Although we’d love to tell you there is one best writing app to rule them all, it simply isn’t true. The best writing app is the one that helps you with the unique challenges of whatever you’re writing. Do you need an app that has scene cards for mapping out a screenplay, one that reduces distractions, or one that can publish directly to a website? We’ve been reviewing writing apps for over a decade, so you can trust that we can help you get words down on the page. Final Draft (for script writing), Scrivener (for structured writing), and Ulysses (for distraction-free writing) are our current Editors’ Choice winners, but one of the other apps on our list might speak to you better. Check out our in-depth reviews of each pick below, along with what you need to know to choose the best one for your needs.
Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
EDITORS’ NOTE
January 16, 2026: With this update, our lineup of recommended writing apps remains unchanged. We have vetted the existing picks for currency and availability.
- Well-tailored for screenwriters
- Powerful tools for both writing scenes and crafting the larger story
- Plenty of view options
- Offers a variety of industry-standard templates
- Good collaboration features
- Best autosave option is once every three minutes
- Expensive
Final Draft is the industry standard for professionals who write or make movies and television shows. It’s a mature product with lots of viewing options and tools for plotting out your entire story.
Final Draft is the writing software to choose if you are in the screenwriting business. It has all the features you need to get the script right from both the story and technical perspectives. Final Draft also has templates for other kinds of writing, such as graphic novels.
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Final Draft Review
- Plentiful tools for writing and revising
- Ample collection of templates
- Competitive price
- Multiple installs allowed
- Available for Mac, Windows, and iOS
- No web app
- No native collaboration features
Scrivener is the best writing app on the market for long-form works. It gives you everything you need to research, compose, reorganize, and edit your writing for a low, one-time price. The app provides lots of templates to help you get started, and granular toolbars are never far away.
Scrivener is ideal for writing novels, nonfiction books, dissertations, and other long-form works. It’s affordable enough for professionals and aspiring professionals alike. This is also the app to get if you like a lot of structure.
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Scrivener Review
Best for Distraction-Free Writing
Ulysses
- Beautiful and tidy interface
- Ample features
- Excellent selection of views and minimalist writing modes
- Tracks writing goals
- Can publish directly to Medium and WordPress
- Available only on Apple devices
- Expensive subscription-only pricing
If you’re looking for a distraction-free writing environment that doesn’t skimp on features, Ulysses is the app to get. It pares down, eliminates, or hides menu options to keep the interface simple and minimal. Ulysses can even track writing goals and publish content directly to Medium and WordPress.
Ulysses is the best writing app if you don’t want to deal with the bloated menus of a traditional word processor. Just keep in mind that it doesn’t coach you through your draft the way some other writing apps do and that it’s available only on Apple devices.
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Ulysses Review
Best for Screenwriting on a Budget
Fade In
- Rich with features, including real-time collaboration
- Competitively priced as a one-time fee with free upgrades
- Supports industry-standard formatting conventions
- Autosaves every two minutes at best
- PDF import tool could use improvements
Fade In is a capable screenwriting app with most of the features scriptwriters need. It’s an excellent and more affordable alternative to Final Draft, with real-time collaboration features and support for industry-standard formatting conventions.
Fade In’s reasonable, one-time price makes it a top choice for aspiring screenwriters. You don’t lose out on too much compared with Final Draft, either.
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Fade In Review
- Clean, clear interface
- Includes tools for storyboarding, outlining, character sheets
- Good exporting and importing options
- No collaboration features
- Mediocre auto-save functionality
- Few templates
- Apple-only
Storyist is a dedicated writing app for Apple devices that has the power of a word processor. It has formatting options galore, including style sheets, which help writers create works with consistent formatting.
Storyist gives long-form writers all the tools they need, including a corkboard view and folders for plot notes and character development. Its one-time price is reasonable, too.
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Storyist Review
- Distraction-free design
- Supports Markdown formatting
- Can export directly to Medium and WordPress
- Inexpensive
- No templates
- Few tools for organizing and arranging files
Taking minimalism to the extreme, iA Writer may have the fewest built-in distractions of any writing app. It’s relatively inexpensive, too.
iA Writer is an excellent choice for bloggers and short-form writers. It’s also a good choice if you prefer to write in Markdown language.
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iA Writer Review
- Attractive and organized interface
- Includes helpful sample scripts
- Available for macOS and Windows
- No co-authoring support
- Lacks beat boards, daily writing goals, and other features
- No mobile apps
Script Studio’s standout feature is its inclusion of popular movie scripts you can use as models for your own. The app has a decent set of features for helping you draft, plot, organize, and write, too.
Script Studio is best for screenplay and teleplay writers (script is in its name, after all), but you can also use it to compose novels and other works. Its one-time price is somewhat high, but you might prefer that to paying a subscription fee.
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Script Studio Review
Best for Scene-Based Writing
yWriter
- Free for desktop users
- Highly structured interface
- Rich tools for story and character development
- Plentiful stats
- Doesn’t include screenwriting tools or any default templates
- macOS version in still in beta
- No collaboration options
yWriter is unique because it encourages you to compose small scenes of a novel rather than chapters because the former are more manageable. It also has dozens of places to store details about your work and compiles all this metadata into useful charts and tables.
If you crave organization and data about your work, the free and stats-heavy yWriter app is the choice. It’s available for Windows and mobile platforms but not macOS.
