10 Mac Writing Apps That Will Level Up Your Writing
Back in the early '90s, a study was conducted on how personal computing machines would impact student writing. On IBM, 50% of students produced "complex sentences" compared to Macintosh's 30%. In an analysis of the study, The San Jose Mercury News said, "The same icons, mouse, fonts, and graphics that make the [Macintosh] easy to use may well turn off the brain's creative-writing abilities" (via Human Progress). How ironic then that today's Mac is widely regarded as the machine for writing. Author J.K. Rowling claimed the "MacBook Air changed my life," and Stephen King is known to have used both the iMac and the MacBook Pro to craft some of his legendary works. Chris Cleave — author of "Gold" — says it plainly: "I use a MacBook... same as every other writer."
It's impossible to choose just one reason writers love working on a Mac, so take your pick. They have lots of built-in features to help you to be more productive, and 97% of office users who make the switch claim that they feel like they get more done. It has surprisingly good voice dictation out of the box, a single-button "Do Not Disturb," and unparalleled battery life so there's no low-battery anxiety getting in the way of your next great American novel. But where the Mac really smashes the competition is with its many writer-focused software suites. If you're still in search of that end-game writing daily driver, then let us present some great options to choose from.
Ulysses
Ulysses easily takes the cake as Mac's best writing app for any project of any size. It's a Markdown editor — Markdown being a formatting language you should use instead of Microsoft Word's RTF – so you can do virtually everything without your fingers leaving the keyboard. Writing, thanks to Ulysses' clean interface and Markdown formatting, is simple and distraction-free, without skimping on features like letting you open documents side-by-side. Everything — including research material like images — can be kept within the program, and it offers intuitive ways to cut up documents, merge them together, and bundle them into relevant groups. You can organize projects into nested folder structures and sync them via iCloud. Periodic, automatic backups even let you go back and restore previous document versions straight from the app.
That's just the beginning. Ulysses helps you polish up your prose with a proofreader, and export it in one click to your blog or your editor. It also has built-in goal tracking, to help you monitor your growing word count and better meet your deadlines. We could honestly write a dozen articles and still fail to chart the depths of Ulysses' features — which makes the trim 40 MB size all the more surprising. Ulysses is available only on Apple devices and costs $39.99 per year. It's not cheap, but it does support Ulysses' continued development, which has been going strong since 2003.
Scrivener
For those with devices outside the Apple ecosystem — and who are tired of feeling like everything charges a subscription fee — Scrivener is a breath of fresh air. You pay $59.99 one time and keep that version for life with all its future updates. Scrivener is a rich text editor, so unlike Ulysses, you're not forced to use Markdown if you find it unsightly. It also has much of the same functionality as Ulysses, letting you organize large projects like manuscripts into "ring binders" of nested folders and documents that you can stitch together or break up as needed. It even has a couple unique features, like a corkboard for planning and organization.
As wonderful as Scrivener can be, it's got one very noteworthy downside: cloud syncing issues. Scrivener has no built-in syncing feature, instead requiring you to do so via your own cloud storage service. Sadly, Scrivener's non-typical file structure doesn't play nice with most cloud clients. The devs are very open about the fact that using OneDrive, Box, Google Drive, and iCloud could cause data loss. Dropbox is the only recommended option, and even then you have to use it in a very specific way — speaking from personal experience, this still leads to frequent file corruption. We only recommend Scrivener for those who keep their files on a flash drive or a single computer.
Bear
One of the best Mac notetaking apps is Bear. The app has three main goals: to be lightweight and minimalist, beautiful, and support Markdown. It also comes with a unique "Hide Markdown" feature so you get the benefits without even knowing it's there. Despite being a primarily note-taking app, Bear is excellent for writers working on smaller projects who want a clean, simple interface. It uses an uncommon note organization feature — tags — ideal for those who want to write first and organize later. All you have to do is create a hashtag with a keyword anywhere in the document. That tag then appears in the sidebar and groups all notes with it, effectively creating a "folder" in Bear. You can even create nested tags (the Bear version of subfolders) for deeper organization.
Bear may not be for power users who require the deep customization and functionality of Ulysses and Scrivener, but it punches above its weight with its feature set. It lets you add tables and footnotes, insert all kinds of attachments, clip web pages, provide link previews, and more. The pro version lets you sync via iCloud, get access to more themes, and even search inside PDFs for text. Bear will likely be a bit pricey for some at $29.99 a year, but thankfully the free version — something Ulysses and Scrivener lack — is plenty capable. The only major downside we can think of is that there's no folder-only alternative to the tag organization feature.
