The best book writing software in 2026

1. Draftly

Best for

A writer who wants the manuscript, the cast and the notes behind one login

Price

Free to start. Starter $10, Pro $20, Studio $50 a month, or the same amounts bought once as a credit pack.

Runs on

Browser, Mac and Windows

A Codex holds one entry per character, place and object, and that entry opens against the chapter where the name appears, so a detail invented in book one is on screen when book three contradicts it. Boards draw the relationships between those entries: who knows whom, who wants what. Timelines put the order events happened in next to the order the book tells them. When a draft is ready to be read, AI editors go through the whole manuscript and leave notes in the margin, against the paragraph that prompted them.

Imports take .docx, .odt, .rtf, .pdf and Markdown, plus a whole Scrivener project as a .scriv file, and pull straight from Google Drive, OneDrive, Notion, Dropbox and reMarkable. Exports reach EPUB for retailers, Word for an editor, a print-ready PDF in a book or manuscript layout, and Markdown, RTF, ODT and plain text. The free tier takes no card and has no time limit: the editor, the Codex, imports and exports, with 200 welcome credits to try a read. Boards, timelines, version history, prose analysis and custom editors sit on the paid plans.

2. Scrivener

Best for

One computer, one licence, and no wish to rent anything

Price

$59.99 for one platform, bought once. iOS is US$23.99 and is a separate purchase. No subscription.

Runs on

macOS, Windows and iOS, licensed separately

Twenty years of development sit behind the Binder, the corkboard and Compile, and no browser tool on this page matches what Compile does on the way out. It writes Word, RTF and OpenOffice files, PDFs, EPUB ebooks, Final Draft screenplays with the script notes intact, and MultiMarkdown for a LaTeX pipeline. The research folder takes anything you point at it, including PDFs, images, web pages and audio, and keeps all of it inside the project beside the draft.

The licence is where writers hit the wall. Literature and Latte state it plainly: each licence covers one platform, so a macOS licence will not unlock the Windows version, and iOS is bought on its own. There is no browser version, which rules out a Chromebook, an Android tablet and any machine you do not administer. Moving a project between a Mac and an iPad runs through Dropbox, set up and maintained by you. One thing the trial gets right is the counting: 30 days of use rather than 30 calendar days, so writing every other day makes it last sixty.

3. Atticus

Best for

The manuscript is finished and the next problem is a print interior

Price

$147 once, with future updates included and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Runs on

Browser, plus Windows, Mac, Linux and Chromebook

Atticus takes a finished manuscript and turns it into files a shop will accept. Seventeen templates combine into more than a thousand interiors, a theme builder covers anything they do not, and a previewer puts the result on a Kindle, an iPhone, an iPad and a Galaxy before you commit to it. One file produces EPUB, PDF and DOCX. It runs as a progressive web app in the browser and installs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chromebook, and $147 buys it outright with future updates included.

The writing half is deliberately thin. Atticus's own pages list a word counter, a goal and habit tracker and drag-and-drop chapter reordering, and they describe no character database, no world bible and no plotting view. That is a design decision rather than an oversight, and it decides where the tool sits in a year of work: the drafting months happen somewhere else and Atticus picks the book up at the end. If you are choosing between paying once and paying monthly, this and Scrivener are the two that let you pay once.

4. Dabble

Best for

Someone who liked how Scrivener organised a book and wanted it in a browser

Price

Writer $19, Author $29, Bestseller $49 a month. Lifetime Author Access $699. 14-day trial, no card.

Runs on

Any browser, plus Windows, Mac and Linux

Dabble rebuilds the organising half of Scrivener for the browser. The $19 Writer plan carries unlimited manuscripts, cloud backup and sync across devices, the Plot Grid where the corkboard was, a story notebook, character profiles, goals and stats, focus mode and spell check. Version history sits on that same entry tier, along with co-authoring and shared access for a writing group, so a second writer can be in the document with you for $19.

The revision tools sit a tier up. Comments, track changes, sticky notes, text highlighting, read-to-me, advanced grammar and style checks and beta-reader support all need the $29 Author plan, so a writer who wants a second pair of eyes marking up the draft starts at $29 rather than $19. Export is the thing to check before you commit: their features page names Word and a text file, so turning a finished manuscript into an ebook happens somewhere else. There is no free plan either, only fourteen days, though the trial takes no card. Against the monthly tools here, the $699 Lifetime Author Access is the alternative on offer: about three years of the Writer plan, bought once.

5. Ulysses

Best for

A writer on Apple hardware who wants the interface out of the way

Price

$5.99 a month or $39.99 a year. Reduced pricing for students. Subscription only.

Runs on

Mac, iPad and iPhone

Ulysses answers the complaint about too many panels by removing them. One markup surface, a library holding every draft, and sync across Macs, iPads and iPhones that arrives switched on. Around it sits a grammar and style check across more than twenty languages, character-count goals and deadlines, a live preview of how an export will look, and publishing straight to WordPress, Ghost, Medium and Micro.blog. Students pay a reduced rate.

The trade is the entire organising layer. Ulysses's own pages sell a writing environment and a library, and a plot grid, a character database and anywhere to keep world notes are absent from them. The hardware limit is sharper still: Macs, iPads and iPhones only, which is the same wall that sends writers looking for something else in the first place. Payment is a subscription, and the pricing page offers no one-off purchase.

