Verso: Write.·Nought: Calculate.·Skein: Connect.

Cold Water, draft 3.docxEdited
Body ▾12 ▾BIUSTrack changes · on

A word processor for the Mac · v1.0.43

A word processor. A place to write.

TZTomasz · edited just now · reason: Clarity

You open the .docx your editor emailed you. You write. That’s the whole thing. It saves back to the same file, and never asks you to sign in.

Get Verso on the App Store14 day trial5 · $14.99 once · macOS 14+

Recent revisions

Thirty-seven releases since launch. Not built in a day, revised like a manuscript.

  1. 1.0.43Your citations survive the file, and headers and footers are finally complete.reported → shipped
  2. 1.0.42More saving fixes, for the person who formats without typing.reported → shipped
  3. 1.0.40Saving is fixed. If Save appeared to do nothing after you reopened a document, it works.reported → shipped
  4. 1.0.39PDF and HTML export work again, and pagination responds at once.reported → shipped
  5. 1.0.38If the App Store stopped recognising your purchase, it recognises it again. Word documents survive the round trip far better.reported → shipped
All 37 releases, in full →
Verso with a chapter open, the Changes panel showing a tracked deletion and insertion, and the inspector on the right.
Verso, mid-edit. Nothing here is a mock-up.

Brighton · 2026

I wrote a lot in Word, and then I wrote a lot in the things that were supposed to replace it. The replacements were lighter, but they all wanted something: a subscription, an account, a folder structure, a format of their own.

What I wanted was a Mac app that opened the .docx someone emailed me, let me work on it, and gave it back to them unchanged apart from the edits. That is a small ask and nothing was doing it.

So I built Verso. It is a word processor, which is an unfashionable thing to make, and it does the unfashionable part properly: your document opens, keeps its formatting, and saves back to the file it came from.

Tomasz

Page colour: Sepia. One of five, and the only one on this site.

Built for the Mac

Swift and AppKit. Not wrapped in a browser, not ported from Windows.

.docx in place

Opens and saves Word files directly. No import step, no export step.

Runs offline

Everything stays on your Mac. No sync, no login, no cloud.

Lightweight

9.0 MB download. Launches instantly.

The Word file goes back the way it came.

Word wants a subscription. Pages converts your document into its own format and hands it back changed. TextEdit stops at bold and italic. The lighter apps are lovely, and none of them will open the file your editor just emailed you.

Verso opens the .docx, edits it, and saves it back to itself. What Verso does not implement it leaves untouched rather than dropping, so the document survives the trip.3

The same document and the same window in dark mode.
Verso in light mode, with the Changes panel open beside the page listing a deletion and an insertion, each with its author and time.
Light
Dark
Same document, same window, same scroll. Only the theme moves.
Verso in focus mode: the page alone on a plain background, the paragraph being worked on held at full strength while the rest dims.
Focus mode. The paragraph you are in, and very little else.

Everything else fades.

One shortcut takes the application away. The toolbar goes, the sidebar goes, and the paragraphs around the one you are writing dim until they stop competing for attention.

What is left is a page and a cursor, and an esc to exit in the corner in case you want the room back.

Works with your files

.docxWord.mdMarkdown.rtfRich text.txtPlain text.pdfExport

What makes Verso different

Track changes

Insertions, deletions and comments, by author, with a Changes panel that shows what moved and lets you accept or reject it. Written to .docx the way Word writes it, so the person you send it to sees the same edits in the same colours.

Focus mode

One shortcut. The toolbar goes, the sidebar goes, the surrounding paragraphs dim, and the sentence you are writing stays lit. Escape brings the room back.

Markdown round-trip

Write in Markdown and save as .docx, or open a .docx and export it as Markdown. Mermaid diagrams and LaTeX maths render live rather than sitting in the file as unreadable source.

Everything else

Index

Full formatting
Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, superscript, subscript, colour, highlighting
Tables
Insert, resize, cell backgrounds, borders, row and column management
Page layout
A4, Letter, Legal. Portrait or landscape. Custom margins. Multi-column
Footnotes and TOC
Popover editing, auto-generated contents with page numbers
Headers and footers
Page numbers, custom text, and layout guides
Lists
Bullets, numbers, letters, Roman numerals. Five bullet styles
Find and Replace
Case-sensitive, whole-word, regex. Match counter
LaTeX math
Paste equations from ChatGPT or Gemini. Inline and display math
Customisable toolbar
Drag to reorder, toggle groups on or off. Your layout persists
Pinch to zoom
Trackpad pinch to zoom in and out of the document
Document outline
A sidebar of every heading, for moving through long documents
Mermaid diagrams
Flowcharts and sequence diagrams render live in Markdown documents
Style redefinition
Reformat a paragraph, then apply it to every paragraph in that style
Export to PDF
Print-ready PDF from any document
Watermarks
Text watermarks for drafts and confidential documents
Sixteen languages
Full UI localisation: English, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic, Polish, Chinese, French, Korean and more

What it costs

Price of Verso compared with three other Mac writing apps, as listed August 2026.
AppPriceFive years
Microsoft 365 PersonalWord is not sold separately in this plan$99.99a year$499.95
Ulysses$49.99a year$249.95
iA WriterMac only$49.99once$49.99
VersoAll updates included$14.99once$14.99

Word pricing via Microsoft 365 Personal.2 Download sizes from the same source on the same day.1

Try Verso free for 14 days.

Verso is written by one person and shipped in the open.4 It does not yet do everything you would expect from a word processor, but it gets better every week. If something feels off, I want to hear about it.

Get Verso on the App StoreTell me what is missing

9.0 MB · macOS 14 or later · Apple silicon and Intel · signed and notarised by Apple6

Notes

  1. 1.Download sizes as listed on the Mac App Store, August 2026. Verso 9.0 MB (v1.0.43); Microsoft Word 1,394 MB. Sizes vary by device and by macOS version, which is why both figures are quoted from the same source on the same day. ↩
  2. 2.Microsoft 365 Personal, $99.99 a year, billed annually, as listed August 2026. Word is also sold as a one-time purchase; the subscription is the route most people arrive by, and the one the comparison is about. ↩
  3. 3.Verso reads and writes .docx directly: the file you open is the file you save. Styles, tables, footnotes, headers, footers, numbering and comments survive the round trip. Features Verso does not implement are preserved untouched rather than dropped, so a document that passes through Verso comes back to Word intact. ↩
  4. 4.37 releases to date. The count is computed from the release notes rather than from the version number, because the history skips several versions and a number derived from v1.0.43 would overstate it. ↩
  5. 5.Fourteen day trial, then one payment. When a trial ends Verso becomes read-only: your documents still open, still scroll and still print. Nothing is held hostage. ↩
  6. 6.The headline at the top of this page is a real tracked change, struck text and all. It is the only marketing copy here that has been through an editorial process, and it lost. ↩