Scrivener, but Free
Scrivener understood that writing is about writing, not formatting. Quillium is the same, and doesn't cost anything.
There’s a Reddit post in r/scrivener where someone asks: “Am I wrong in thinking Scrivener is not a WYSIWYG editor?” The top comments all say the same thing: no, you’re not wrong. Scrivener is for writing, not for making your document look pretty. The formatting is someone else’s job. The focus is on getting words right.
That’s the correct take, and it’s why Scrivener has a loyal following among serious writers while Word and Google Docs dominate everywhere else. Most writing software is secretly page layout software. You spend half your time adjusting margins, picking fonts, watching your words reflow as if the visual presentation matters while you’re still figuring out what you’re trying to say. Scrivener rejected that: write first, compile later. The source of truth is the writing, not the output.
I built Quillium on the same principle, but I think there’s more to do with it.
What Scrivener gets right
Scrivener’s core insight is that writing and formatting are separate activities, and doing them at the same time is a distraction. It gives you a binder, a corkboard, a way to break your project into scenes and chapters and rearrange them. It doesn’t care what your manuscript looks like as a PDF until you tell it to compile. Until then, it’s just text.
This matters more than people realize. When you’re drafting, the last thing you need is your brain toggling between “what am I trying to say” and “does this heading look right.” Scrivener kills that toggle. You write. The formatting happens later, or never, if you’re just working through ideas.
Writers who use Scrivener tend to be fiercely loyal to it, and for good reason. It’s one of the few tools that treats writing as its own thing rather than a subset of document production.
Where Scrivener stops
Scrivener solves the structure problem. It lets you organize a long project into pieces, move those pieces around, compile them into a finished document. What it doesn’t solve is the revision problem.
When you’re revising in Scrivener, you have Snapshots—manual save points you can compare against later. I’ve written about this before: snapshots are whole-document, one-directional, and you have to remember to take them before you start changing things. Forget, and the old version is gone.
There’s also Revision Mode, which colors new text so you can see what you’ve added. But it doesn’t track deletions, and it doesn’t let you hold two versions of the same passage side by side. It shows you what’s new, not what your options are.
Scrivener treats revision as something that happens to a document over time. Quillium treats it as the central activity of writing—the thing the entire tool should be built around.
Same philosophy, taken further
Quillium shares Scrivener’s belief that writing is about writing—no WYSIWYG formatting, no page layout distractions. You open the editor and you just write.
But where Scrivener focuses on organizing writing (breaking it into chunks, rearranging structure) Quillium focuses on exploring writing. You select a sentence and branch it. Both versions live in the document. You can switch between them, compare them, branch again. You’re not making irreversible choices about which version to keep; you’re holding all your options open until you’re ready to decide.
It’s the difference between a tool that helps you structure a manuscript and a tool that helps you figure out what each sentence should actually say. Both matter. They’re different problems.
And it’s free
Scrivener costs $49 on Mac (or $59.99 if you want it on iOS too) but that’s not unreasonable for what it does. It’s a mature, well-built application with decades of development behind it. However, that price tag is still a barrier, especially for students, hobbyist writers, and anyone who isn’t sure yet whether a dedicated writing tool is worth paying for.
Quillium is free. Like completely free. Not freemium, not free-with-ads, not free-for-30-days. Free.
The core editor—branching, revision, everything that makes it what it is—costs nothing. We’ve written about how we plan to sustain this: the short version is that the writing app stays free forever, and we charge for optional cloud-based add-ons like Sync and Collab for those who are invested.
Writing tools should be accessible. The people who need a better revision workflow the most—students working through essays, writers early in their craft, anyone who revises obsessively but can’t justify paying for specialized software—shouldn’t have to pay for the privilege of keeping their drafts.
Who this is for
If you already use Scrivener and love it, Quillium isn’t trying to replace it. Scrivener is excellent at what it does, and if your workflow is built around its binder and compiler, that’s a solved problem.
But if you’ve been curious about Scrivener’s philosophy—writing-first, formatting-later—and you want a tool that takes that idea into revision, or if you’ve looked at Scrivener’s price tag and hesitated, Quillium is worth trying.
The core belief is the same—writing is about writing—but the focus is different: revision instead of structure. And it won’t cost you anything.