Top 14 Best Writing Apps For Windows & Mac OS (2025 Review)

This Tutorial Explores the Best Writing Apps With Features, Cost, and Comparison To Help you choose the Creative Writing App per your Preference:

Gone are the days when writing was merely a profession for journalists or novelists. Today, the Internet has opened doors to writers for both novices and experts in making a living out of publishing all sorts of content online. We are talking here about blogs, opinion pieces, business writing and so much more that have found a new pathway in a world driven by the content.

As such, the creators of the content have also found a new lease in life, an opportunity to earn both name and money with the help of their published content. Needless to say, content sells, and today you do not need a university degree in arts or writing to become a well-known blogger, novelist, or even an independent journalist.

What you do need, however, is the skill to write compelling content that can engage your audience. This is easier said than done. With the Internet being an open playing field, it is crowded with both established and aspiring writers online. Getting your work noticed amidst a sea of similar content is extremely challenging.

This challenge can only be overcome by being the best among your flock rather than being a decent writer. Thankfully, if you are a decent enough writer, a creative writing application or tool will do the rest to turn you into a great writer.

What is a Writing App or Tool?

A writing app is a tool, application, or technology that is powered by a powerful AI that assists in improving and enhancing the quality of your writing. Through its robust collection of features, a creative writing tool can improve a writer’s overall content by performing spelling checks, rectifying grammatical errors, and suggesting stylistic changes to make the overall content more engaging.

In this article, we will be looking at some of the most popular and best writing apps that the industry has to offer to writers today. We will go in-depth to learn of every individual tool feature, their best selling points, their issues if any, and what they will cost you. Ultimately, our goal is to make your decision-making process a tad bit easier.

After reading our article, you will be able to settle on a writing tool of your preference without any hassle.

List of Creative Writing Apps

1. ProWritingAid
2. Grammarly
3. Reedsy
4. Squibler
5. Scrivener
6. Ulysses
7. Evernote Web
8. Microsoft Word
9. iA Writer
10. Google Docs
11. Final Draft
12. Now Novel
13. A Soft Murmur
14. Freedom
15. Setapp

Comparing Writing Apps for Windows & Mac

Best Writing apps review in detail.

#1) ProWritingAid

Best for long-form writers trying to perfect their writing style.

ProWritingAid comes very close, next to Grammarly when it comes to grammar/editing tools. Unlike Grammarly, it generates a whopping 25 reports to analyze your content. The suggestions it highlights, are more in-line with improving the overall flow of your written prose than it is to highlight individual errors and mistakes.

This is precisely why we recommend this tool to long-form content writers who want to improve the style of their content and make it more compelling to readers.

It analyses your content based on clarity, redundancies, readability and so much more. However, the features it provides can be a bit overwhelming for novice users. Its user interface is also pretty jarring and confusing to use.

Features:

• Grammar checker
• Spell checker
• Plagiarism checker
• Dictionary/Thesaurus
• Text editor
• Style check

Verdict: We recommend ProWritingAid as a grammar-checking tool for long-form content writers. It is comparatively way more affordable than Grammarly and provides more features than its counterpart. However, the absence of its mobile app does stick out like a sore thumb.

Price: 14-day free trial, the paid version is categorized as follows: $20 per month, $79 per year, $299 lifetime.

#2) Grammarly

Best for performing grammar and spelling checks for bloggers and writers of short-form content.

Boasting of over 10 million active users as of today, Grammarly is perhaps one of the most widely used writing apps in circulation today. One look at its features and it is not difficult to find out why that is the case. No other app provides the accuracy with which Grammarly performs grammar and spell checks.

Not just that, Grammarly also provides detailed reasoning behind the corrections it suggests.

It also offers writers a chance to set the tone of their writing concerning their audience and the nature of their content. Adding to that, it also offers a great tool to analyze your writing based on clarity, readability, and overused sentences. Grammarly is better for short-form content than it is for long-form content.

The only glaring issue we have with the app is its absence on Google Docs, which we hope won’t be an issue in the coming years.

