Entering the world of writing apps can feel a bit like walking into a maze.
There are so many apps out there, all at varying prices. Each offers different tools, which can seem incomprehensible in themselves.
But if you’re throwing up your hands in despair, ready to give up on finding the best writing app for you, then don’t panic.
Here, I’ve rounded up some of the best writing apps currently available in 2025.
Overall Best Apps for Writing a Book
Fictionary Storyteller
Originally designed for story editing, Fictionary Storyteller has since evolved and now offers incredible support throughout all stages of your writing and editing journey.
There are different subscriptions available: here, I’ll look at the basic subscription plan, which comes in at $19 a month.
For this price, you’ll gain access to Storyteller software at both the writing and editing stages of your book. You don’t need to download this software. Once you’ve set up your account you’ll have login details and can access Storyteller through the internet.
Once you’ve begun writing your book in Storyteller software, you don’t need to save it elsewhere: your work will be saved in your Storyteller account.
Storyteller’s design enables you to plan and write your story with a clear overall grasp of story structure.
It’s set-up so that you write in scenes, able to see right from the start how your different scenes work in sequence with each other, and how well these scenes together form a story. By using this structure, you’ll avoid accidentally filling your first draft with rambling and unstructured passages.
As you draft your scenes in Storyteller, you’ll be able to see straight away whether your scenes contain the 38 essential story elements. These story elements work together to ensure a scene is well-paced, gripping and immersive.
A few of the best features for planning and writing your book include:
Story Goal Tracking: As you write your scenes, Storyteller’s story goal tracking function allows you to ensure each scene is relevant and necessary to your story, and that the action takes your story in the right direction. It’s easy to lose yourself in the joy of creating a scene, only to discover that you’ve veered off-track, and your beautifully written scene doesn’t work well within your overall story. The story goal tracker helps prevent this from happening, so you’ve fewer scenes to cut or rewrite at the end of your first draft.
Character Development: Storyteller’s character tracking feature helps you keep your character’s motivations consistent. When used in conjunction with the Notes section, you can track the gradual development of each primary character, so that their growth is believable and convincing.
Scene Goal Analysis: Storyteller helps keep you on track as you write by ensuring each scene contains a gripping goal, stakes and structure. An optional artificial intelligence tool will analyse your scene goal and structure for you, so that you can check each scene contains conflict, tension and structure as you write. This way, if you’re getting lost as you draft, you’ll realise before falling too far down the rabbit-hole.
Setting Analysis: The Settings tab helps you ensure that you’ve written detailed and immersive settings for each of your scenes.
Scene and Sequel Tracking: These tabs help you figure out whether you’ve balanced the pacing of your story as you write scenes, ensuring you’ve a good mix of action and reaction scenes. It’s important to balance out action with character and setting development as you write, and Storyteller will help you keep an eye on this.
This is just a short summary of some of Storyteller’s great features – there are many more available. The best news is that you can sign up for a free 7-day trial to explore these features for yourself.
ProWritingAid
ProWritingAid is an online writing tool designed to help you improve your copy-editing skills. It helps you check for grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, and identifies other problematic issues with your prose.
ProWritingAid is a great tool for helping you improve your writing at the sentence-level.
The Premium Plan is ideal for drafting and writing your book.
Let’s look at some of the features which help you write your book:
Passive Voice Checker: This is a great training tool to use as you write. For those of you accustomed to academic writing, the passive voice may be one of your creative writing nemeses: it can make your scenes feel dull and flat with overuse. ProWritingAid’s tool will pick this up for you as you write, so that over time you’ll find your voice naturally changes to become more active and immersive.
Chapter Critique: Once you’ve written your first draft of a scene or chapter, ProWritingAid’s chapter critique will analyse your chapter for you. You’ll be given feedback on how compelling your opening is, the strength of your voice, how vivid your descriptions are, how well you’ve drawn out tension, your character introductions and so on.
