Raven vs Narrativ Timeline
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Raven
Create, organize, and manage notes using Markdown on your Apple devices. Turn checkboxes into actionable tasks with local reminders. Your notes are stored locally, ensuring offline access and no vendor lock-in.
- Native Markdown editor
- Create notes with tables, images, code blocks
- Checkboxes to tasks with due dates
- Local reminders for tasks
- Offline access
- iCloud Drive sync
- Full-text search
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Beautiful notes. Never locked in. Raven is a native Markdown notes app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Write, journal, capture articles, and turn checkboxes into reminders—without putting your work in a proprietary note format. WRITE WITH CONTEXT Create notes with tables, images, checklists, code blocks, wiki links, and backlinks. Organize them with folders and tags, pin what matters, and find anything with full-text search. TURN NOTES INTO ACTION A checkbox can become a task with a due date and time. Raven gathers open tasks from across your notes, keeps each one linked to its source, and can send a local reminder when it is due. Complete or snooze it from the notification. JOURNAL WITHOUT ANOTHER SILO Daily and weekly journals live beside the rest of your writing. Save articles to Read Later, or capture a thought from widgets, Shortcuts, and the share sheet. MARKDOWN YOU CAN KEEP Raven works offline without an account. Keep notes on this device, choose a folder on Mac, or use iCloud Drive to keep the same Markdown files available in Files and Finder across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. No proprietary note format. No forced account. One purchase, with no subscription.
Narrativ Timeline
This app helps creative writers plan their stories by mapping out plotlines, characters, locations, and world events. It provides tools to visualize story structure, track character relationships, and manage loose ideas. Users can set milestones and access their projects through home screen widgets and quick actions.
- Character planning with relationships and traits
- Scene mapping and visualization
- Multiple story structure frameworks
- World event and lore management
- Notepad for capturing ideas
- Milestone setting and reminders
- Series planning and universe building
- Character relationship graph visualization
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Narrativ is a planning tool for creative writers. Map out the shape of your story. Add a cast, sketch your plotlines, create locations, note important world events, and link it all to the timeline so you can get a clear picture of the structure of your story. Plan your cast Build characters with photos, roles, descriptions, traits, relationships, and the connections that make them more than a list of names. See who knows whom in a graph. Track who appears in which scene. Plan your scenes Scenes with summaries, tension, cast, and plotline tags. View them as cards, on a timeline, or in story order. This is where the story takes shape. The manuscript comes later, in your writing app of choice. Find the structure Follow each plotline through the story, beat by beat. Start from a framework if it helps: Three-Act Structure, Save the Cat, Hero’s Journey, Seven-Point, Story Circle, Freytag’s Pyramid, Fichtean Curve, Four-Act or Kishotenketsu. Or ignore them all and build your own. Plan your world The story is ten per cent on the page. The world is the ninety per cent underneath. World Events and Lore are where that ninety per cent lives: everything you know about your world that the reader never sees. Add events with your own when-labels, link them to the scenes that show them, and switch the timeline between story order and world time. Capture loose thoughts Not every idea is ready to become a character or a scene. Notepad is where it waits until it is. Write one note or a hundred, with bold, italics and highlights, and link a note to any card in your story with the @ feature. Set milestones Give your next step a deadline: “First act mapped”, Friday at nine. Get a reminder at the deadline, and every day, week or month before it if you want one. See your milestones in a calendar or add them to your phone’s Calendar. Reminders only come from milestones you set up yourself. Plan a series A universe holds multiple stories that share characters, locations, and world events. Add a story and it inherits the cast. The bundled Sherlock Holmes example shows a three-book universe in action. See the connections The character graph maps your cast as a force-directed network. Characters who share scenes pull closer together, loosely connected characters drift apart. Tap a node to open a character card. Tap a line to see the scenes they share. The graph shows you where relationships are overloaded, where they are thin, and where a connection is missing that the story needs. Your book on your Home Screen Widgets show your book’s cover and what it holds, your whole bookshelf, or the shortcuts you choose. Add a Narrativ button to the Lock Screen, Control Center or the Action button to start a note, a character or a scene in one tap, in the book you choose. Quick actions and Siri get you there too. Wherever the idea strikes Narrativ is universal across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and made for iPhone Duo, folded or open. Work at your desk or on the go. Your work syncs through iCloud. One-time purchase, no subscription. Exports When the planning is done, export everything as a story bible. Choose PDF, Word, Markdown, or plain text. Select which sections to include: characters, scenes, plotlines, world events, or the full document. A clean reference to keep open while you write. Your look Narrativ’s own colours and type, or the system look with iOS colours and fonts. Light, dark, or following your device. Before the story, there’s Narrativ.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is review sentiment: Raven at 57% against Narrativ Timeline's 0%. Raven also leads on rating (4.0 vs 3.5) and price ($19.99 vs $24.99). Narrativ Timeline's advantage is iOS requirement (18.0 vs 26.0). On ratings volume, ads, in-app purchases and monetization model 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
Raven costs $19.99 and Narrativ Timeline $24.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Raven holds the better App Store score, 4.0 against 3.5. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 4 and 2 respectively. Written reviews point the same way: 57% of Raven's written reviews are positive against 0% of Narrativ Timeline's.
Raven ships an update every 3 days, Narrativ Timeline weekly. Both last shipped on October 31, 2026.
| Parameter | Raven | Narrativ Timeline |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $19.99 — better | $24.99 |
| Rating | 4.0 (4 ratings) — better | 3.5 (2 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 57.1% of reviews — better | 0.0% of reviews |
| Number of ratings | 4 — better | 2 |
| Update frequency | Every 3 days — better | Weekly |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Monetization | Paid | Paid |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, Mac | iPhone, iPad, Mac |
| Requires iOS | 26.0 | 18.0 — better |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 126 MB | 21 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Thomas Sivilay | EIRIK ANDRE STEEN |
Customer experience
Raven
Narrativ Timeline
In-app purchases
Raven
No in-app purchases
Narrativ Timeline
No in-app purchases









