Ulysses

Ulysses is a subscription-based writing environment for Mac and iPhone that unifies every draft, manuscript, and note in a single library — built for writers who need professional structure without abandoning the focus of a blank page.

What is Ulysses?

Ulysses is a full-featured writing app from The Soulmen that blends distraction-free composition with a robust document management system, all backed by seamless iCloud sync across Mac, iPhone, and iPad. It uses a variant of Markdown for formatting, but keeps the syntax largely invisible so the words stay front and center.

Where most writing apps force you to choose between a simple notepad and a heavy word processor, Ulysses occupies the productive middle ground: structured enough for a 100,000-word novel, clean enough for a 300-word blog post. The library sidebar organises everything into groups and filters, so switching from chapter three of a memoir to a client brief is one click, not a file-system expedition.

What does Ulysses do best?

Ulysses excels at long-form writing with its unified library, goal tracking, and one-click export to polished formats including PDF, DOCX, ePub, and HTML — all styled through customisable export themes.

The sheet-based model — every document is a "sheet", not a file — means you never hunt through Finder for a draft. Sheets live inside the app and sync everywhere automatically. For serialised work like a newsletter, a book, or a long-running blog, the Groups feature lets you set a combined word-count goal across multiple sheets and watch a progress ring fill as you write. I've used this through entire book drafts, and it quietly becomes motivating in a way that a raw word count never is.

The export engine deserves special mention. You choose a theme — or build your own — and Ulysses renders a beautifully typeset PDF or ePub without touching a single layout control. For writers who self-publish or submit directly to editors, this is hours saved per manuscript.

How much does Ulysses cost?

Ulysses is a paid subscription: a single plan covers Mac, iPhone, and iPad, billed monthly or annually. A free trial gives you access to the full feature set for a limited period before any payment is required.

For writers who use the app daily, the annual plan works out to a reasonable per-month figure — less than most coffee subscriptions. That said, if you write only occasionally, the ongoing cost may feel steep compared to a one-time-purchase alternative like iA Writer or the free Markdown editor Bear.

Who should use Ulysses?

Ulysses is the right tool for writers who produce substantial, recurring work: novelists, journalists, technical writers, bloggers managing large back-catalogues, and anyone juggling multiple long-running projects simultaneously.

If your workflow is mostly occasional short documents that live in separate files, you may find the library model more structure than you need — Drafts or iA Writer will serve you better. But if you've ever lost a draft in Finder, struggled to track progress across chapters, or wasted an afternoon reformatting a Word export, Ulysses will feel like a homecoming.

• Novelists and non-fiction authors — manuscript goals, chapter grouping, ePub export
• Bloggers and newsletter writers — WordPress and Ghost publishing integrations built in
• Journalists on deadline — fast composition, instant DOCX export, iCloud sync to iPhone
• Technical writers — Markdown with code blocks, customisable export for documentation

What are the best Ulysses alternatives?

The strongest alternatives to Ulysses on Mac are iA Writer, Scrivener, and Bear, each targeting a different slice of the writing market.

iA Writer is leaner and cheaper — a one-time purchase with a near-identical Markdown core — and wins on simplicity for writers who just want a typewriter with sync. Scrivener goes the other direction: deeper outlining, corkboard view, and a compile system powerful enough to layout an entire paperback. It has a steeper learning curve and no subscription, but it's overkill for anything under 60,000 words. Bear splits the difference for note-heavy writers who want beautiful formatting and cross-platform sync without a full manuscript workflow. For pure, sustained prose output, though, I keep coming back to Ulysses.

How does Ulysses compare to Scrivener?

Ulysses is faster to start and cleaner to live in day-to-day; Scrivener rewards the writer willing to invest a week learning its compile and corkboard systems.

Scrivener's project-file model keeps everything self-contained in a single bundle — useful for archiving a finished manuscript. Ulysses keeps everything in the cloud library — useful for a writer who switches devices constantly. For genre novelists who need detailed scene metadata, Scrivener is hard to beat. For everyone else writing book-length work, Ulysses removes more friction than it adds.