6. Novelcrafter

Best for

You already hold an API key and would rather keep that bill separate

Price

Scribe $4, Hobbyist $8, Artisan $14, Specialist $20 a month. 21-day trial, no card.

Runs on

Any browser

Novelcrafter puts a story bible at the centre of the app. Its codex holds characters, locations and lore and links them into the prose, and a series shares one codex across every book in it. Planning views lay the same material out as a grid of scene cards, which is where a hole in the plot tends to become visible. Unlimited books and series are on every tier, and the twenty-one day trial takes no card.

The AI is the part to read carefully, because you supply it. Bring your own key starts at the $8 Hobbyist plan, so the $4 Scribe tier has no AI integration at all. Above it, every token you spend is billed by the model provider rather than by Novelcrafter, which means the figure on the pricing page is not the cost of the month. For a writer already holding a key that works out cheaper than a bundled allowance. For a writer without one it is a second account to open before anything happens.

7. Sudowrite

Best for

Stuck at a blank page and wanting something to push against

Price

Hobby and Student $10, Professional $22, Max $44 a month. No card to start.

Runs on

Any browser

Sudowrite produces prose, and it is well equipped for that job. Hobby and Student is $10 a month for 225,000 credits, Professional $22 for 450,000, and Max $44 for two million, with rollover of unused credits for twelve months on the Max plan. Every tier starts without a card. A story bible runs from idea to outline to chapter beats, and the writing tools work at the line: continue a passage, describe a room, slow down a rushed section, offer alternatives a sentence at a time.

Credits are the unit of everything here, which makes a month hard to budget for. The pricing page states an allowance in tokens and nothing on it converts that into chapters. The wider gap is that there is nowhere for the book to live. Drafts and chapters sit inside a project, and Sudowrite's own pages take the organising no further than that: no board of who knows whom, and no timeline to check the order against. Its Story Bible is built to feed the generator rather than to be the place you keep a world.

8. Microsoft Word

Best for

A manuscript that has to reach an editor or an agent in the format they expect

Price

Free in a browser with a Microsoft account. Microsoft 365 Personal $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, Family $12.99 or $129.99. Office Home 2024 is $179.99 once.

Runs on

Windows, Mac and any browser

Word is where a manuscript ends up whether or not it started there. Editors and agents ask for a .docx, track changes is the revision language publishing already speaks, and anyone you send a chapter to can open it. Microsoft 365 for the web gives you Word free with a Microsoft account, covering writing, reading and real-time collaboration in a browser. The desktop apps come with Microsoft 365 Personal at $9.99 a month or $99.99 a year, Family at $12.99 or $129.99 for up to six people, and Office Home 2024 is a $179.99 one-off for a single PC or Mac.

Microsoft sells Word as a word processor for documents. Their pages describe no chapter structure beyond the navigation pane, nowhere to keep a character or a place, no record of when an event happened in the story, and no read of a finished draft. Writers who work in it end up running the book as a folder of chapter files, with the navigation pane standing in for the structure. Reviewers on this page's competitors also raise how a very long single document behaves, though Microsoft publishes no figure for it. That gap is the reason Draftly exists, and we are saying so in the entry about the tool we were built against.

9. Google Docs

Best for

A draft that two or three people need to read and mark up at once

Price

Free with a Google account.

Runs on

Any browser

Plenty of finished novels were written in Google Docs, and the reason is sharing. Anyone with a Google account can create a document, it costs nothing, and a reader can sit in the same file leaving comments while you write in it. Google's own product page states that documents can be opened, created and edited without an internet connection, so the offline objection people raise about browser tools does not land here.

Google sells Docs as document creation, editing and collaboration, and their pages describe nothing past that. A chapter structure and a record of the cast are not among the features. A long draft in Docs ends up split across a folder of documents, and nothing in the product gives you a single view of the book those documents add up to.

Reedsy Studio

The core of it costs nothing, and what it does with a finished draft is the reason to look: EPUB, and a typeset print-ready PDF for any major print-on-demand service. A co-author, editor or proofreader can be invited into the book with track changes and comments. Paid tiers add advanced outlining, writing stats and dark mode. There is no dedicated mobile app, though it works in a phone browser.

bibisco Community edition

Built for novels from the start: characters, scenes, chapters and storylines with a structural overview, in fifteen languages, running on Linux, macOS, Windows, Android and iOS. The character work is unusual, organised around qualities, defects and contradictions. A paid Supporters edition funds development. It installs on the machine rather than opening in a browser.

Manuskript

Open source, and of the free options the closest to what Scrivener is for: a hierarchical outliner, character and plot tools that link to each other, world-building notes, a distraction-free mode and an assistant that walks the snowflake method. Windows, macOS and Linux, with no browser version.

yWriter

Written by Simon Haynes, a programmer with around thirty published novels, and the model shows it: the book breaks into chapters and scenes, and every scene carries its viewpoint character, goal, conflict and outcome. There is a storyboard view, drag-and-drop reordering and automatic daily backups. The Mac and mobile builds come from another developer and are paid.

Draftly free tier

No card and no time limit. The editor, the Codex, imports and exports are free, with 200 welcome credits to try an editorial read. Boards, timelines, version history, prose analysis and custom editors need a paid plan.