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yWriter Review
Best for Web-Based Novel Writing
Novelize
- Platform-independent web app
- Syncs and backs up your work effortlessly
- Minimal learning curve
- Offers useful tools for novelists
- Depends on third-party cloud storage
- No offline functionality
- No dedicated mobile apps
- Does not support collaboration or co-authoring
- Pricey
Novelize is one of the few writing apps that works on the web. It’s easy to use and capable enough to handle young adult series, novellas, and other simple pieces with plenty of styling tools.
Novelize is for creative writers who specifically don’t want downloadable writing software and are working on short to medium-length works. Just be prepared to pay a pricey monthly or annual subscription fee.
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Novelize Review
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The Best Writing Apps for 2026
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Buying Guide: The Best Writing Apps for 2026
How Much Do Writing Apps Cost?
Apps for writers tend to be less expensive than other kinds of software. Many charge a one-time fee, though a few require a subscription. In addition to the cost of the desktop app, you should factor in a potential fee for the service’s mobile app, which often costs extra.
We include three types of writing software here:
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Low-cost, lightweight apps that cost around $30 (you can find cheaper ones, but they tend not to be very good).
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Writing apps for long-form writers (such as book authors) that cost between $50 and $75 for a perpetual license or between $50 and $60 per year as a subscription.
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Screenwriting software that costs anywhere between $70 and $250 for a perpetual license.
Some writing apps include storage, but many don’t. To make sure you never lose your work, you should back up your work early and often. A cloud storage service like Dropbox or iCloud is often the most convenient solution. The good news is that pages of text don’t take up much space, so you might be fine with whatever free allotment of storage you already have. Just keep in mind that you might eventually have to pay for more storage.
Final Draft (Credit: Final Draft/PCMag)
What’s the Best App for Screenwriting?
As a genre, screenwriting has unique requirements. Scripts for movies, television, and the stage must clearly distinguish between action, scene descriptions, spoken dialogue, and so forth. Scripts do this through formatting. For example, lines of dialogue are always centered on the page, while the name of the character who speaks them is always centered and in all caps directly above the lines. The formatting rules are standard so that all the people involved in creating the final product—actors, directors, editors, and film crews, among others—can understand the script and do their jobs.
Because the formatting for screenwriting is exceedingly precise, it helps tremendously when a writing app applies the correct formatting automatically. Most professional screenwriters use Final Draft, which is the industry standard. In addition to suggesting the correct formatting, Final Draft has a beat board where you can map out the beats of your story and view them on a timeline above your script as you write.
Fade In is a great, low-cost alternative to Final Draft, while Script Studio offers sample scripts to help you structure your work.
Scrivener (Credit: Literature and Latte)
What’s the Best Writing App for Long-Form Works?
Book authors spend a lot of time simply organizing their manuscripts. Whether it’s for fiction or nonfiction works, many authors put an incredible amount of effort into outlining their chapters and sections, moving them around, and trying to structure everything into one cohesive piece. The same can be said for other types of long-form works, such as dissertations, graphic novels, and so forth.
We have two favorite apps for long-form writers. One is Scrivener, which has templates and tools for a variety of genres and forms. The other is Ulysses, which is better if toolbars, menus, and options tend to get in your way; it has a great distraction-free mode.
Ulysses (Credit: Ulysses)
Writing for Medium, WordPress Blogs, and More
Book authors and screenwriters aren’t the only types of writers, of course. Many writers create shorter pieces that they publish directly online, often without ever passing through the hands of an editor, agent, publisher, or movie producer. If you’re publishing on Medium or WordPress, it’s handy to have a writing app that can seamlessly export your work to those platforms.
Ulysses and iA Writer both integrate with Medium and WordPress. Like Ulysses, iA Writer is a distraction-free writing app, but it’s much more pared-down. It has some neat functions, such as text transclusion, which allows you to use inline commands to import and order sections, files, and images. In other words, you can make a document that essentially says, “Pull in all the text from this file, then place this image after it, and then pull in the text of this other file.” Using this method, the text of your document could be all of four sentences long and yet produce a final piece that, when exported, is 25 pages long.
Which Distraction-Free Apps Support Markdown?
If you’re after minimalism, getting an app with a distraction-free mode or view is a great place to start. You may also want to write in Markdown language.
Recommended by Our Editors
Markdown is a lightweight set of codes that you use to apply formatting instead of using the rich-text formatting options that are common in word processors. If you’ve ever typed asterisks or double asterisks (depending on which app you’re using) around a word to make it bold like this, that’s Markdown. The idea is that by removing menu options and toolbars for formatting, you can simply focus on writing.
Ulysses, iA Writer, and Byword all support Markdown natively and focus on delivering a distraction-free interface. A few other apps allow you to write in Markdown, but they don’t necessarily emphasize it or minimize other kinds of interface elements.
Some writers need a little bit of help to make their words flow or to smooth out word choice when they aren’t native speakers of the language. In such instances, tools such as Hemingway Editor (a tool that steers you toward brevity), AI keyboards, or Grammarly might help. Grammarly, in particular, is popular among non-native English speakers because it’s very good at hunting down typos and repetitive phrases. It also makes suggestions for word choices that might not be quite right.
Grammarly isn’t a writer’s app in the sense that the other apps on this list are, since it doesn’t have any tools for organizing your writing or ideas. But you can use it in tandem with another writing app, including Final Draft. If your app of choice doesn’t integrate directly with Grammarly, you can use the Grammarly browser extension for web-based tools.
Alternatives to Writing Apps
If you decide that a dedicated writing tool just isn’t for you and that you prefer a plain old word processor, see our list of the top office suites. Microsoft Word is the industry standard because of its advanced features and exceptional reliability, while the online-focused Google Docs might appeal more for collaboration.
