Authora vs Wrighter
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Authora
This writing companion helps aspiring authors reclaim lost minutes for their book projects. It offers tools for writing, storyboarding, and self-publishing directly from a mobile device, turning commutes and waiting times into productive writing sessions.
- Six writing format templates
- Rich text editor optimized for mobile
- Storyboard for characters, plot, and world-building
- Export to EPUB/PDF for self-publishing
- Speech-to-text dictation
- On-device writing analysis
- Encrypted cloud sync (Premium)
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Turn waiting into writing. Most people who want to write a book never finish one - not for lack of ideas, but for lack of time to sit down. Authora is a mobile writing companion built for the life you actually have. Waiting rooms, commutes, flight delays, lunch breaks - the minutes that usually disappear into doomscrolling, reclaimed for the book you've always meant to write. WRITE ANYWHERE Six format templates - novel, journal, manuscript, academic paper, non-fiction, poetry collection. Rich text editor optimised for phones and tablets, not a desktop UI stuffed onto a small screen. Auto-save every two seconds. Focus mode for distraction-free writing. Preview mode to read your draft as a reader will see it. STORYBOARDING THAT MATCHES HOW WRITERS THINK Characters with bios, traits, and relationships. Plot arcs with scenes you can link to chapters. World-building notes. Colour-coded labels. Keep the people, places, and threads of your story organised without leaving your phone. FROM BLANK PAGE TO PUBLISHED BOOK Authora isn't just a writing app - it's a self-publishing pipeline. When your draft is done, add a cover image, and export as EPUB or PDF that's ready to upload straight to Amazon KDP, Apple Books, or Kobo. Front matter, back matter, TOC, metadata - all handled. Your finished book goes into your personal library inside Authora too, readable with a built-in ebook reader. No separate formatting tool. No desktop required. Draft to published, all on your phone. CAPTURE ON THE GO Speech-to-text dictation with live transcription. Chapter import from .docx, .rtf, and .txt - start with existing drafts, no retyping. On-device writing analysis flags passive voice, adverb overuse, clichés, and readability issues as you write. FREE FOREVER, PREMIUM WHEN YOU'RE READY Full writing experience, export, personal library, and a starter storyboard - all free, all local, no account required. Premium ($2.99/mo or $29.99/yr) adds encrypted cloud sync and backup across phone and tablet, unlimited storyboarding, inline figures with captions, and priority support. PRIVATE BY DEFAULT Free users never sign in. Premium users' chapters, world notes, character bios, and plot descriptions are encrypted at rest with AES-256, and in transit with TLS - even in a breach, your draft stays unreadable. Biometric app lock on both platforms. We never read your work, never train on your writing, never sell your data. BUILT FOR PHONES AND TABLETS Native iOS App. Dark and light theme. Responsive layout on tablets. Biometric unlock. Full offline support. Dashboard showing word count trends and your completion stats. The book is already in you. Authora is where you finish it.
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 update cadence: Wrighter at every 3 days against Authora's fortnightly. Authora's advantage is iOS requirement (15.0 vs 17.0). On price, ads, in-app purchases 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
Both are free to download. Authora sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $4.99 per month and Wrighter sells 3 in-app purchases, starting at $1.99 per month. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
Authora ships an update fortnightly, Wrighter every 3 days. The most recent releases landed on October 23, 2026 and October 24, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Authora | Wrighter |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.5 (4 ratings) — better | — |
| Positive reviews | 100.0% of reviews | — |
| Number of ratings | 4 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Fortnightly | Every 3 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Freemium | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod | iPhone, iPad, Mac |
| Requires iOS | 15.0 — better | 17.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 43 MB | 18 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Ronan Campbell | Defiance Strategy Ltd |
In-app purchases
Authora
- Authora Premium (Monthly)$4.991 Month
- Authora Premium (Yearly)$49.991 Year
Wrighter
- Monthly7 Days trial$1.991 Month
- Annual7 Days trial$19.991 Year
- Lifetime$49.99









