Two additional online writing apps

Posted by satis
Jul 14, 2021 at 11:46 AM

Most of the people I know who use Scrivener professionally are daunted by its complexity and only use a small percentage of its features. I own Scrivener but I don’t use it because it’s too clunky and I didn’t feel comfortable writing in it. I’m also wary after a well-known writer I know lost a few chapters in it causing her to abandon the app for an even clunkier and uglier option - the Save The Cat app, which is $100-$180/year depending on the plan, plus Microsoft Word (a business necessity when submitting work and dealing with Track Changes from an editor).

These Scrivener alternatives, at least most of the robust, competitive ones, tend to be services now, usually with a bloated Electron app front-end to make it easy to deploy to multiple OSes. Unfortunately that is considered best practices these days for many classes of app in order to scale up a cross-platform product that’s easiest to develop and support, can garner the most customers, and can obstruct pirating.

I do like NovelPad’s scene-card kanban view, which seems more functional and attractive than Scrivener’s. But I don’t see anything that would make me switch from Ulysses and a free kanban service plan.