If you want something a little less stuffy, cluttered, and nine-to-five, or more focused on creative writing, weve found four solid choices that take two very different approaches to helping you express yourself.

They sport clean, minimalist interfaces, keep all your writing in a single window, can swap documents between their iOS and Mac versions, and use some variation of the Markdown syntax to handle all text formatting.

Best Creative Software Series Of Introductory

An outstanding series of introductory texts ease you into using Ulysses, one simple step at a time.

Their witty writing allows you to learn the program while youre using it.

Ulysses also supports old faithful keyboard shortcuts for bold, italic, and linked text, if you dont want to type Markdown XLs extra characters.).

The Style Exchange also offers a host of free templates for PDF, HTML, and ePub exports, with different looks, fonts, and styles.

It can also publish your work directly to your Medium or WordPress site, once you enter your account info.

And its subscription model means that your monthly 4.99 fee unlocks the app on both the Mac and iOS.

Unfortunately, it has a good portion of its thunder stolen by.

Bears fonts and color scheme, while still clean and stark, go easier on the eyes than Ulyssess utilitarian gray.

Its stats panel is much easier to read, though less detailed.

Best Creative Software Full WYSIWYG Formatting

And Bear strikes a happy medium between full WYSIWYG formatting and Markdown simplicity by clearly labeling different header tags as you create them, and offering the option to actually show text as bold or italic when properly marked.

Just type in a hashtag anywhere in your document, and Bear will either create a category for it on the fly in its list of documents, or add that document to an existing category.

I was also impressed with Bears ability to share a note to any program youve added to your Macs Sharing menu, including Facebook, Twitter, and Reminders.

And the programs basic version, which packs plenty of power, is absolutely free on both Mac and iOS.

However, to match Ulyssess features, youll need to subscribe to Bear Plus, for 1.49 a month or 14.99 a year.

That subscription gets you features like iCloud synching, ePub export, and customizable export themes, all of which Ulysses includes right out of the box.

Like Bear and Ulysses, iA Writer offers downloadable export templates, and its help files include instructions to make your own with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

On first use, the program dumps you right into its interface with no introduction.

Its lean, efficient Help files explain the program well, but after Ulysses and Bears gentler tutorials, iA Writers lack of frills can feel jarring.

Theyre squeezed into the same small space as iA Writers Format and Syntax menus, which can format text or quickly highlight all the nouns, adverbs, adjectives, or other parts of speech in your document a nifty feature undercut by lackluster interface design.

But it feels odd to have the same text side by side; if you want to see what text looks like when formatted, why not just have a WYSIWYG editor.

The other programs in this roundup are undeniably more versatile, lending themselves just as well to note taking, blog posts, journalism, or technical writing as they do to writing fiction.

In contrast, Scriveners built to serve the needs of folks writing novels, short stories, screenplays, and given its ability to store pictures, cached web pages, and other research material alongside a given text possibly term papers.

It arguably needs such a crowd of buttons to display even a fraction of the features stuffed into its every nook and cranny.

My favorite: A ridiculously options-laden name generator for authors in need of inspiration.) Scriveners user manual, however engagingly written, is 546 pages long.

Best Creative Software For Mac