Markdown editors
Twelve editors, no ranking, and no winner. Every price, platform and release date below was read off the project's own pages on 31 August 2026, which is why one row here contradicts most of the other lists on this subject. We make one of the twelve. It is last, it says so, and the three things wrong with it are in the same paragraph as the download.
People pick a Markdown editor on the screenshot and regret it on the third month. These are the questions that actually decide it, in the order they cost you money.
A folder you own, an app's own library, or somebody's server. This decides more than the interface does, and it is the one answer that is expensive to change later. If the documents are already in a git repository, half of this list is out before you look at it.
WYSIWYG hides the syntax and shows you the document. Inline preview hides it everywhere except the line the cursor is on. Raw text with a preview pane shows you both at once. All three are defensible; they are not the same thing, and the pages that call all three WYSIWYG are why the term stopped meaning anything.
Most of this list has no answer to that. Two of the browser tools have comments, one desktop editor does, and everything else assumes one person and one document. If a draft has to come back with somebody else's objections on it, ask this first rather than last.
In no order. Half of them are better than the others at something, and the useful sentence is the one that says at what.
Best for a personal knowledge base
Free, no account, and your notes are ordinary .md files in a folder you picked. Backlinks, a graph and the largest plugin catalogue in the category. The editing surface is Live Preview, which is inline preview rather than WYSIWYG - the syntax comes back on the line the cursor is on, and you can see it flicker as the caret moves through a heading. Sync is $4 a month, Publish $8, and the $50 commercial licence its own pricing page says you are not required to buy. If what you want is a place to think, stop reading here; nothing below is better at it.
Best for one person writing prose
$14.99 once, up to three devices, fifteen-day trial, and it runs everywhere. Typora established this way of working and is still the cleanest version of it - the syntax disappears as you finish typing it, and the document is the only thing on screen. There is no collaboration of any kind and nothing that resembles a comment. One writer, one file, and on that job it is very hard to beat for fifteen dollars.
Best when the Markdown is source
Free, and already open on the machine of everybody who would be editing. Split preview: the raw text in one pane and the rendering in the other. If the same repository holds the code, everybody touching the documents is a developer, and review already happens in a pull request, then adding an editor to that is a cost rather than a saving. The extensions advertising WYSIWYG either open a separate webview or hide the syntax only where the cursor is not.
Best for drafting, and for typography
Pay once per platform, seven-day trial, on Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPad. The syntax stays visible on purpose - this is a text editor with opinions about type, not a WYSIWYG one - and the opinions are good. It is also the only editor in this list with Authorship, which colours what you typed apart from what you pasted and what a model wrote. Whatever you think of AI in a draft, that is the one honest answer anybody has shipped to it.
Best for long-form on Apple hardware
$5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, with no one-time option, on Mac, iPad and iPhone. A library, a research pile and a publishing pipeline that pushes straight to WordPress and Medium, rather than a window onto a folder. If a book or a magazine piece is the unit of work and everything you own has an Apple logo on it, this is the one that was built for you.
Best for quick notes on Apple hardware
$2.99 a month or $29.99 a year, Mac, iPad and iPhone. The best-looking thing in this list by some distance, with a tag system that beats folders for the way most people actually file notes. It keeps its notes in a library of its own and exports Markdown, which is the sentence to read twice before you put three years of work in it.
Best for academic writing
Free and open source, Windows, macOS and Linux. First-class Zotero and JabRef support, over nine thousand citation styles, Pandoc underneath and export profiles aimed at journal and conference submission. Nothing else here is close on that job, and if your document ends as a PDF with a bibliography the choice is already made.
Best free WYSIWYG editor
Free, MIT, all three desktop platforms, and the closest free equivalent to Typora. It is also the row every other list on this query gets wrong: the line that MarkText has been unmaintained since March 2022 is repeated everywhere and is out of date. 0.19.1 shipped on 6 June 2025 and 0.20.0-rc.1 on 5 July 2025. Nothing has shipped since, so what the release page actually shows is a project that came back once and then went quiet again - read that page yourself before you commit a team to it.
Best free editor on Windows and Linux
Free, GPL, a KDE project, and it runs on Windows, Linux and macOS. Raw Markdown with a live preview pane, a focus mode that dims everything but the current sentence, and a Hemingway mode that turns off the backspace key. It is not trying to be WYSIWYG and does not pretend to be, which on this result page counts as a virtue.
Best scratchpad in a browser
Free, open source, nothing to install, and it syncs to Drive and Dropbox. Live preview, side by side. It holds position one on Google for the whole category on about four hundred words of copy, which says more about the result page than about the editor - but for pasting something in and seeing how it renders, it is still the fastest answer there is.
