Ulysses – The Ultimate Writing App App Reviews

It is quite unusual for me to write a review, but Ulysses and the Soulmen have so much soul that I just wanted to publicly aknowledge it. In the (now) many years using this product, I have had two issues, and both were resolved by support within a few hours. For me, this has become the perfect example of the spirit of what indie dev should be, and what my company should aspire to be, despite having a more complex product. That said, the interface of ULysses is so simple, yet complete, to achieve seemingly complex tasks, that you can see that a huge amount of work has gone into it, from thinking to design to implementation. I have used and abused Ulysses since its early days, and it has replaced all my editors, save Xcode. The custom CSS enables me to use Ulysses for everything: reports, letters, brochures… and export it as docx/pdf for our less tech savvy (sales) team. Altogether, an awesome product and an awesome support team, making it one of my few must-have apps on all my devices!

Without a doubt my favorite app for writing. I’m a firm believer that there is no one size fits all solution, but this comes very close for me. By this point, I think I’ve tried every other application targeted for writers and I keep coming back to Ulysses. It’s incredibily well thought out and a joy to use. At some point, I’d love to see some autotext features like Scrivener’s autonumbering for chapters, scenes, etc., but honestly I’m quite happy with the application as it is. It’s my first recommendation for people looking for a good application that can both let them focus on the task of writing, while still being a comprehensive library of their work.

This is my favorite app. It is minimal, yet beautiful. Simple, yet profoundly capable. If you hate writing in Word/Pages and found the idea of Scrivener to be appealing, but needed something more streamlined then I highly recommend you try a demo of Ulysses. I use it for a daily journal, YouTube scripts, note taking, blog posts, novel writing and researching, and pretty much anything else. I’ve tried a lot of writing apps, but Ulysses has stolen my heart.

I’ve been a fan for a long time. For both essays and blogs as well as longer book-length work, Ulysses is the perfect way to keep your writing organized and at your finger tips. Now with the ability to publish directly to WordPress, along with all the other ways to export, Ulysses is better than ever. When I’ve needed help, the support team is responsive and helpful. I can’t say enough about how much I love it.

Ulysses hits perfectly between the hack of using a standard word processor and folders to create long-form writing, such as a novel, and the too-much-to-be-worth-the-effort kitchen sink approach of Scrivener. I have become many times more productive since I started using it and it quickly, quickly, QUICKLY justified itself in terms of cost. Even when working on a screenplay, which was unexpected. I also used to use Focused, which is a great little distraction-free editor for focused writing, because it had better options than Ulysses, but with this latest update, Ulysses is now on par and I find that I no longer need the separate app (which makes me feel bad for the Focused team, but I can’t fault the Ulysses team). And thanks for allowing different setting between window and fullscreen modes, so I can keep one in light mode without highlighting for editing and the other in dark mode with sentence highlighting when I’m focused on writing. Such a small thing makes this app so much more pleasant to use. I gifted the app, both Mac & iOS, to another writer because I believe in it that much. Thank you for making my life a little less painful.

I used to write with Scrivener, also Storyist, not to mention various word processsors. I tried Ulysses because I wanted a seamless editing experience involving several Macs and my iPad, fully intending to go back to Scrivener once they got their iPad version going. To my surprise, I now prefer Ulysses to everything else. I never have to worry about having my work open on several machines. It stays seamlessly synced all the time and I just pick up whatever machine closest (even my iPhone now) and the blinking cursor is waiting where I left it on the last machine I worked on. Marvelous. Better syncing than anyone else because its embedded right into iCloud. Not file based but work based. I also thought I needed all the complexity and features of Scriverner, but there is something about Ulysses that just makes it so easy to pick up and work with, even if I’ve only got five minutes of free time to scribble down some ideas. Almost like it draws the words out of me. Simplicity seems to be its own reward, at least for me. So despite completing my original quest, and getting Scrivener on my iPad, I find I’m much more creative in Ulysses. I’ve learned how to organize my work in it and it simply works for writing novels. Not the result I expected, but I’m a very happy camper who is writing more words now than ever before. Wonderful tool that is always there but never gets in the way.

