Twelve Markdown editors in 2026, checked against their own release pages

Disclosure: I work on Notula, which is the last of the twelve. Everything above it is about the category, and I have tried to be fair to the editors that beat us.

I went to write a comparison and found that almost every page ranking for "best markdown editor" is a small vendor's own blog with that vendor inside its own list. ShyEditor is first of twelve on shyeditor.com. mdclaudy is ninth of nine on mdclaudy.com. Nimbalyst is fifth of five on nimbalyst.com. None of them takes submissions, so there is no list to get onto - there are only lists people wrote.

So here is one more, with two rules. Every price, platform and release date below came off the project's own pages on 31 August 2026, not from another list. And I am last, and I say what is wrong with mine.

The row everybody has wrong

MarkText is described as unmaintained since March 2022 on essentially every one of those pages. Go and look at its releases: 0.19.1 shipped on 6 June 2025, and 0.20.0-rc.1 on 5 July 2025.

Nothing has shipped since, so the honest reading is neither "dead since 2022" nor "actively maintained". It is a project that came back once and then went quiet again. That matters if you are about to put a team on it, and it is the kind of thing that stays wrong for years once one list copies another.

Three questions before the list

Where do the files live? A folder you own, an app's own library, or somebody's server. This decides more than the interface does, and it is the one answer that is expensive to change later.

What do you look at while typing? WYSIWYG hides the syntax and shows you the document. Inline preview hides it everywhere except the line the cursor is on. Raw text with a preview pane shows you both. All three are defensible; they are not the same thing, and the pages that call all three WYSIWYG are why the term stopped meaning anything.

Does anybody else have to read it? Most of this list has no answer to that. Two of the browser tools have comments, one desktop editor does, and everything else assumes one person and one document.

The twelve

In no order.

Obsidian - best for a personal knowledge base. Free, no account, ordinary .md files in a folder you picked. Backlinks, a graph, and the largest plugin catalogue in the category. The editing surface is Live Preview, which is inline preview rather than WYSIWYG - you can see the syntax flicker back on the line the cursor is on. Sync is $4 a month, Publish $8, and there is a $50 commercial licence its own pricing page says you are not required to buy. If what you want is a place to think, stop reading here; nothing below is better at it.

Typora - best for one person writing prose. $14.99 once, up to three devices, fifteen-day trial, all three platforms. Typora established this way of working and is still the cleanest version of it. No collaboration of any kind and nothing resembling a comment. One writer, one file, and on that job it is very hard to beat for fifteen dollars.

VS Code - best when the Markdown is source. Free, and already open. Split preview. If the same repository holds the code, everybody touching the docs is a developer, and review already happens in a pull request, then adding an editor to that is a cost rather than a saving. The extensions advertising WYSIWYG either open a separate webview or hide the syntax only where the cursor is not.

iA Writer - best for drafting, and for typography. Pay once per platform, seven-day trial, Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPad. The syntax stays visible on purpose - this is a text editor with opinions about type - and the opinions are good. It is also the only editor here with Authorship, which colours what you typed apart from what you pasted and what a model wrote. Whatever you think about AI in a draft, that is the one honest answer anybody has shipped to it.

Ulysses - best for long-form on Apple hardware. $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, no one-time option, Mac, iPad and iPhone. A library, a research pile and a pipeline that publishes straight to WordPress and Medium, rather than a window onto a folder.

Bear - best for quick notes on Apple hardware. $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year. The best-looking thing in this list by some distance, with a tag system that beats folders for the way most people actually file notes. It keeps notes in a library of its own and exports Markdown, which is the sentence to read twice before you put three years of work in it.

Zettlr - best for academic writing. Free and open source, all three platforms. First-class Zotero and JabRef support, over nine thousand citation styles, Pandoc underneath, export profiles aimed at journal submission. Nothing else here is close on that job.

MarkText - best free WYSIWYG. Free, MIT, the closest free equivalent to Typora. See the section above before you commit a team to it.

Ghostwriter - best free editor on Windows and Linux. Free, GPL, a KDE project. Raw Markdown with a live preview pane, a focus mode that dims everything but the current sentence, and a Hemingway mode that turns off the backspace key. It is not trying to be WYSIWYG and does not pretend to be, which on this subject counts as a virtue.

StackEdit - best scratchpad in a browser. Free, open source, nothing to install, syncs to Drive and Dropbox. It holds position one on Google for the whole category on about four hundred words of copy, which says more about the result page than about the editor - but for pasting something in and seeing how it renders, it is still the fastest answer there is.

HackMD - best for a team drafting in a browser. The free tier carries in-line and page comments, three invitees and twenty GitHub pushes a month; Prime is $5 a seat. Real-time co-editing, and the document syncs to a repository. The trade is which direction it syncs: the document lives on their server and visits your repo, so the comments, the history and the access list are theirs rather than yours.

Notula - the one I make. Free, no account, no server, macOS and Windows. It opens a git repository as a tree of documents rather than a list of files, hides the syntax everywhere including the line the cursor is on, edits a pipe table as a table and draws a Mermaid block as a diagram in the document. The part nothing else here has: select a passage, leave a comment, get a reply, resolve it - and the thread is committed beside the document as a plain file, so it arrives with a clone, works offline and outlives any account. On the question that decides whether a WYSIWYG editor is usable in a repository at all, the round trip is byte-identical across six thousand real documents and a one-word edit leaves 96.4% of blocks untouched. What is wrong with it: it is closed source, there is no Linux build yet, everybody who comments needs the repository and a desktop, and the builds are not code-signed yet, so macOS quarantines the download and Windows shows a SmartScreen warning the first time.

The same twelve in a table

The last column is the one no competing list carries, and it is the one that is expensive to get wrong. Two of these keep your writing in a library of their own, and one keeps it on a server you do not run.

If the docs are already in a git repository

That is the case this list is thin on. The documentation sits in the repo beside the code, which is the right place for it - and then the people who have to read it, the PM and the support lead and the person who actually knows whether the sentence is true, are outside the repo looking in. That gap is why I built Notula, and it is the only claim I would make for it.