Could there be more even more writing apps? Oh. My. God. There are!
Here are four more—two came from the developers asking me to review their app, one from an ad I saw on Reddit, and one I found on my own.
First the ad:
Understory Free just for writing/$10 per month for the AI
This app mainly for writers to have their story read and reviewed by AI. You can write in it and add in characters and locations to the codex, but really it’s geared toward AI. So, if you are looking for AI to analyze your story, Understory might be want you want.
Now the requests:
Plotiar A free basic tier/$5 per month for more features/$10 per month for AI (Updated 11/12/2026)
Plotiar is a good program especially for a brand new author.
As this is an updated review, I have to start out by saying that the app looks so much better than the last time I was here. The text editor is nicely detailed with everything an author might want. Some items, like putting in text messages, are grayed out presumably because they’re only available on the Plus Plan.
For tracking your scenes, you can choose to have an open canvas, kanban board, bulletin board, and more.
These all make it really easy and nice to plot out your story. There are templates by genre which then give you genre specific templates for character creation and plot board. I appreciate the family tree option and, I’m not sure if it’s only in the Romance template or not, a Relationship Board where you can link different characters based on the role they play in the story.
If you pay for AI features, you can use it ask questions if, for example, you forget what you named the hero’s dog.
And finally, in the online version of the software, there is a “Cover Studio” where you can create a basic cover–both front and print wrap around. While this is very nice, there doesn’t seem to be a way to format your book. When you export, it save it as a Word document.
On the whole, this is a very nice app, especially if you’re looking for any sort of assistance (both through templates and/or AI). The app is available for use online or you can download a desktop version to use locally on your own computer.
One note: when I went to download the app to my computer, all of my Mac’s defenses went into high gear and I would have had to override them in order to download the software. As I didn’t 110% trust it, I decided not to do that. However, you can also use the app online, so you don’t have to actually download anything. This can also be nice if you want to work on a different computer, table, or phone as your work is all in the cloud.
StoryLine Scribe 30 day free trial, then $69.99 flat fee
In June, I wrote a review of the Obsidian Plugin StoryLine. Well, the developers have now released a new version as a standalone app—and it’s so much better! I liked the plugin, but I didn’t love it. This new app… well, it’s making me rethink the other software I just bought because it’s so good.
You can write or import your work easily into the app, and then the magic happens. There is a “Board” (either bulletin board or kanban), a “Plot Grid” which allows you to look at your work in a table which you can organize however you want (I put beats down the left-hand column and then each subplot along the top), a “TimeLine” (when you input information about each scene you can specify act, chapter, and/or chronological order, “Plotline” which lists all the scenes in each subplot of your novel, a “Codex” where you can input your characters (in a very nice malleable form), location, organizations, and culture. The fun bit of the codex is the last option, the “Story Graph” which shows you all of the relationships within you novel—from character to character and scene to scene.
And finally, there is formatting — it has the nicest formatting I’ve seen in a writing app — you can choose everything independently, there are no pre-designed layouts. There is also a cover design area where you can upload your images and add text. I’d still hire a professional cover designer, but if you don’t have the funds for that, this is a good second option.
All-in-all, I am really impressed with this software.
Found on my own:
Campfire – Free
This is definitely an app for fantasy and scifi authors. Just look at the basic menu:
This is an interesting app that is fundamentally made up of panels or blocks of information. When you create a new character, location, or whatever, you are given page of panels which you can then add to, remove, rearrange, and edit. One interesting thing with this is that, for example, when I created a character I rearranged the panels exactly the way I wanted and filled them with the information I needed. Then, I went to create a second character, and I had to do it all over again—from scratch. There doesn’t seem to be a way to save your set-up or a template.
Interestingly, once you are finished writing your story, not only can you export it as an epub or PDF, but then you can publish it to Campfire’s own store where others can purchase it.
If you write (or read) speculative fiction, I highly recommend testing this app out.
So, there you have it, four more apps. If you are interested in a list of all the apps I’ve reviewed, you can find it here.