UpNote
Like Bear, UpNote is a notetaking app with enough features to easily make it a writer's cornerstone, and it's much cheaper than the competition – $0.99 per month or $29.99 for life. It's very similar to Bear with a focus on simplicity while still offering nested notebooks and folders for those who weren't sold on Bear's tag system. The note editor window works with Markdown and supports practically any text editing function: attachments, code blocks, text highlighting, you name it. Writers will especially love the automatically enabled file syncing, focus mode, and version history, among other things. There are a handful of features you won't find on other apps in this list, such as a sticky note window that always stays on top and collapsible lists.
Where UpNote really smokes the competition is its cross-platform compatibility. You can find it on all your Apple devices, plus Windows, Android, and Linux. That said, there are some downsides. There is no support for external cloud services, which could be problematic since UpNote does not and will not support end-to-end encryption — a must-have feature in things like encrypted messaging apps that makes it virtually impossible for unauthorized people to read your notes. Further, UpNote has potential sustainability concerns due to its uncharacteristically low price and lifetime plan for a live service. To be fair to the devs, they claim to have very lean operating costs and will raise prices and discontinue the lifetime subscription if necessary.
iA Writer
Every app on this list has some flavor of distraction-free writing mode, but none do it like iA Writer's marquee Focus Mode. It works by highlighting only the active sentence or paragraph you're working on. The philosophy, it seems, is to prevent writer procrastination, the sort where you compulsively proofread other sections of text after hitting writer's block. The app supports Markdown, too, so you can keep your hands on the keyboard as much as possible. Somewhat similar to Scrivener, iA Writer uses .txt files that you store in your regular documents folder, then organize and edit inside iA Writer — there are no proprietary file formats to hold your work hostage in a single app. iCloud is supported by default, but the app lets you source files from popular cloud storage providers like Dropbox and OneDrive.
iA Writer's features go plenty deep, same as Markdown apps like Ulysses and Bear, letting you customize all the typography bells and whistles you could want. And there's one new feature that's going to be incredibly useful in our AI-enabled world: authorship. In a nutshell, iA Writer Authorship grays out pasted-in text that originates from other writers or — importantly — from ChatGPT. Useful, since with OpenAI's next ChatGPT-5 release, it's going to become even more difficult for writers to remember what they wrote, and what was written by a bot. iA Writer is a one-time, $49.99 purchase on Mac, and supports all other major platforms.
Cold Turkey Writer
iA Writer does an admirable job of keeping you on track, but at the end of the day, you can easily exit fullscreen and get sucked into internet distractions. Short of unplugging your router, there's not much you can do to prevent that, which is where Cold Turkey Writer comes to your aid. It's a sister app to Cold Turkey Blocker, a program capable of denying you access to specific web pages and apps during focus sessions. Cold Turkey Writer takes this approach one step further. Once opened and enabled, it prevents you from leaving the editor until a certain amount of time has elapsed, or you've written a certain number of words.
If you trust yourself not to get distracted enough to exit the app, but need something that stops you from casually glancing at Dock or Menu bar notifications, you can use it as the ultimate distraction-free editor without setting a time limit or word count. It's a small, portable executable file you can run off a thumbstick, and the free version gives you all the most important functionality with no strings attached. Getting Pro for $9.00 unlocks "productivity hacks," like the option to disable the backspace and arrow keys to prevent yourself from compulsive editing. Pro also gives you access to dark mode, extra formatting options, and background soundtracks. Writer saves your work to a .txt file for you to do with what you will when finished.
Drafts
The Drafts app takes the idea of managing local .txt files seen in Scrivener and iA Writer and jacks it up to eleven. It describes itself as a "launching-off point for text," or a "Swiss Army knife for text" rather than a text editor. Think of it as an overlay that grabs text from all your other apps so you can edit and organize it from a single location. It pulls from your email, your messages, and even your tweets, and lets you organize it all via Tags, Flags, or the built-in Archive. Similar to Bear, there's a "write first, organize later" mentality at play here. For writers who have hands in all sorts of cookie jars — that is, all sorts of apps – Drafts may be the thing you've been looking for.
