Zealous Notes vs Wrighter
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Zealous Notes
Organize your thoughts with a versatile note-taking application. Link related notes, embed various media files directly, and enhance your text with markup tools. Features include searchable PDFs, video playback, and audio transcription.
- Stackable and linked notes
- Inline PDF, video, and audio embedding
- Searchable and mark-upable PDFs
- Audio transcription
- Hashtag organization
- Marker mode with zoom
- Calendar event linking
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A lot like the Notes app you're used to, plus some added features: • Open several notes as a stack. - related notes can be linked together. • Subdivide your notes into Sections • PDFs, Video & Audio files attach inline, alongside your notes' other contents. - PDFs can be zoomed, scrolled, searched & marked-up. - Videos can play picture-in-picture or full-screen - Voice Notes audio files can be transcribed (with your permission) • Keep related notes together: - embed related notes as attachments - assign relatable #hashtags to your notes • Marker Mode - mark anywhere inside or outside of your notes - link markup with your highlighted or underlined text. - zoom-in for more precise drawings. • Link notes to your Calendar events (with your permission) • Case sensitive Find/Replace/Replace-All • Multiple Line-Spacing options See the included `Getting Started` guide for more, including several additional features available from within the app's Settings.
Wrighter
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Write anything, anywhere. Novels, memoir, non-fiction, theses, screenplays, comics and poetry each with their own layout and tools, on your Mac, iPhone, iPad, Windows or Linux computer, with your book and your research synced across them all. Wrighter takes you from first draft through the self-editing pass where a book gets written, and every scene of prose gets a Wrighter score out of 100 for the things an editor would mark. I have written about 500,000 words over twenty years, and for a long time failed to finish any of them. The apps I used excelled at the first draft yet provided little help at all with what came next. I would open a manuscript, not know where to start, and close it again. Wrighter is what I built when I stopped believing it came down to a discipline problem. Drafting still comes first. Wrighter allows you to write full screen with no other windows to distract you, or with two scenes side by side, against a sprint timer or a word target. Wrighter has a write-forward lock too, because reworking the last paragraph is how a chapter takes four months. Every scene carries a Wrighter score. It finds clichés, adverbs propping up weak verbs, passive voice, the same distinctive word four times on a page, filler, filter words, telling where you meant to show, sentences that run too long, and a good deal more. The score matters less than the exercise of helping you critique your own work: somewhere to start, and a way of knowing a scene is done rather than merely that you are tired of it. Where you disagree with it, you win. Flag a phrase as deliberate and it stops costing you points, and your overrides collect into a style sheet that follows you from book to book. The scoring uses a set of written rules applied on your own machine. Wrighter uses no AI anywhere in the app. Writing a thesis or a paper? Build a reference library by ISBN or DOI, or from a PDF you have open. Cite a source as you type, including page number, and add footnotes the same way. Wrighter checks that every citation matches a source, builds the bibliography in APA, MLA, Chicago or Harvard, and keeps the PDFs you quote, with your highlights, a tap away. Switch from Harvard to APA and every citation in the work rewrites itself. Writing fiction or a screenplay? Wrighter can't tell you whether your story is any good, but it helps you make it stronger. Build each character's arc from a classic archetype. Wrighter automatically knows who's in which scene and where the scene takes place. Drive mood, tension and conflict by understanding where your character is in handy pop-up cards. Start the action 'in the middle of things'. Full-book zoomable index card view or outline view help you sequence your work. The dashboard tells you where to pick up the work and what most needs your attention. Take your Research wherever you go: PDFs, web pages and pictures, shared in from any app. Highlight a PDF with the Pencil on the iPad and the marks arrive on your Mac and iPhone too. Bring your work in from .scriv, .fdx, Word and Markdown, and send it out as Word, PDF, ePub or .fdx, or publish it straight to WordPress, Ghost or Micro.blog. Nothing you write leaves your device unless you switch sync on. If you stop paying you keep read access and export permanently. Nobody loses a book because a card expired. One purchase covers Mac, iPhone, iPad, Windows, Linux, and phones and tablets outside Apple's ecosystem, on every tier, with 1 GB of storage for your research and pictures. Seven days free on either subscription, then £1.99 a month, £19.99 a year, or £49.99 once. There are no sales, so there is nothing to wait for. Wrighter is made in the United Kingdom by one person. Many an amazing book never made it past the copy editor's red circles. Wrighter brings the mechanics. You bring the story. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: Wrighter at Free against Zealous Notes's $4.99. Wrighter also leads on update cadence (every 3 days vs every 8 days) and iOS requirement (17.0 vs 26.0). Zealous Notes's advantage is in-app purchases (none vs 3). On ads and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Wrighter is free to download; Zealous Notes costs $4.99 up front. Wrighter sells 3 in-app purchases, starting at $1.99 per month. Zealous Notes asks for nothing beyond the download.
Zealous Notes ships an update every 8 days, Wrighter every 3 days. The most recent releases landed on November 3, 2026 and October 31, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Zealous Notes | Wrighter |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $4.99 | Free — better |
| Rating | 4.3 (3 ratings) — better | — |
| Number of ratings | 3 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 8 days | Every 3 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No — better | Yes |
| Monetization | Paid | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad, Mac — better |
| Requires iOS | 26.0 | 17.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 265 MB | 26 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Jason Browning | Defiance Strategy Ltd |
In-app purchases
Zealous Notes
No in-app purchases
Wrighter
- Monthly7 Days trial$1.991 Month
- Annual7 Days trial$19.991 Year
- Lifetime$49.99