Most valuable of all, the critique will highlight potential improvements for the areas where your chapter could benefit from further improvements. This is a great way to let you know whether your scene needs more work or whether you’re ready to move onto the next chapter.
Sentence Variety Tracker: This is another area where it can be great to get feedback as you write. The sentence variety tracker helps you develop your characters’ voices so that they’ll engage readers.
Show and Tell Tracker: An area that’s the bane of many writers! We all know we should show, not just tell. And yet sometimes it’s so hard to tell the difference between the two. ProWritingAid’s tool will help you figure out where you might have over-told and under-shown.
Atticus
Atticus is a comprehensive book formatting software with several features which can really help turn your draft into a publishable book. It’s particularly useful for any writer planning on self-publishing their book.
Custom Chapter Headings: Atticus will help you create custom chapter headings and ornamental breaks. These can help make your book look both professional and personal. You can choose from a variety of pre-designed formats, or design your own using a Book Brush account.
Automated Front and Back Matter Feature: This allows you easily to add pages to your book, including title page, table of contents, copyright page, dedication, author biography etc. Moreover, you can duplicate this across many books.
Typesetting: Typesetting can be an overwhelming task for writers self-publishing their first book. Atticus software has been designed to take care of this for you, helping you create a polished and professional looking book. Atticus offers different streamlined typesetting options for different book themes, although you can also personalise your typesetting if you prefer.
By saving you time and effort in these technical matters, you can spend more time focusing on the creative writing aspects of your book.
Another great feature of Atticus is its price. For a one-off payment of $147, you gain lifetime access to the software.
Best Writing Apps for Editors
Within these apps, we’ll look both at the best apps for professional editors, and for writers looking to self-edit their own books.
Fictionary Storycoach
Fictionary Storycoach is shares all the same features as Storyteller, but has been designed for professional editors to edit clients’ manuscripts. It’s available for $49 per month.
The editor’s Storycoach account links to their client’s Storyteller account, allowing the editor’s comments and feedback to be available to the client in their own account.
It’s a great tool for allowing editors and writers to work together.
There are certain features shared by both Storyeller and Storycoach which are invaluable for the editing process, whether you’re editing your own work or a client’s. The features I’ll discuss below are available in both Storyteller and Storycoach, and are helpful for both professional editors and writers in the process of self-editing.
Story Arc Visualisation: Once you’ve a completed manuscript, the Story Arc visualisation feature jumps into play. Creating a compelling story is one of the key aspects of structural editing, but visualising the story as a whole can be a tricky feat to pull off.
Fictionary will do the job for you, identifying them most likely key plot points scenes, and showing you how they hold together within the story arc graph. This gives you a great idea of what the reading experience will feel like: where the story flags, where it races too fast, and where it’s paced just right.
Story Map: The story map, available on both Storycoach and Storyteller, is a great way for you visually to track the various story elements and their development throughout the narrative arc.
By marking the elements as you edit a manuscript, showing them as either complete, needing development, or absent, you’ll see which areas of the story need further work. Moreover, by visualising all the elements together you can often find single solutions for multiple problems.
For example, if a scene lacks both conflict and a clear goal, usually clarifying a single scene goal will also allow for the creation of clearer conflict. Once you know the goal, you can easily create the obstacles getting in the way of the character achieving that goal.
These are just a few of the editing features available on Storycoach.
ProWritingAid Premium Pro
This aid is probably most useful for writers in the self-editing stage of their writing, but can also be useful for professional editors.
The Premium Pro subscription costs $36 per month. It includes all the features available in the Premium version but includes more of certain limited, but particularly useful, features. These include:
Sparks: These ‘sparks’ are AI-generated suggested improvements to your sentences. The sparks give feedback as to why they are suggesting these alternative sentences, so that you may opt to take on board the feedback without using the suggested rephrasing.
