Book Writing Software: 12 Programs Compared on Cost and Goals

I’d buy Scrivener first for a long novel. It’s $59.99 once for a Mac or a Windows PC, it lets you chop the manuscript into scenes and shuffle them around, and it’ll turn your deadline into a daily word count on its own. If you only use Apple devices and don’t mind paying every year, Ulysses does the same deadline maths for $39.99 a year. Self-publishers should look at Atticus, which handles the writing and the formatting in one program for $147. And if you haven’t finished a first draft yet, you don’t need to spend anything. Google Docs, LibreOffice or bibisco’s free edition will carry you to the end.

On October 23, 2026, I checked twelve programs against what their developers say on their own sites, and I was surprised how few of them do the thing a writer with a deadline needs most. Just three, Scrivener, Ulysses and Atticus, will take a word count and a due date and tell you today’s number. The others charge extra for goals, don’t tie them to a deadline, only count, or don’t say.

So this doesn’t stay abstract, I’m going to carry one made-up book through the whole comparison. It’s a 90,000-word thriller. You start on Monday, November 2, 2026, you write Monday to Friday, and the first draft has to be done by Friday, July 30, 2027. When it’s finished, you’ll send a Word file to an agent. I’ll keep coming back to it.

Who wrote the guides you’ve probably read

Before I started, I read the English guides that turn up first when you search for this. Two of them put their own company’s product at number one. Kindlepreneur’s list of the best book writing software has Atticus on top, and its author says he co-founded Atticus. Reedsy’s guide to book writing software starts with Reedsy Studio and admits it’s “a little biased”. I like that they’re upfront about it, but I’d still take their first places with a pinch of salt.

Fair’s fair, so here’s where this page stands. WriteZone, which publishes it, makes a writing tracker. That isn’t a writing program, it isn’t ranked anywhere below, and the one note about it near the end is marked as ours.

Then there were the prices. Depending on which guide I read, Scrivener cost “~$49” or $59.99, and Dabble came with three different sets of monthly prices. Reedsy quoted $19, $29 and $49 a month, SelfPublishing.com’s guide said about $10, and Dabble’s own page says $15, $23 and $39 a month billed annually. That’s why every price in this article links to the page I took it from. If one’s changed by the time you read this, you’ll spot it straight away.

The twelve programs in one table

Seven of the twelve are made for books. They split a manuscript into chapters and scenes and give you somewhere to keep your notes. Three are ordinary word processors that lots of novelists use anyway, and two are free programs from small independent projects. The “Word goals” column tells you whether you can set a target word count that the program then keeps track of.

You won’t find Vellum in the table, and that’s deliberate. Hardly anyone drafts in it. You’d write the thriller in Word or Scrivener and then pull the finished text into Vellum to make the ebook and the print file. Its store charges $199.99 for Vellum Ebooks and $249.99 for Vellum Press, which adds paperbacks, and you’ll need a Mac on macOS 13 or later. I dropped Plottr for much the same reason. It’s for outlines and timelines, not for writing the chapters themselves.

Why Scrivener still makes sense for a long novel

Picture the chapter of the thriller where the body’s found. Halfway through the draft, you decide it belongs at the very start. In Word you’d be cutting and pasting across a couple of hundred pages. In Scrivener each scene can be its own section, so you just drag it to the top. Its App Store listing describes a ring-binder for jumping between text, notes and research, a corkboard for plotting and an outliner with a synopsis for every section. Once the draft’s done, Scrivener compiles it into one Word file, a PDF, or an EPUB or Kindle file.

Then there’s the deadline. You give Scrivener the total and the due date, tick the weekdays you write, and it sets a target for each session. Literature & Latte explains in its post on these features that a missed day or a good day gets spread over what’s left. For our thriller that means 195 writing days and about 462 words a day. If a cold and a holiday cost you ten of those days, the target goes up to about 487. Scrivener also records how much you wrote each day and lets you export that history as a CSV file.

