Comparison

Marginalias 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

Marginalias

Features
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Keep the quote with its source Evidence Board collects exact passages across your documents, with topics and notes. Verify each clip against the local source and share a focused Markdown evidence sheet. โ€ข Open a document โ†’ Clip evidence. Enter an exact passage of at least three characters and choose its occurrence. โ€ข Save a topic and note with the clip. Open Evidence Board from the library to find and review clips. โ€ข Open a clip to verify its quote and source hash, edit notes, or share the visible board. Exact case-sensitive matching shows up to 32 occurrences. A source hash identifies the local text version; it is not proof of authorship or truth. Up to 256 clips and 1 MiB are retained. Unavailable or changed sources are reported. Marginalias is a private reading companion for your own documents. Import text-based PDFs, plain text, or Markdown notes, then use on-device intelligence to summarize, ask questions, and pull out useful structure without sending your content to a developer server. Build a local library of documents, open the source text whenever you need it, and keep AI output close to the material it came from. Marginalias is designed for focused review, research, note cleanup, study, and document triage. Features: - Import text-based PDFs, plain text, and Markdown - Keep a searchable local document library - Generate concise document summaries - Ask questions grounded in document excerpts - Inspect exact evidence excerpts, character ranges, and PDF pages behind generated claims - See the retrieved context used for each answer - Extract key points, action items, outlines, and glossary terms - Copy and share generated output - Use light, dark, or system appearance - Review a bundled sample document before importing your own files Privacy: Marginalias does not require an account, does not include analytics or advertising SDKs, and does not collect your documents or AI output. Documents and generated output stay on your device. Device note: AI features use Apple on-device intelligence. If Apple Intelligence is unavailable or not enabled, importing and reading documents still work and the app explains the requirement.

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

Marginalias3 screens
Recto MD4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is price: Recto MD at Free against Marginalias's $3.99. Recto MD also leads on update cadence (every 2 days vs every 5 weeks) and iOS requirement (18.0 vs 26.0). On 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

Recto MD is free to download; Marginalias costs $3.99 up front. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Marginalias ships an update every 5 weeks, Recto MD every 2 days. The most recent releases landed on October 16, 2026 and October 2, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard3 real differences ยท 3 level
Marginalias versus Recto MD: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterMarginaliasRecto MD
Price$3.99Free โ€” better
Update frequencyEvery 5 weeksEvery 2 days โ€” better
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesNoNo
DevicesiPhone, iPadiPhone, iPad, Mac โ€” better
Requires iOS26.018.0 โ€” better
Further details โ€” not scored
Size1 MB12 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperRobert CorbinITSUCARA, K.K.

In-app purchases

None

Marginalias

No in-app purchases

None

Recto MD

No in-app purchases

Questions

Is Marginalias free?
Marginalias costs $3.99, with no in-app purchases.
Is Recto MD free?
Recto MD is free to download, with no in-app purchases.
Do Marginalias or Recto MD have ads?
Neither Marginalias nor Recto MD shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Marginalias or Recto MD?
Marginalias ships an update every 5 weeks, and Recto MD every 2 days. Most recently, Marginalias was updated on October 16, 2026 and Recto MD on October 2, 2026.

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