Comparison

Peak Browser vs Recto MD

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side โ€” with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Peak Browser

Features
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Open a tab. Everything else is already here. Look something up, keep what matters, and pick the thread back up later. Peak is a native browser workspace for focused work, creative projects and local collaboration across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. BROWSE YOUR WAY Fast WebKit tabs, saved sessions and bookmarks, and private profiles keeping work and personal browsing apart. Pin the ones you keep open all day, and find a closed one again. On iPad, put two tabs on screen at once and keep both live โ€” a video plays in one while you read the other. Incognito sessions stay temporary and never enter your history. THE PAGE BEFORE THE FIRST PAGE Push the start page to the right, as the Today View sits left of a phone's home screen, and Peak shows what is due and what is coming: a month grid, a week grid with real hours, and an agenda narrowing to whichever day you press. It shows both halves of a day: tasks with a due date arrive from your boards, and events you make here sit beside them. Overdue work comes first, because it is the only part that is already a problem. WHEN A LOOKUP BECOMES WORK โ€ข Block-based notes, Kanban task boards and infinite whiteboards โ€ข Calendar events, repeating or not โ€ข Projects that open as their own tab, holding pictures, clips and documents rather than links to them โ€ข A searchable library of everything Peak has made โ€ข A morning brief on the start page, off until you ask for it โ€ข Tools that run on the machine: background removal, text extraction, image compression, colour palettes, SVG tracing and 3D extrusion, article-to- Markdown, transcription, an SEO audit CUT VIDEO ON A REAL TIMELINE Clips sit on rows that overlap, so a title can lie over a shot and a music bed runs under all of them. Trim by dragging a clip's ends, hold a card longer by dragging past it, fade from the corners. Choose the frame first โ€” widescreen, 4K, square, portrait โ€” and everything you drop in is fitted to it. Switch the pane above and the same edit becomes a mixing desk, with a fader, mute, solo and a meter per row. Bounce the sound alone, or export the film. MUSIC THAT DOES NOT EXIST YET Waveform is a record shop for a catalogue nobody has made. Describe a song and it arrives as a release โ€” an invented artist, a record, a cover โ€” not as a loose file. Keep what is worth keeping, search it, archive rather than delete, and let the radio carry on from the words each song was asked for. Making audio uses your configured provider; what exists already plays with nothing connected. BUILD SITES AND APPS Start from one of eighteen finished templates, each running the real page rather than a picture of it, or from nothing. Write complete multi-page sites, preview as you go, export the result โ€” PeakUI as a native Xcode project. AI WHEN YOU CHOOSE Optional AI chat can research, write, read your documents and images, make media and build whole sites. It cuts on the timeline with you, reads and fills your calendar, and looks at its own slides before describing them. Run a model on the device itself and nothing leaves it: no account, no key, no bill. Peak suggests one your iPhone or iPad can actually hold rather than the best that exists. Apple Intelligence appears in the same menu wherever the system can run it, and can now use Peak's tools rather than only talk. Or bring your own provider, or a local Ollama model โ€” credentials stay in the Keychain. CONNECT LOCALLY WITH MESH Nearby Peak devices connect directly over your local network. Share tabs, chats, notes, boards, whiteboards, sites, decks and songs, each behind a toggle. A phone can borrow a model from a Mac in the same room: the Mac holds the weights, your phone asks, the reply streams back. No account, no server. PRIVATE BY DESIGN Your work stays on your device and syncs only through your own iCloud. There is no account to create, no analytics and no tracking. Cloud AI and outside services are used only when you choose them. Open a tab. Pick up where you left off.