This product is far too pricey to justify being promoted as a do-all writing app. It’s for technical writing and blogging, mainly. The claims of being “distraction free” are disjointed from the reality of the experience. In their own marketing screenshots there is a paragraph littered with hashtags, text in a rainbow of different colors and a little box that says [IMG]. Those elements do not enhance focus in the slightest. Those elements are like clarity roadblocks when re-reading one’s work. I don’t want to mentally parse that visual garbage, as if I’m reading a Twitter feed, while trying to keep myself in a creative zone. Reinventing paradigms and terminology under the guise of “innovation” might be ok for an app that costs $4.99; but this app costs ten times that much. (“Sheets”? “Inbox”? …Why do I need to relearn this stuff just to write?) As I’ve recently discovered, Scrivener is the tool of choice if you’re trying to do creative writing, fiction, essays and the like. (Look at the reviews if you don’t believe me —Scrivener out-ranked Ulysses in a matter of weeks. No contest. )

I own all versions of this application. It runs just as it is designed to. The UX is very simple, yet beautiful. IMHO, it’s worth every penny. I enjoy using it very much for a host of different mediums that I publish to. I use it everyday. If I had one feature request, it would be for an option to password protect the application or password protect certain folders, would be even better.

As a writer, blogger and someone who seeks organization in all aspects of my life, I have to say, the past 20 hours of having this new app has got me SO satisfied. I was a little skeptical as Ive never bought an app for more than 19.99 but this sort of platform is worth it. From its easy directions to its layout, I am really loving it on both my iphone, macbook and imac. I can only hope future updates adds more to enhance the app, if thats even possible.

The 2.6 update broke typewriter scrollilng, despite it being mentioned as a “big ticket” new feature on their blog. Support acknowledges the problem but won’t commit to a timeline for a fix. When you put out a productivity app, it’s not acceptable to break a core feature and not deliver a fix. Imagine if Pages or MS Word broke scrolling and didn’t have a patch ready for 3 weeks. This app used to be great, but it’s really not ready for prime time. Steer clear for now. If the company’s track record so far is any indication of future reliability, it’s time to migrate to a different writing tool. Still, the UI is very clean and would work well as a day-to-day tool if the core features worked properly.

This app makes it so, so much easier to write both novel-length things and web things. I came from Scrivener, and I missed a lot of features at first, but eventually I realized that for everything I missed, Ulysses had a better, cleaner, less baroque way of solving the same problem. Plain text with markdown takes a bit of getting used to, but as soon as you do, you’ll never want to go back. The library system also feels frictionless, and a lot less work than creating files or Scrivener projects. I want every writer to buy this app so that the Soulmen keep improving this incredible product.

Ulysses is a beautiful, intuitive and non-distracting writing environment. I consider it the “home base” for almost* all the creative writing I do, from brainstorming all the way through final versions. The design looks and feels simple and intuitive on the surface, but also packs a lot of thoughful features that stay out of your way until you need them. And your files are encoded in plain text, so you’re not locked into Ulysses forever — any basic text editor will be able to open and edit them, formatting intact. * If Ulysses supported Fountain screenwriting syntax (which is plain text-based), I’d try it for screenplays as well. Hopefully they’ll get around to that at some point.

When Scrivener released an iOS app, I decided to give Scrivener another look, both on the desktop and mobile. It’s a solid app all around, and the iOS app is amazingly solid for a first release. But after a few days of tooling around in it I went back to Ulysses. Ulysses has a few advantages over Scrivener at least for the way I like to work: First, its UI is amazing. It’s beautiful, minimal, and you can tell that The Soulmen sweat the details. It gives you just enough flexibility to customize it to your taste, and then it just gets out of your way and lets you work. Scrivener’s UI is nice, but feels dated. The iOS app is better, but both versions simply give you too many options spread over too many windows and pop-ups that interact in odd ways. You set up default styles to control the look of your text, including text color, but the colors for everything else are in a completely separate window. And after spending all your time fidling with styles, those styles aren’t applied on export. It’s a sensible model, both Ulysses and Scrivener separate content from structure, but in many ways Scrivener *looks* like a word processor. That’s a huge win for Ulysses in my estimation. Second, I prefer how Ulysses handles exporting. I have some experience with web design, so the model that treats structure and presentation differently, and I like the stylesheet approach. Your mileage may vary, but I find this approach significantly more sensible and clear than Scrivener’s “window with a thousand options” approach. Finally, syncing. Ulysses iCloud syncing is the most solid syncing I’ve ever experienced. I’ve never lost a word, and changes are reflected almost instantly. Scrivener uses Dropbox, which is all well and good, but its syncing is far too manual, and too easy to break by accident. Obviously, Ulysses isn’t perfect, and there are absolutely things that Scrivener does better. Scrivener may be a better choice for you in the following cases: You gather a lot of research. Scrivener will store files of any type in your project folder, and its split screen view makes referencing that research fairly simple (thgouh you have to dig through menus to do things like lock one of the panes). I’d love for Ulysses to get a split screen mode, but it’s not a big deal. More important, for me, would be the ability to view images and other attachments without having to open them in a different window. I’m not sure how this would work, given that Ulysses is a plain text editor and attaches images rather than embedding them, but it would be a game changer for me if they could figure it out. You like working on coarkboards. Ah, Scrivener’s corkboard, the one and only feature that gives me pause about uninstalling Scrivener. If only Ulysses had a similar view, where sheets could be viewed as cards and organized visually, it would be nearly perfect. And that’s it, really. Better handling of images and a cork board like feature would make Ulysses totally perfect for my needs.