You pay per platform. Literature & Latte’s page on its licensing lists $59.99 for Mac, $59.99 for Windows and $23.99 for iPhone and iPad. If you already own one desktop version, the other one costs $37.95, so all three come to $121.93. It says major paid upgrades come “more than two years apart”. The trial for Mac and Windows stops after 30 days of use, so if you only write on Saturdays and Sundays, it lasts fifteen weeks.

Two things would make me hesitate. The iPhone and iPad app hasn’t been updated since version 1.2.4 in September 2023, according to the iOS release notes, and it only syncs through Dropbox. I noticed the date isn’t even consistent, because the release notes say September 20 and the App Store says September 29. The Mac version, by contrast, got version 3.5.2 in December 2025. Scrivener’s knowledge base also asks you to have a project open on only one device at a time, which is easy to forget if you switch between a laptop and a desktop.

Ulysses and Atticus also turn a deadline into a daily number

If the thriller gets written on a MacBook and an iPhone, Ulysses is the more pleasant place to write it. It’s quiet to look at and syncs through iCloud, and in the US it costs $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, according to its pricing page. The goals feature does everything Scrivener’s does for our example. You set the 90,000 words as a minimum, add July 30 as the deadline, take out weekends, and Ulysses shows today’s share. It keeps a history of your sessions and exports it as CSV. I couldn’t find character sheets or timelines in its help pages, so you’d plan the plot somewhere else. Ulysses exports plain and rich text, DOCX, HTML, ePub and PDF, and you can’t get it for Windows or Android.

Atticus is where I’d go if the thriller was heading for Amazon rather than an agent. You write in a plain editor and format the same text into an ebook or a print-ready PDF, so you don’t need Vellum on top. The Atticus site asks $147 once, with all future updates included, and it runs on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chromebooks, offline as well. It exports EPUB, PDF and DOCX. With its writing goals you’d enter 90,000 words, the due date and your writing days, and Atticus would work out the words per day. A calendar colours in each day you hit the target and shows your longest streak. That help page was last updated in February 2024, so the details may have moved on. The site doesn’t mention a corkboard or an outliner like Scrivener’s, which matters only if you plan a lot.

The cloud programs get expensive over time

Dabble, Novlr and Reedsy Studio all live in your browser, so the thriller would be waiting on any computer you log into, including the one at work during lunch. Where they differ is how much they charge, and for how long.

Dabble’s pricing page puts the Writer plan at $15 a month billed annually, so $180 a year. Author costs $276 a year and Bestseller $468, and there are lifetime plans for $699 and $899. Each plan starts with 14 free days, and the FAQ says your work is also stored on your devices for offline use. Goals and stats come with Writer. The pricing page doesn’t say whether Dabble works out a daily number from a deadline, so for our thriller I’d plan on working out the 462 myself.

Novlr’s free plan covers two projects and already includes analytics, sprints and streaks, which is generous. To set goals you need Starter or Studio, listed at $8 and $16 a month when you pay for a year up front, which Novlr says saves 20 percent, or the $499 lifetime plan. Protection against a patchy connection is listed only for Studio.

Reedsy Studio is free for writing and formatting, EPUB and PDF export included, according to its FAQ. On the free plan you can set one overall word goal. Daily, weekly and monthly goals need the Craft plan at $4.99 a month. The same FAQ says Studio doesn’t work offline yet, and it doesn’t mention Word export. For our thriller that’s the awkward part, because the agent wants a .docx file.

What the software costs over five years

I’ve used five years for the cost comparison. That’s long enough for a subscription to show its real size, and in Europe it’s about where five yearly Ulysses plans at €39.99 cost as much as its one-time licence at €199.99. Where a plan can be paid monthly or yearly, I’ve used yearly.

The range goes from nothing to $900. Five years of Dabble’s Writer plan cost about fifteen times as much as one Scrivener licence, and if you’re sure you’ll stay, the $699 lifetime Author plan is cheaper than five years of Writer. Microsoft 365 looks expensive in the table, but if your job or university already pays for it, Word costs your book nothing.