All this power may seem like it comes at a steep price, but that's where Drafts defies your expectations: it's totally free on Mac, iPhone, iPad, and even watchOS. Subscribing to Drafts Pro for $19.99 a year unlocks the feature set even further. You'll be able to customize actions and integrations with third-party apps, change themes and syntax, automate some of your processes, and set up a special Drafts email address to send text directly to the application. Our only complaint about Drafts is that there's a bit of a learning curve for new users.
Manuskript
So far, every app we've mentioned is either paid or has some of its best features locked behind a paywall. A brief, weeklong trial may not be enough for someone who wants to give novel writing a shot — especially those on a tight budget. Manuskript mimics the functionality of greats like Ulysses and Scrivener for the low, low price of $0.00, and includes many features they don't. In addition to the same folder organization and distraction-free editor mode common to Mac writing apps, Manuskript adds things like character-building sheets, plot outlines, a world-building item tracker, and a word frequency analyzer to avoid overusing certain words. Manuskript markets itself toward fiction writers, particularly planners rather than pantsers. It incorporates the "snowflake method" that allows writers to additively build up small ideas into a full-blown novel.
The app isn't just free, it's open-source, letting you use, modify, and distribute the code if you so choose. That said, there are some caveats. Manuskript, per its own words, is in the "early development stages." The devs recommend creating frequent backups since it's unstable, beta software — though you should always back up your Mac to iCloud as a matter of principle. If you use Manuskript and want it to continue improving, please donate to the developer.
iWriter Pro
Not to be confused with iA Writer, iWriter Pro is yet another Markdown-focused app — seeing a theme here? This app aims for a balance between simplicity and power in a subscription-free package. Same as Scrivener and iA Writer, iWriter Pro uses your local on-device .txt and .md files,and syncs them via iCloud. Other cloud storage services work too, but be warned that you may lose out on some iCloud-specific functionality. iWriter Pro includes many expected features such as Markdown syntax highlighting, typewriter mode, and split-view mode for working on two files at once. Many of the baseline backend components seen in competitors are found here, too, such as autosave and file versioning. Preview mode appears as a split screen inside the text editor, unlike most on this list, so you can see a more aesthetically pleasing view of your Markdown document as you write without having to open a separate export window.
Long story short, iWriter Pro keeps things clean and uncluttered without shortchanging you on the most important fare. It's one of the cheapest non-subscription options on this list at $9.99 for macOS. For an extra $2.99, you can get iWriter on your iPhone and iPad to take that writing on the go — though it appears there have been no updates for the latter two platforms since September 2021.
Obsidian
Obsidian has been making waves primarily among notetakers, but we think it offers something special to writers — especially fiction authors. Big shots like Brandon Sanderson, who need to keep track of dozens of characters and world-building details, often rely on a personal Wiki as their fictional world's concept database. Wikis take time to get used to, but Obsidian takes far less. The basic principle underpinning every aspect of the app is that you can link text in one document to other notes simply by adding double square brackets. It's that simple. Over time, as you link more and more notes together, you begin to create "Maps of Content" or MOCs. Then, you can see a visual representation (not unlike neurons in the brain, hence Obsidian's marketing about being your "second brain") and better understand how the information links together.
For writers who need to link character descriptions to character sheets, items to worldbuilding sheets, and lingo to fictional slang lists, Obsidian is a game-changer. It could, if you're willing to invest the time, be your Wiki and writing app all in one. Obsidian is free on Mac. Paying for the Sync version lets you sync it cross-platform for $8 a month. The app supports syncing via your preferred cloud storage, such as iCloud, but you'll have to set that up yourself.
How we chose the apps for this list
The primary deciding factor for this list was how strongly each app supports the Mac platform, with bonus points for cross-platform options on iPad and iOS. The writer has personal experience with many of these choices and gave special preference to the ones that proved to be the most intuitive and capable of delivering on their marketing promises. Markdown was also given special consideration, as it's a vital tool for transferring your writing to other platforms and easily exporting to other formats.
At SlashGear, we believe in monetarily supporting developers to keep their projects alive in the long term. That said, we tried to keep a balance between free, one-time payment, and subscription options to avoid alienating readers on tighter budgets. This list is not comprehensive, and many more apps exist — or will exist — that may better scratch your writing itch than these.