Features:

• Grammar check
• Spell check
• Plagiarism checker
• Customize the setting to set the tone and intent of the writing
• Pop-up box to explain suggested changes
• Analyze writing for clarity, readability, and redundant phrases or words.

Verdict: Grammarly is the most popular writing app on this list that is compatible with almost all systems. Its grammar-checking abilities are probably its most appealing quality. We highly recommend it as a powerful grammar-checking and editing tool for short-form content writers.

Price: Free basic version, billed at $11.66 a month, ($139.95 to be precise when charged annually).

---

#3) Reedsy

Best for authors who are seeking a tool to edit their books before publishing.

Reedsy is perhaps best known as a publishing house that makes the process of self-publishing fairly convenient for novice authors. In this process, Reedsy also provides authors with a powerful book editing tool that allows writers to save time on editing their books, and save money on hiring a professional human editor.

Further reading =>> Best Book Writing Software

Armed with a stylish interface, and robust features that allow you to customize the look of your book, Reedsy offers a tool that is in many ways notches higher on quality than its paid counterparts. It comes with an advanced typesetting feature that saves you a lot of precious time on the formatting of books.

The book files that you create on this tool are clean and professional, thus uploading can be done instantaneously to any online eBook platform.

Features:

• Drag and Drop chapters
• Formatting and Typesetting
• Sleek User Interface
• Track Changes to check past versions of your book
• Export clean, professional files to any eBook retailer

Verdict: Reedsy’s book editor is a boon to creative writers and is hands down the best creative writing tool for authors when it comes to free writing tools available on the web. If you are an author with a book that needs editing than Reedsy can be the solution you need.

Price: Free Writing App

---

#4) Squibler

Best for authors and writers who want to write books with compelling prose, outline, and publish books.

Squibler provides an intuitive writing tool to satiate the creative geniuses of the story-telling world. It perhaps acts best as a productive hack that helps writers of novels and other books to write and produce content faster. Its ‘Note Cards’ feature allows writers to split their display screen, organize their work, and check its progress by creating note cards.

Writers can also store and filter their written material with the help of tags. It provides a convenient drag-and-drop feature to put elements in their respective places and create a clear-cut narrative structure to your prose. The books you create on Squibler can be easily shared with editors when you are done working on them.

Features:

• Drag and Drop editor
• Content management
• Notecards to track progress
• Tags to store and filter content

Verdict: Squibler is a great creative writing app, which works phenomenally to create and produce content faster for screenplay writers, authors, and other forms of fiction writers. If you have a story to tell, then you might want to use Squibler to help you tell it to the world.

Price: 30-day free trial, then billed at $9.99/month

---

#5) Scrivener

Best for long-form writers and novelists.

None of the lists for the writing app is complete without the mention of Scrivener, which is a widely renowned tool among novelists. Scrivener provides its users with a tool that is both comprehensive and sophisticated in its structure. It allows writers to choose a template that best fits the nature of their written content. Templates for essays, screenplays, or novels are all readily available on the tool.

The left-hand sidebar displays sections like notecards and other elements that can come in handy in your writing. You also get to track the progress of your content while creating material such as front and back matter to personalize your work.

Features:

• Outline and Publish long-form written content
• A wide gallery of templates for writing
• Notecards
• Track the progress of content and research

Verdict: Scrivener masquerades as a great writing app that was designed to cater to novelists and other such creators of long-form content. Its affordable price and sophisticated features make it a must-try tool for creative writers.

Price: 30 Days free trial, $45 license fee.

Further Reading => List of the TOP Screenwriting Courses of the Year

---

#6) Ulysses

Best for productive formatting of written content.

Ulysses is a standard writing app that has so much in common with Scrivener. It is designed to make the formatting of your work easier. It offers several informative tutorials alongside its pragmatic features.

It uses the ‘Markdown’ approach in the formatting of content, thus helping writers maintain the flow of their prose while writing. It offers all of the standard features you’ve come to expect from tools like this to organize your written content effectively. The one thing that might bother users of this tool is its reluctance to appear to outline friendly to its writers.

