Craft is a block-based document editor for Mac, iPhone, and iPad that brings genuine visual craftsmanship to everyday note-taking and long-form writing — without the browser-tab overhead of cloud-first alternatives.
What is Craft?
Craft is a native Mac document creation app that lets you build anything from a quick capture to a polished project brief using an intuitive block-based canvas. Unlike browser-dependent tools such as Notion, Craft is built with Apple's native frameworks from the ground up. It launches instantly, scrolls with butter-smooth momentum, and honours macOS conventions — system font, dark mode, trackpad gestures, and keyboard navigation — in a way a wrapped web app never quite manages.
Each document in Craft is a collection of typed blocks: text, headings, code, images, tasks, cards, and nested sub-pages. You rearrange them by dragging, style them with a keystroke, and link them to any other block in your workspace via Deep Links that work across Shortcuts and Calendar.
What does Craft do best?
Craft excels at making structured documents feel effortless. I've used it to write project briefs, client meeting notes, research digests, and long-form articles; in every context, friction is close to zero. Several capabilities stand out in daily use:
- Bi-directional backlinks — weave notes into a lightweight knowledge graph without the plugin overhead Obsidian demands.
- Deep Links — point a Calendar event or a Shortcuts action straight to a specific block inside any document.
- Instant web sharing — publish a document as a clean, publicly accessible page; collaborators read and comment without signing up for anything.
- Real-time collaboration — inline comments, mentions, and version history that stay snappy because the heavy lifting happens locally, not in a remote database.
The Apple Silicon performance is genuinely noticeable. Opening a workspace, switching between documents, and rendering complex pages are all instantaneous — something Bear gets right too, but Notion and heavier Obsidian vaults regularly stumble on.
Is Craft free?
Yes — Craft offers a genuinely useful free tier for personal use. Core editing, document organisation, and single-device sync cost nothing; you can evaluate the full writing experience before committing to a subscription. A paid plan (Craft+) unlocks unlimited cross-device sync, full version history, advanced collaboration features, and priority support. Crucially, the free tier is not a time-limited trial or a crippled demo — it is a real working tool, which stands in sharp contrast to apps that gate basic formatting or dark mode behind a paywall.
Who should use Craft?
Writers, designers, and project leads who want documents that look as good as they read. If you have been tolerating Apple Notes because it is fast but quietly resenting its ceiling — no backlinks, no nested pages, no meaningful hierarchy — Craft is the natural step up. It is also the right call for anyone who regularly shares documents externally: the shareable web view is polished enough to send to a client without explanation, unlike a raw Notion link that exposes every sidebar toggle and database breadcrumb.
Heavy Obsidian users who depend on community plugins or require local plaintext files will find Craft's proprietary storage model a dealbreaker. If your notes must live on disk as Markdown files, Bear or Obsidian are safer fits. For everyone else, Craft's combination of speed, visual quality, and connected structure is genuinely hard to match in the Mac ecosystem.
What are the best Craft alternatives?
Bear is the closest sibling: native macOS, beautifully designed, Apple-ecosystem-only — but oriented toward minimalist Markdown writing rather than structured multi-page documents. Notion adds databases, kanban boards, and formulas that Craft deliberately skips; it earns the browser overhead only if your team lives in spreadsheet-style views. Obsidian dominates for a local-file knowledge graph with plugin extensibility, though its default aesthetic skews developer scratchpad over polished document. Apple Notes is free and brilliantly integrated with iCloud but lacks linking and hierarchy. Ulysses wins for pure, distraction-free long-form prose but is not a document organiser in any meaningful sense.