About

Recto MD

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Recto MD opens a Markdown file and gets out of the way. Open one from Files, Mail or Safari with Open in Recto MD, or share it in from any app. On iPadOS and iOS 26, Files > Get Info > Always Open With makes it the default. Reading comes first: pick a file and it is on screen, typeset and ready, nothing to configure. When you want to change something, Edit mode puts the source next to the live preview - side by side on iPad, a Source/Preview switch on iPhone - and Save is explicit, so nothing is written until you ask for it. TYPOGRAPHY FIRST The reading column, the leading and the vertical rhythm are the product. Pinch to zoom the whole page from 50% to 300% - text, measure and margins scale together, the way a browser's page zoom does - the column measure also has three widths, and the page is laid out so a long document stays comfortable rather than merely legible. RENDERS WHAT YOUR DOCUMENTS ACTUALLY CONTAIN - CommonMark and GitHub Flavored Markdown: tables, task lists, strikethrough, autolinks, footnotes - GitHub-style alerts: NOTE, TIP, IMPORTANT, WARNING, CAUTION - Mermaid diagrams, loaded only when a document has one - Mathematics and chemistry, typeset by KaTeX: inline and display LaTeX, and mhchem chemical equations. The delimiters are narrow on purpose, so a price written as $5 stays a price - Syntax-highlighted fenced code blocks, with a copy button - Wide tables scroll inside the reading column, so the page itself never scrolls sideways EDITING, WHEN YOU WANT IT Edit mode puts a source pane beside the live preview - side by side on iPad, a Source/Preview switch on iPhone. Save is explicit, and nothing autosaves in the background. Export the document as a PDF whenever you want a copy to share. FIND YOUR WAY AROUND An outline is generated from the document's headings: a sheet on iPhone, a sidebar on iPad that also holds your recent documents. Search inside a document with a live match count and step through the matches. Recents remembers where you stopped reading and puts you back there. IT UPDATES WHILE YOU READ Change the file somewhere else and the document updates in place - same scroll position, no flash, no reload button to hunt for. If you have unsaved edits, the app stops and asks instead of choosing for you. Turn auto-reload off and you get a "File changed" tap target instead. A THEME EDITOR, NOT A THEME PICKER Duplicate a built-in theme or start from nothing, and tune it in six groups: text (font, scale, line height, spacing, indent, justification); headings (font, weight, an accent color, rules, and a size for each of the six levels); layout (column width by characters, points or percent, a max width, custom margins, a page-card look); sidebar (font size and step per level, row height, indent, background and accent mix); blocks (code font and size, table density and zebra striping, blockquote style, the code syntax palette); and color, down to the selection highlight. Import or export any theme as JSON. OFFLINE, AND PRIVATE BY CONSTRUCTION The app makes no network requests at all. No account, no sign-in, no analytics, no tracking, nothing collected. Your documents are files on your device or in your iCloud Drive, and that is where they stay. BUILT FOR THE PLATFORM Dynamic Type through to the accessibility sizes, VoiceOver reading real document structure, Increase Contrast, Reduce Motion and Reduce Transparency are all honoured. With a hardware keyboard, every navigation shortcut is independently rebindable - pick the key, choose Command, Option or Shift, and the app flags a conflict before you save one - and Open, Find, Find Next, Reload, the zoom commands and Settings are all one keystroke away, listed in the Command-hold sheet. The interface is available in twelve languages, with a System option and a picker for the one you want.

Screenshots

Peak Browser4 screens
Recto MD4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is update cadence: Recto MD at every 2 days against Peak Browser's every 2 weeks. On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.

Scored on Price ยท Rating ยท Positive reviews ยท Number of ratings ยท Update frequency ยท Ads ยท In-app purchases ยท Monetization ยท Best chart rank ยท Devices ยท Requires iOS

CostPrice ยท In-app purchases ยท Ads ยท Monetization

Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Peak Browser ships an update every 2 weeks, Recto MD every 2 days. The most recent releases landed on September 29, 2026 and October 2, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard1 real difference ยท 5 level
Peak Browser versus Recto MD: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterPeak BrowserRecto MD
PriceFreeFree
Update frequencyEvery 2 weeksEvery 2 days โ€” better
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
DevicesiPhone, iPad, MaciPhone, iPad, Mac
Requires iOS17.0 โ€” better18.0
Further details โ€” not scored
Size92 MB12 MB
Age rating17+4+
DeveloperVegar BerentsenITSUCARA, K.K.

In-app purchases

None

Peak Browser

No in-app purchases

None

Recto MD

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Peak Browser free?
Peak Browser is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Is Recto MD free?
Recto MD is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do Peak Browser or Recto MD have ads?
Neither Peak Browser nor Recto MD shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Peak Browser or Recto MD?
Peak Browser ships an update every 2 weeks, and Recto MD every 2 days. Most recently, Peak Browser was updated on September 29, 2026 and Recto MD on October 2, 2026.

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