Features:

• Organize content with Keyword labels
• Intuitive sidebar to display your work
• Split view
• Track the progress of content

Verdict: Ulysses is a great app if formatting is the only thing you seek from an app. It is a fairly standard writing app that allows writers with a focused writing experience at a reasonably charged cost.

Price: $4.99/month, $39.99/year

---

#7) Evernote Web

Best for organizing and creating written content of all sorts.

Evernote is perhaps the best free writing app when it comes to catering to all kinds of multitalented writers. Its interface is home to oodles of creative templates that facilitate the creation of content like essays, novels, and simple classroom note-taking.

All of the templates we have mentioned above are available to writers for free. Apart from the templates, writers get to collaborate on writing projects with other users, chat with them, and even tag their content in specific categories. Its web clipper feature is its most appealing selling point, allowing users to save any excerpt from the web they might come across.

Features:

• Wide gallery of writing templates
• Collaborate with other users
• Chatbox to converse with other users
• Categorize content with tags
• Web clipper to save excerpts from the web

Verdict: Evernote is a great app to save both time and money and caters to all sorts of writers, whether they are bloggers or novelists. We highly recommend you try the tool for its sleek interface and pragmatic features.

Price: Free basic plan, $4.99/month premium plan.

---

#8) Microsoft Word

Recommended Read => How to Create A Flowchart In Word With Pictures

Who hasn’t heard of or tried this writing app for Windows in their lifetime? You have to be living under a rock to not have heard of Microsoft Word. Despite new writing apps in the market, MS Word has maintained its place with constant updates and advanced features for changing times.

An integral part of Microsoft Office, most users have known no other way to write on Windows except MS Word.

It is very simple to use and allows users an exhaustive list of features that include convenient formatting about font size, style, and color, easy alignment of pages, convenient bifurcation of content with headers, footers, page, and section breaks, use many clip arts, word art, and colors to make your work stand out, find and replace and a ton of other features that make it a mandatory tool to have for any writer.

Features:

• Basic Grammar and Spelling check
• Formatting and Font adjustments
• Insert an image, table, clip arts, stat, and graphical figures
• Find and Replace the word
• Bifurcate content according to headers, footers, page, and section breaks
• Highlight content
• Align content according to preference.

Verdict: MS Word has been around for what seems like forever. It has taken advantage of the changes in technology to remain relevant and is still the go-to choice as a legendary writing app.

Price: It comes included in the Microsoft Office app, Free trial for 30 days is available. Billed at $99.99/year for a family plan, $69.99/year for a personal plan, and $149.99 for a student plan.

---

#9) iA Writer

Best for writers who prefer simplicity in their writing tools.

iA Writer’s minimalistic design and easy-to-use interface are designed keeping only one salient goal in mind, a tool simply made to write. It also uses the Markdown formatting method that Ulysses employs, however, iA Writer is a much simpler tool to use than Ulysses.

Its major feature includes an upper-hand toolbar that facilitates the highlighting of speech like nouns, adverbs, adjectives, etc. However, its purpose is singular, i.e. to offer writers a tool that provides a distraction-free writing experience impervious to clutters.

Features:

• Clean interface
• Markdown formatting
• Dark mode to highlight speech

Verdict: iA Writer is meant for those writers who aren’t technically sound and simply want a tool that will allow them to write without any distractive features according to their own skills. There isn’t much more to the tool.

Price: Free 14-day trial, buy-in $29.99 for Mac, $19.99 for Windows.

---

#10) Final Draft

Best for budding screenwriters with a passion for writing film screenplays.

Writing screenplays is a whole new ball game altogether. The rules are different, and the structure is in sharp contrast to simple novel writing. As such, screenwriters need to be well versed with the principles and structure that go into creating a good screenplay. Final Draft allows writers to create clean screenplays conveniently.

It offers all the features you need to write a fantastic screenplay, this includes line-by-line formatting, content analysis, appropriate implementation of elements like dialogues, character names, and fade-ins and outs.