The AI generated rephrasing suggestions may well not be in your or characters’ voices, so I’d suggest using these with caution. Nevertheless, they’re a valuable way to see what might be lacking in a manuscript’s prose.
Manuscript Analysis discounts: This works in the same way as the chapter critique, but on a much larger scale, analysing your entire manuscript. The critique looks at character development, plot and setting and provides feedback on what works and what doesn’t.
As with the Chapter analysis reports, this is a computer-generated feedback tool, and not a substitute for a human reader, but it can give excellent suggestions as to where you should direct your editorial energies.
Grammarly Pro
Grammarly was initially designed to help writers improve their writing of all types (not just fiction), by checking spelling and punctuation. It’s since developed to include features which check your writing for correctness, clarity and engagement.
It’s a great app to use if you’re a professional proof-reader, as it will help you find sentences which need some copy-editing. And likewise, if you’re proof-reading your own manuscript, Garmmarly offers a useful objective eye.
Its Pro subscription offers a variety of features useful to fiction writers and editors:
Sentence Re-writing: with just one click, Grammarly will rewrite sentences for you.
Fluency: If English isn’t your first language, Grammarly will help you improve the fluency of your sentences.
Plagiarism Detection: This is very useful, as it can be easy to accidentally plagiarise the work of others writers we admire, especially in the realm of non-fiction.
The caveat here is that Grammarly wasn’t specifically designed for fiction writers. It’s great for writers of non-fiction, but for fiction writers, ProWritingAid’s tools might be more appropriate.
Creative Writing Apps for Beginners:
Fictionary Storyteller Premium
If you’re a beginner writer, I can’t recommend this option highly enough. It’s all very well for Storyteller to have been designed to help writers ensure their scenes meet all the essential story structure elements, but what if you don’t understand what these elements are?
In this case, Storyteller Premium comes into play.
At $39 a month, this subscription also offers unlimited access to Fictionary Live classes: online classes teaching you the basics and the advanced complexities of story structure and the story elements, and how to maximise the potential of your Storyteller subscription.
These interactive classes are available at different times, allowing for access from various different time-zones, and taught by different Storycoach editors, so you can gain insights from the perspectives of different teachers.
Plottr
Plottr’s a great tool if you’re looking to start planning a novel and don’t know where to start. It’s technically a software rather than an app, but it’s so great for beginners, it’s worth including here.
For between $60 and $270 a year, depending on which plan you choose, you’ll gain access to a range of great plotting tools.
Plottr contains a range of built-in story structure templates, catering to a variety of genres and storytelling techniques.
The software includes an introductory tour to help new users navigate their way around.
You can lay out your key scenes on plotlines and subplot lines using diagrams, make scene annotations on your cards, and move them around as you choose.
There are character tabs where you can make and keep notes about your different characters, and you can use these to track character traits and development across plotlines.
Although great for new and seasoned writers alike, the software’s particularly useful for beginners who are still learning to work with different storytelling techniques.
Top Additional Book Writing Apps:
Scrivener
Unlike MS Word and Google Docs, Scrivener’s a program that’s been designed specifically with book writing in mind. Its various features include, amongst others:
Colour Coding Tools: A popular way for writers to annotate their drafts as they write.
A Word Frequency Analyser: To keep track of overused words as you write.
A Project Binder: So that you can navigate through your various files with ease.
Synopsis and Notes section: There’s a more user-friendly version of notes and comments for writers than you’ll find in standard word processors.
Perhaps most importantly, Scrivener has been created specifically to handle large manuscripts, so you can easily move large sections around without the same struggles you’ll encounter using cut-and-paste in MS Word, which might cause your file to crash.
The cost is a single payment of between $23.99 and $95.98 depending on whether you’re getting for IOS, Single platform Word/Mac or a bundled license for both Word and Mac.
World Anvil
World Anvil has been created as a world-building tool for writers, especially perfect for writers of Fantasy and Sci-Fi.
