; the billing period on that rate is not stated on its pricing page, so check it directly.
They serve different writers. Scrivener is a rich text editor with deep structural tools, an index-card corkboard and a steeper learning curve. Ulysses is a markdown app that stays out of your way and publishes to the web at a click. If you dislike Scrivener's learning curve and you write for the web, Ulysses is the better fit.
No. Ulysses is Apple only: Mac, iPad and iPhone. If you are on Windows, iA Writer is the closest equivalent.
Yes. Sheets are your chapters, groups collect them, and subgroups let you build acts or parts. Material sheets hold research and interview transcripts and are excluded from the final export.
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