Its collaborative feature allows you to bring in editors with who you can work in real time. When the time comes to shop your screenplay, you can easily export your content into a shareable file.

Features:

• Screenplay element inserts
• Tweak Beat Board conveniently
• Collaborate with the team in real-time
• Content analysis

Verdict: Final Draft is the perfect tool for screenwriters, and can help them write convenient screenplays. However, it is way too expensive and cannot be purchased by struggling writers. For everybody else, it offers a tool that makes screenplay writing a fun endeavor.

Price: Free 30 day trial, @249.99 license fee.

---

#11) Google Docs

Best for web-based writing and secure storing of content online.

Recommended read => How To Strikethrough On Google Docs (A Step-by-Step Guide)

Google Docs, in many ways, is a fairly straightforward web-based writing tool with all the features you need to write content online. Similar to MS Word, you get to write content, format it, and store it in your personal Google Drive for future reference.

The reason why Google Docs is so popular is its ability to save your written content in a secure cloud database. With Google Docs, you can rest assured that your content is safe and impervious to loss and theft.

Apart from that, it is a fairly simple writing tool that enables writers to collaborate with other Google users to edit and post comments on the written content in real time. Perhaps its most appealing, and seldom-used feature is its ability to write content by using voice rather than traditional typing. Go ahead and give this fascinating feature a try.

Features:

• Use voice to type-in content
• Clear formatting
• Extensive list of fonts
• Suggestion mode
• Tag others in comments
• Bookmark
• Offline mode.

Verdict: Google Docs is a very simple web-based writing tool to use. If you have Google account then there is no harm in using google docs to write and store your content online. Its voice based typing feature is only like the icing on the cake.

Price: Free

---

#12) Now Novel

Best for novice and aspiring authors with a passion to publish their book.

Now Novel is a writing tool that caters specifically to fiction writers only. It provides writers with an intuitive writing tool that helps them write a fun, engaging plot for their book. With Now Novel, writers can create compelling characters, map out a story outline, and craft an engaging narrative by working in collaboration with coaches and critiques from the writer community.

Features:

• 400+ free articles on improving your craft of writing
• Coached and Free writing courses
• Scene builder to add structure
• Develop ideas and outline in the Story dashboard
• Coaching by expert authors and editors

Verdict: Now Novel is an educational app that helps in molding your fiction writing skills. Writers can get coached by expert authors and editors to sharpen their skills as an authors. We highly recommend this tool to those who want to learn the intricate details of novel writing.

Price: Billed at the basic plan of $149/year, coaching plan of $799/year, and coaching + plan of $1499/year.

---

#13) A Soft Murmur

Best for producing ambient sound to focus on writing.

A Soft Murmur is technically not a writing app, but it does help in creating a distraction-free environment, which is needed when embarking on a creative journey. Writing, in particular, is a vocation that requires the utmost focus from writers.

A Soft Murmur ensures that producing an ambient sound changes the mood of your surroundings and allows you to engage more with the process of writing. Mesmerizing sounds of waves, wind, rain, birds, etc. can be used effectively to improve your focus.

Features:

• Fully offline operability
• Mix multiple sounds
• Create your own sound
• Play in the background
• Smooth gapless playback

Further Reading => An Exclusive List of the BEST Mac Apps

Verdict: A Soft Murmur is not your traditional writing app. It has nothing to do with writing but does help in creating a mood for effective writing. We highly recommend this app to create an environment that will help you focus more, especially if you are a creative writer.

Price: Free

---

#14) Freedom

Best for blocking websites, apps, notifications to avoid distraction while writing.

It’s not just your physical surroundings that can be antagonistic to your writing, the system you are working on can also be a source of constant irritation due to tons and tons of pop-ups, email notifications, update alerts, etc. Freedom provides you freedom from such mundane annoyances by blocking websites, apps, and notifications permanently, temporarily, or for a specific period of time.

With none of those things to disturb you, you can focus on writing compelling content for your blog, business, or book. Writing is about focusing as much as it is about language and grammatical skills, Freedom takes care of the former so you can focus on the latter.

