Verso vs Ulysses

I built Verso. I also respect Ulysses a lot. Both are great Mac writing apps. They’re just built on completely different assumptions, which means they solve different problems for different people.

The Pricing Question

Ulysses is $39.99 a year. Verso is $14.99, once, forever, the end.

No subscription. No account. No cloud. After you buy it, you own it.

Right now Verso is free during early access. When we launch it’ll be $14.99 on the Mac App Store. If you buy it now, you’ll own it then too.

This isn’t the only difference between these apps. But it’s the biggest one. It shapes everything. Ulysses needs to justify $600 over ten years of use. Verso doesn’t. That changes what we build, how we think about priorities, and what bets we make.

What Ulysses Does Better

Ulysses is built for writers who manage big projects.

Writing a novel? A thesis? Running a 200-post blog? Ulysses has a library system. You organize your work. Set goals. Track deadlines. Everything syncs across Mac, iPad, iPhone. It’s a complete workspace.

Verso doesn’t have any of that. We have folders. Your file system. That’s it. If you need a purpose-built writing environment with real project management, Ulysses wins. Say that honestly.

Ulysses has a grammar and style checker that works in 20+ languages. That’s real. Verso doesn’t have one. If that matters to you, Ulysses is the answer.

Ulysses publishes directly to WordPress, Ghost, Medium. You write in Ulysses, hit publish, your blog updates. Verso exports to PDF. You handle the rest.

And Ulysses has been around since 2013. They’ve earned their reputation. Verso is new. That matters too.

What Verso Does Better

Verso opens Word documents. Both .docx and .doc. OpenDocument files. RTF. Plain text. Markdown. HTML.

Ulysses is Markdown only. Doesn’t open Word files.

If you work with .docx files (which, let’s be honest, a lot of people do), you can open them in Verso, edit them, save them back. Ulysses can’t.

Verso has comments. Ulysses doesn’t. If you need to annotate drafts or leave notes for collaborators, Verso has it.

Both have footnotes and tables. Verso also has headers, footers, and page-level formatting. Paste a table from ChatGPT or Gemini and it lands as a proper grid. Paste LaTeX math and it renders. If you’re doing academic work or professional reports that need to look right when printed or exported as .docx, those matter.

Focus Mode

Verso has a proper Focus Mode (Cmd+Shift+F). Every toolbar, sidebar, and status bar disappears. Only the page is visible. Nothing else. The sentence you’re typing stays fully visible while surrounding text dims to about a third opacity. When you’re done, press Esc and your entire workspace comes back exactly as it was. Ulysses doesn’t have anything like this.

Verso is 8 MB. Requires macOS 14 and up. Not bloated. Opens in a second. No spinning wheel.

And there’s something honest about a Mac-only, offline-first writing app. No cloud. No account. No recurring bill. Your file is just a file in your file system. Open it in ten years with whatever you want.

Who Should Use What

Use Ulysses if: You write across multiple Apple devices and want everything in sync. You prefer Markdown. You want a grammar checker. You publish to WordPress or Ghost. You’re managing a big creative project like a novel. You don’t mind paying $40 a year for a polished, specialized tool.

Use Verso if: You write on Mac. You deal with .docx files. Academic papers. Grant applications. Reports. Manuscripts that go back and forth with professors, editors, collaborators. You want comments and footnotes. You want Focus Mode where only the page exists and only your current sentence is visible. You want one purchase, no subscription. You like apps lightweight and offline, that don’t get in the way. You’re a student, researcher, freelancer, anyone who needs a real word processor without Word’s bloat.

Both are solid. Built by small teams that actually care about writing. The real question is whether your workflow lives in Markdown or .docx. That decides it.

The Honest Comparison

The Real Difference

Ulysses is a subscription. It needs to solve enough problems well enough that you’ll pay every year. For the right person, it does. The library system, the sync, the grammar checker, the blog publishing, they all work together. It’s one coherent product built around a specific workflow.

Verso is not a subscription. We can focus on doing what we do well, opening your documents, letting you edit them clean, without needing to justify recurring revenue. That lets us focus on compatibility and efficiency instead of locking you in.

Neither is wrong. Just different.

If you write on a single Mac, work with Word documents, want to own your tools, Verso’s for you. If you’re managing a big project across multiple devices and want a specialized workspace, Ulysses makes sense. If you want to try Ulysses risk-free, they have 14 days. Go to ulysses.app and check their pricing page.

Verso is free right now during early access. Try it at verso’s download page. When we launch it’ll be $14.99. Learn more at verso’s help section.

Part of why I built Verso is that I missed something. Word processors used to be simple. You opened them and they were just there. A page. A cursor. No project library. No sync setup. No “welcome to your writing journey.” Maybe that’s nostalgia. Maybe those old tools were actually clunky and I’m remembering wrong. But I wanted to find out. So I built one.

The best writing app is the one that doesn’t get in your way. For some people that’s Ulysses. For others it’s Verso. Both true.