When creating fictional worlds, it can be difficult to keep track of everything you plan and create. If you’ve ever tried making a folder of Word Documents and then trying to keep tabs on them all as you write, you’ll know exactly how tricky this can be!
Which is where World Anvil steps in, helping you to create comprehensive worlds and keep everything together in one easily-accessible place.
Within Word Anvil you can create detailed maps, timelines and family trees. You can design detailed governments, institutions and organisations, connecting them all together.
It’s not just limited to setting: you can also create detailed character profiles with backstories and relationship dynamics.
World Anvil also allows for artist collaboration, so that others can contribute to your world. You can share the world you’ve created with readers or your writing community, and if you allow, they can offer contributions and feedback. You control the privacy settings, so you’re completely in control of how much collaboration is allowed.
For writers of speculative series, this tool can be a great way to encourage reader involvement in your work, and allow for greater world-building to take place than that you’ve time for within your stories themselves. For anyone looking to create a more interactive experience for their readers, this is a really exciting tool.
Monthly Subscriptions come in between $7 and $34 a month depending on which plan you choose.
Ulysses
This is an app designed to allow writers to easily shuffle around the different parts and scenes of a book. It’s a comprehensive tool for drafting, editing and publishing.
One of Ulysses great features is that it’s available off-line, so you can take yourself away from the online world of distractions while you write.
The app includes a built-in proof-reader and editing assistant. It offers suggestions for capitalization, punctuation, semantics, redundancy, style and more.
Once you’ve finished writing, Ulysses can turn your texts into PDFs, word documents, e-books and blog posts.
Ulysses is designed for writing, but not specifically for fiction book writers, so it doesn’t have the same target towards fiction-writing that some of the other apps mentioned above do.
Its pricing comes in at about $39.99 per year.
How to Select the Best Writer App for You
Let’s look at the factors which might affect how you choose the writing app or software to best suit your purposes.
Your Budget
Your available budget is bound to be a deciding factor as to which app you choose. When taking this into account, a key point of consideration is whether you hope to traditionally publish or self-publish your work.
If you’re planning to self-publish, and you intend to take your author business seriously by investing in professional editing, advertising and marketing, then investing in apps at all stages of the writing, editing and publishing process can make financial sense.
If an app allows you to write better books faster, then it’s going to allow you to publish more books – and if you’re running your own self-publishing business, then increasing the volume of high-quality books you publish can substantially improve your income.
For those hoping to be published traditionally, there’s still much to gain through investing in an app which helps you write the best story and prose possible. Storyteller and ProWritingAid can help with this. As long as your grammar is decent, it’s less necessary to spend money on proofreading and typesetting apps, such as Atticus and Grammarly, than it is for those intending to self-publish.
Purpose of the App and Stage of your Writing
As we’ve seen, different apps have different purposes, though there are crossovers between them. Which app you choose will be influenced by what you’re seeking to achieve.
If you’re looking for help getting started on your story idea and planning your novel, then an app like Plottr could help you at this stage of your writing.
If you’re needing an app to help you organise your scenes as you write, then Ulysses, Scrivener or Fictionary might be just what you’re looking for.
Once you’ve completed your first draft, then you’ll need to structurally edit your novel, in which case Fictionary Storyteller will be perfect for your needs.
After your story has been structurally edited, then you’ll want to target your prose in more detail through a copy-edit, and PrWritingAid might be ideal at this point.
What you don’t want to do is skip one of the earlier stages in favour of the latter. Writing a successful novel is about so much more than having perfectly crafted sentences.
Indeed, if you’re hoping to get your work traditionally published, whilst you’ll want your draft to be in good shape as regards spelling and grammar, it’s arguably even more important to focus on creating a structurally sound and immersive story.
Conclusion
Now we’ve looked through how different writing tools can help you at different stages of writing a book, you should be in a strong position to start trialling out the different apps which may be best suited to your needs.