Best for a team drafting in a browser
The free tier carries in-line and page comments, three invitees and twenty GitHub pushes a month; Prime is $5 a seat. Real-time co-editing, and the document syncs to a repository. The trade is in which direction it syncs: the document lives on their server and visits your repository, so the comments, the history and the access list are theirs rather than yours.
Best for documentation that already lives in a git repository - and it is ours
We make this one, so read the row with that in mind. Free, no account, no server, macOS and Windows. It opens a repository as a tree of documents rather than a list of files, hides the syntax everywhere including the line the cursor is on, edits a pipe table as a table and draws a Mermaid block as a diagram in the document. The part nothing else in this list has: select a passage, leave a comment, get a reply, resolve it - and the thread is committed beside the document as a plain file, so it arrives with a clone, works offline and outlives any account. On the question that decides whether a WYSIWYG editor is usable in a repository at all, the round trip is byte-identical across six thousand real documents and a one-word edit leaves 96.4% of blocks untouched. What is wrong with it: it is closed source, there is no Linux build yet, everybody who comments needs the repository and a desktop, and the builds are not signed yet - macOS holds the download in quarantine and Windows shows a SmartScreen warning the first time you run it.
| Editor | Editing surface | Runs on | Price | Your files |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Obsidian | Inline preview | Desktop and mobile | Free | Plain .md in a folder |
| Typora | WYSIWYG | macOS, Windows, Linux | $14.99 once | Plain .md in a folder |
| VS Code | Split preview | macOS, Windows, Linux | Free | Plain .md in a folder |
| iA Writer | Raw text, styled | macOS, Windows, iOS | Once, per platform | Plain .md in a folder |
| Ulysses | Raw text, styled | macOS, iPadOS, iOS | $39.99 a year | Its own library |
| Bear | Inline preview | macOS, iPadOS, iOS | $29.99 a year | Its own library |
| Zettlr | Inline preview | macOS, Windows, Linux | Free, open source | Plain .md in a folder |
| MarkText | WYSIWYG | macOS, Windows, Linux | Free, MIT | Plain .md in a folder |
| Ghostwriter | Raw text and preview | Windows, Linux, macOS | Free, GPL | Plain .md in a folder |
| StackEdit | Live preview | Browser | Free, open source | Browser and cloud storage |
| HackMD | Live preview | Browser | Free tier, $5 a seat | Their server, synced to git |
| Notula | WYSIWYG | macOS, Windows | Free | Plain .md in your git repo |
Checked against each project's own pricing, download and release pages on 31 August 2026. The last column is the one the other lists on this subject leave out, and it is the one that is expensive to get wrong: two of these keep your writing in a library of their own, and one keeps it on a server you do not run.
There is no single answer, and every page that gives you one is selling something. The question splits three ways: where the files live, what you look at while you type, and whether anybody else has to read the document. Obsidian wins a personal knowledge base, Typora wins one person writing prose, Zettlr wins academic work, VS Code wins when the Markdown is source code, and a team drafting in a browser wants HackMD.
If everybody on the team is a developer, the answer is VS Code and a pull request, and adding a tool costs more than it saves. If they are not, the choice is between a browser tool like HackMD, where the document lives on somebody else's server, and a desktop editor that works on the repository directly. That second option is the one this page exists because of, and Notula is the entry in it.
MarkText is the closest, it is free and MIT-licensed, and it does the same in-place WYSIWYG. The caveat is maintenance rather than quality: 0.19.1 shipped in June 2025 and a release candidate in July 2025, and nothing since. Notula is free and does the same hiding of syntax with a different job in mind. Ghostwriter is free and excellent but shows you the raw text.
Typora, VS Code, Zettlr, MarkText, Ghostwriter and Notula all run on Windows. Bear and Ulysses do not and never will - they are Apple-only - which quietly removes the two prettiest entries from most of these lists if Windows is what you use. iA Writer does have a Windows build.
Very few. HackMD has in-line and page comments on its free tier, StackEdit can write a comment into the document, and Notula puts threads beside the file and commits them. Everything else in this list assumes one person and one document, which is why teams keep pasting Markdown into Google Docs to get it reviewed and then pasting it back.
That is the case this list is thin on, and it is the one Notula was built for. The documentation is in the repo beside the code, which is docs as code and is the right place for it - and then the people who have to read it, the product manager and the support lead and the person who actually knows whether the sentence is true, are outside the repo looking in. Notula is a WYSIWYG Markdown editor that opens the repository for them, with comment threads committed next to the documents.
Free, and it stays free. No account, no server. macOS and Windows.