Ulysses is sometimes dismissed for being pretty. It certainly is that, and the spare beauty of Ulysses’ UI is much of what makes it so alluring. This is an environment you will want to live in, even if the app’s organizational paradigm at first seems unfamiliar for a writing app or you are somewhat irked by the use of markdown tags (As an aside, Ulysses’ layout is very intuitive and closely resembles Mac OS’ Mail app. Also, you can use style sheets that hide the tags, but it’s likely you won’t even notice them after several sessions. You may even come to like them, as I did.) Ulysses is much more than a pretty face, however. It is a very powerful, very formidable writing environment which allows you to compose and manipulate texts of any kind and any length and export them to as many sources as you can imagine. It also allows you to view and organize all of your writing projects in one easily negotiable sidebar. This is perhaps the one function that Ulysses flat out has over on its chief competitor (and its only bona fide peer), Scrivener. In Scrivener, your view is limited to your current project; in Ulysses you are able to view anything and everything you write. The genius of Ulysses’ current iteration is reflected in a statement made by Soulman Marcus Fehn in a development diary published during the app’s construction. The Soulmen set out to completely demolish Ulysses’ previous iteration — a klodgy if feature-packed tangle — and completely rebuild it from the first floor. Fehn said the new app should appear simple and inviting to the user at first blush, and only reveal the layers of its complexity and power as the user engages it more. And that is exactly what the experience of using the latest Ulysses does: it draws you in effortlessly as you learn how to have it do what you need it to do. Although Ulysses and Scrivener are inevitably compared with one another, neither application is perfect — as their respective developers would (and have) acknowledged. Scrivener has more features, simply put. Some have bemoaned the fact that Scrivener comes with a nearly-600 page user manual. But it needs a whopping user manual because Scrivener simply does that much. Ulysses needs to be able to do more, also simply put. Not much more, just more. Fehn seems to get testy with feature requests, especially ones he fears will render Ulysses less unique (which may mean: more like Scrivener). But Ulysses’ genius is dependant on its power and utility, and not just its beauty. Features which Scrivener currently has and Ulysses does not are the only way to keep that balance, not because Scrivener has them, but because they are necessary to productive writing in a single environment. Some way to bring research documents into Ulysses — web pages, PDFs, and the like — and store them would transform the app, as would the ability to import and split a document composed elsewhere. These are a couple of examples; I could offer several more that in total would make Ulysses as near to perfect as is reasonable to expect in a material world. A possible irony may be this: I suspect that in its next iteration, Scrivener will look — and perhaps even act — a lot more like Ulysses than it currently does, and if so it will be for a couple of reasons. First, Scrivener’s developer, Keith Blount, is a real admirer of Ulysses and of the Soulmen; he appreciates Ulysses’ singularity and power as a writing tool and he digs the way in which the Soulmen develop software. But the second reason is more fundamental, and is a reflection of Keith’s pragmatic heart: Ulysses works, and it works very well, in ways Scrivener currently does not. And no matter whose idea it was or who thought of it first or who won what award, this is the only thing that matters to the real writers who depend on these tools.

