Ulysses Review: Pure Writing Polish Trapped in Apple's Walled Garden
Ulysses is one of the most refined long-form writing environments on macOS and iOS, but it asks for something many writers still resist: an ongoing subscription for a text editor. Priced at $39.99 per year or $5.99 per month (with a $10.99 six-month rate for verified students), Ulysses charges recurring rent in a market where notable rivals still sell perpetual licenses. For Apple-centric writers, that polish often justifies the fee. For anyone else, the platform restrictions and database design create hard boundaries.
The Sheet Model and Publishing Pipeline
Most writing apps treat every document as a separate window. Ulysses replaces that clutter with a unified three-pane library of groups and sheets. Sheets are modular text blocks you can split, reorder, or glue together into a continuous manuscript without leaving your keyboard.
Two capabilities solve distinct workflow problems:
- Material Sheets let you park research notes, character sketches, or interview transcripts alongside your draft while excluding them from the group's target word count.
- Direct CMS publishing allows bloggers and newsletter writers to push finished sheets straight to WordPress, Ghost, Medium, and Micro.blog, automatically mapping categories, tags, excerpts, and featured images without copying and pasting into a browser.
Full-screen mode dims everything except the current paragraph, while an integrated LanguageTool proofreader flags grammar, style redundancies, and punctuation across twenty languages. Apple Family Sharing covers up to five family members under one subscription.
The Storage Dilemma: Markdown XL vs. File Portability
The central tension in Ulysses is file ownership. Rather than saving standard .md files in your file system, Ulysses stores your library in a proprietary database synced via iCloud.
This architecture enables "Markdown XL," an extended syntax supporting side-panel attachments (notes, keywords, image cards, and word targets) outside the main body text.
Ulysses does offer an "External Folders" mode to read local directories, but pointing it at standard Markdown folders guts core features: Markdown XL annotations stop working, local image attachments and sheet goals disappear, and automatic backups are disabled.
Reddit discussions in r/UlyssesApp frequently focus on this trade-off. Users wanting to share files with Obsidian or git have to abandon the metadata that makes Ulysses appealing. Furthermore, when iCloud sync hiccups, troubleshooting conflicts inside a database bundle is far more frustrating than diffing plain text files.
Against Scrivener and iA Writer
Literature & Latte's Scrivener ($59.99 one-time on macOS) remains the standard for massive projects. Novelists on writing forums routinely point out that when an outline expands to dozens of subplots and research binders, Ulysses' sheet hierarchy feels too narrow. Scrivener offers corkboards, outliners, and complex compile presets that Ulysses deliberately omits to keep its interface clean.
On the minimalist end sits iA Writer ($49.99 one-time on Mac). It operates strictly on plain text files in your own directory tree with zero proprietary wrappers. It is clean and future-proof, but lacks project organization tools and direct publishing integrations.
Ulysses occupies the middle ground: more structured than basic markdown pads, yet far more focused than Scrivener's crowded desktop studio.
Where It Stumbles
Hardware lock-in is the most immediate blocker. Ulysses runs exclusively on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. There is no web app, no Windows client, and no Android companion. If your work requires a PC or you carry an Android phone, your library is inaccessible.
Then there is the financial equation. At $39.99 annually, Ulysses costs more after eighteen months than a perpetual license for Scrivener ($59.99) or iA Writer ($49.99). You can access it via a $14.99/month Setapp membership if you already use that catalog, but for standalone users, paying perpetual rent on a text editor remains a hard sell.
Finally, long-form manuscript planning has real ceilings:
- There is no corkboard or index-card matrix for visual plot structuring.
- Split-screen editing exists, but side-by-side comparison of different versions of the same sheet is cumbersome.
- The compile engine handles standard ebooks and clean PDFs well, but cannot match Scrivener's granular manuscript formatting rules.
Who It Fits (and Who Should Walk Away)
Pick Ulysses if you write on a Mac or iPad, publish regularly to web platforms like Ghost or WordPress, and value a focused library where research and goals stay organized. Skip it if you need Windows or Android access, insist on raw portable Markdown files, or prefer buying your software once.