A one-time price isn’t always the last payment. A licence covers one version, so Scrivener’s next major release will come with an upgrade fee. Atticus says every future update is included, and bibisco Supporters comes with two years of them.

Which programs know how far behind you are

None of the guides I read compared how programs track progress, yet once there’s a deadline it’s the number you check every day. Going by what their developers say, the twelve fall into four groups.

1. A deadline that sets today’s target. Scrivener, Ulysses and Atticus take the 90,000 words and July 30, skip the days you don’t write, and give you the daily figure.

2. Goals with strings attached. Dabble and Novlr have goals on their paid plans, and Reedsy Studio Craft has daily goals you set yourself. bibisco offers writing goals, but only in the Supporters edition, which surprised me, because none of the three guides I read mentions it. Manuskript has a goal of a different kind. In its distraction-free mode, you set a number of words or minutes you have to reach before it lets you out.

3. Counting only. Word, Google Docs and LibreOffice will tell you how many words you’ve got and nothing more. In Google Docs you don’t even see that while you type until you switch on “Display word count while typing” under Tools, and Google’s help page says headers, footers and footnotes aren’t counted unless you select the text yourself.

4. Not documented. yWriter’s page talks about chapters, scenes, characters and locations. It doesn’t mention goals at all.

Even the first group has a blind spot, and our thriller runs straight into it. Say you write the car chase on your phone in Google Docs over lunch and carry on in Scrivener after dinner. Scrivener only knows about the evening, Google Docs only about lunch, and neither has your total for the day. You don’t need any of these programs to turn a deadline into a daily number, by the way. Our free writing goal calculator does it in a few seconds.

Getting the manuscript out again

I’d check the exit before moving in, because a novel can easily outlive the program it was written in. With the word processors there’s not much to worry about, since nearly anything opens their files. Manuskript saves your book in an open, plain-text format, so you could still read every chapter if the program stopped working one day. For Mac users, that’s closer than it sounds. The latest release, 0.17.0 from June 2025, only has downloads for Windows and Linux, according to the releases page, although the version before it still came with a Mac installer.

Scrivener keeps each project in a package. In Finder it looks like one file, but its knowledge base explains that it’s really a folder full of smaller files. That’s fine for as long as you stay with Scrivener, and if you want to move, you compile or export first. The browser programs keep the thriller on the company’s servers. That’s handy on a work computer at lunch, but it also means your manuscript depends on how that company does.

Whatever you choose, I’d do one thing every few weeks. Export the manuscript as a Word file or plain text and keep the copy somewhere outside the program. According to their developers, all twelve can produce one, apart from those marked “see text” in the table. Reedsy Studio’s FAQ mentions EPUB and PDF but not Word, and the pages for Dabble, Novlr, Manuskript and yWriter don’t say clearly whether they write .docx files.

Which program suits which kind of book

If I were writing the thriller on a Mac or a Windows PC with that July deadline, I’d pick Scrivener. You get the structure, the deadline goals and a writing history for one payment. If all I had were a MacBook and an iPhone and I didn’t mind paying every year, I’d go with Ulysses instead. And if the book were heading for Amazon rather than an agent, I’d use Atticus and skip buying Vellum.

Dabble and Novlr make sense if you want the same manuscript on every computer without installing anything, but I’d look at the five-year table before signing up. For a first novel with no budget, Google Docs, LibreOffice or bibisco Community will do. You’ll know it’s time for more when you can’t find your own scenes any more. On Linux, your choices are LibreOffice, bibisco, Manuskript and Atticus, plus anything that runs in a browser.

If you write in more than one place, say the thriller in Scrivener and short stories in Word, none of these programs will add it all up. That’s what a separate writing tracker is for, and our comparison of ways to track writing progress goes from spreadsheets to apps. If you do most of your writing on a phone, our guide to writing apps for iPhone looks at nine of them in more detail.

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