First of all, my compliments for the simple yet elegant UI. Dark mode is especially nice. I have used versions of Scrivener for a few years now. Going away from that I was looking for a more streamlined place for me to collect my thoughts and focus on tasks at hand - plus I felt it was overly bloated with gimmicky “features". The hierarchy system is wonderful and the entire intro process (less the single page including code insertion) took me about 15 mins. I’m highly impressed and I really apprecaite the powerful tool implementation without the UI clutter. Very fast app, iCloud syncing is great, and learning the 25 or so language tags was simple and made a lot of sense. I would highly recommend this app for anyone that likes to write and requires a powerful, non-linear-approach platform for larger undertakings (and to be honest, I’d recommend it for linear writing or shoter works all the same). Very well designed and with just the perfect amount of features required to make writing the primary focus yet definitely powerful enough for professional power users that demand the best. Thanks guys!

Four years into writing a historical novel I kept trying to convince myself that it was me, and not Scrivener, that was the problem. I tried, really really tried, to learn it and like it. After trying every solution I could find to sync Scrivener with iPad a year before they finally released their own iOS version, I gave up and bought Ulysses. Day by day I fell in love with Ulysses and eventually transferred the entire 100K word mess over to it. Amazingly I then started to make very quick progress. It was a joy to use, and most importantly to write! The iCloud sync is best in class - far superior to Dropbox. Version control on an iPad for restores - yes, they have it! So incredibly intuitive and easy. So I came over and purchased the Mac version, expecting the same. I was wrong. It’s just as amazing the the iOS version in its own right, if not moreso. I can edit on one side of the screen, and instantly see a updated preview of the export on the other side. You can customize the look and feel, customize the export, and use keyboard shortcuts for italics and bold - there’s no need to learn markup if you don’t want to though I’ve found it very simple to pick up. The only downside - I’m kicking myself that I didn’t switch sooner. Don’t make the same mistake. Download the free trial on their website or jump in and buy a version. Also be sure to download the eBook on Apple’s bookstore as it contains some really good tips from an author who uses it daily and has published quite a few books.

Ulysses provides that sense of delight that is the main reason a lot of us stick with the Mac environment. It doesn’t do everything—sometimes I need to jump into TextMate for heavy lifting (I know the cool kids have moved to Sublime text but I just can’t move on) or use Pandoc or Marked for some post processing—but Ulysses is my favorite place to hang out and write. Organizing my writing feels really smooth and easy, I love taking notes inline that disappear on export, and not having to worry about formatting is great. It’s just the right combination of powerful and simple for my needs. I think that Ulysses competes with something like Scrivener. It is a very different take on an app that is meant to accomplish many of the same purposes. Scrivener has more features, but I find that most of the extra stuff just adds friction. They’re both great apps and they both have trial copies on their websites, so I would try them both out if you’re in the market for something that lets you write and organize text, and that is especially good for large projects like writing a novel. I’m always looking forward to feature updates in the future that provide things like better tables support, but the app as it currently exists is my favorite writing environment.

Ive written over 200,000 words in Ulysses, and it is the best overall platform for writing. It is also one of the most robust exporting and publishing tools that I am aware of. The one tiny critique that I have is that its Mac and iOS development moves slowly (which is understandable for quality software). That said, I would rate it higher if I could.

As a journalist who spends most of his time writing, I cant imagine my life without this app. I looked far and wide for an alternative to Microsoft Word (which is an abomination) and was skeptical of everything I found and tried. With Ulysses it was love at first sight. So elegant, so gorgeous, so simple. And yet, the more i used it, the more I realized just how powerful it can be. It’s like what they say about the ancient game of Go: takes 10 minutes to learn, but a lifetime to master. Ulysses restores the craft and beauty of writing to the digital age when everything just feels like pixels on an empty screen. A+++++++++

Between Scrivier, IA Writer, Microsoft Word, SublimeText, Atom, Google Docs — so far Ulysses is the best-designed applicaiton there is. It is totally seamless and beautiful. The remaining issues I would reccommend for Ulysses programmers to fix: (1) Ulysses absolutely NEEDS hotkeys for formatting, and needs for users to be able to assign these hotkeys as they please and sync their preferences using iCloud/DropBox, and export these preferences. (2) What is the best way to export to RTF, Microsoft Word. This is a dealbreaker for my office. Less critical: (3) People are leaving for much worse Scrivier because it is simpler to combine citations collections and documents-within-documents (binders) like Scrivier has. (4) The “About” dialog needs to indicate that the user is using the latest possbile release even though to advanced users this is obvious due to App Store updating. The About box should link to the website. Really items (1) and (2) are easily-fixable issues that is affecting many, many, many Ulysses users and will ultimately make or break this superb product. Keep up the great work and simplicity of the interface!