Features:

• Choose apps, and websites to block
• Choose the time you would like the websites and apps to remain blocked for
• Select when to start and end the block
• Block across multiple mobile and computer devices

Verdict: Many well-known authors and journalists credit Freedom for their newly found productivity in writing. So if you seek to be more productive with your writing, then we highly recommend Freedom.

Price: Free trial for the first seven sessions, $6.99 per month, $29.04 per year, $129 for lifetime use.

---

#15) Setapp

Best for a Long list of writing apps exclusive to Mac and iPhone.

Why settle for a single writing app, when you can get direct access to multiple writing tools for the price of one? That is the benefit of using Setapp. This platform is home to more than 240 Mac-exclusive apps, some of which happen to be pretty great applications for writers.

Simply go to the platform’s APP gallery, select the ‘Writing and Blogging’ section and you’ll be greeted with numerous apps that will spoil you for choice.

With apps like Ulysses, MonsterWriter, Rocket Typist, etc. all available to you in a single reasonably priced suite, you basically have a plethora of options to experiment with and switch between with a single subscription.

Features:

• Write and Publish virtual content
• Store content securely in iCloud
• Applications to proofread content
• Convert written text into PDF files and eBooks.

Verdict: With Setapp, you get to own and use multiple different types of Mac-exclusive writing applications from a single place.

If you are not satisfied with one, there are plenty of others you can try without having to pay extra. This is what makes Setapp such an enticing app for creative writers, bloggers, journalists, and other types of writers.

Pricing: Mac: $9.99/month, Mac and iOS: $12.49/month, Power User: $14.99/month, 7-day free trial available.

---

#16) xTiles

xTiles is a flexible writing application for organizing your entire writing process and collecting any content you need in one place.

The template library contains various free ready-made solutions for different occasions. The interface is simple, making the app effective and easy to work with, allowing the writing process to be as easy as possible. You can write down their ideas and fully concentrate only on them and their development and implementation without long introductions.

It also allows organizing information (whether we speak about writing or rich content) the way one prefers. And the cherry on top is xTiles Web Clipper to help you save everything that may be useful for writing while surfing the web.

Flexibility and versatility are the essence of the app. It may serve as a task manager, dashboard, visual board, writing space, to-do list, planner, presentation, etc. Additionally, all of these documents can be shared with other users and even with those who don’t use xTiles.

Features:

• The ability to add links, text, and pictures within one document.
• An impressive quantity of available templates for writing and other purposes.
• The ability to share your documents with others
• The ability to create sub-documents
• Web Clipper to save data for later use or consideration.
• Suitable for a variety of purposes and tasks
• The ability to organize your writing content in a visually appealing way.

Verdict: xTiles is a great app for any people involved in writing. If you’re looking for something to ease your writing routine, help organize all of your ideas and thoughts, and where you will be able to work at the same time, you should try xTiles.

Price: Free basic plan, $10 per month, $96 per year, $300 lifetime.

---

FAQs for Best Writing Apps

---

Conclusion

No matter what kind of content you are writing, whether it is novels or short-form blogs, your content quality needs to be top-notch for it to attract readers. Thankfully, writers today are blessed with the almighty power of technology and bequeathed with some of the most fascinating writing tools in the market.

=> We Recommend ProWritingAid as the Overall BEST Writing App! Get a 20% Discount Coupon here.

The choice to land on an appropriate writing tool can be overwhelming. If you have established what your desires are from the tool, then settling on one tool won’t be an issue. If you are looking for a tool that improves your grammar and enhances the quality of your short-form blogs then Grammarly is the best writing app on Windows, Mac, and Web that you can try.

If you are seeking a tool to write long-form content like novels, then a creative writing app like Squibler will work wonders for you. Other apps like Freedom and A Soft Murmur can also be used to free yourself from distractions for a much more focused writing experience.

Research Process:

• We spent 12 hours researching and writing this article so you can have summarized and insightful information on what writing app or tool will best suit you.
• Total writing apps Researched – 30
• Total writing apps Shortlisted – 14