Dabble vs Ghostwriter

Dabble is a fiction-writing tool aimed especially at novelists, from first-time hobbyists to professional authors. Its Plot Grid organizes plot lines, plot points, and labels, alongside character profiles and worldbuilding tools. The editor includes scene organization, focus mode, daily word-count goals, and auto-numbered chapters. For editing, it offers sticky notes, comments, highlights, and built-in grammar and style checks. Co-authors can work together on a manuscript in real time. Dabble says it provides automatic cloud backup and sync, along with regular online and offline backups. Projects can be exported to the web, Word, and Google Docs; a NaNoWriMo word tracker is included. It runs in a browser and has Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, and Android availability. There is no free plan, though a 14-day trial is listed. Writer costs $19 a month, Author $29 a month, and Bestseller $49 a month. After a subscription ends, manuscripts and notes remain viewable and exportable but become read-only.

Ghostwriter is a free Markdown text editor for distraction-free writing, available on Linux and Windows, with unofficial community-provided macOS support. It stores documents as local files and previews Markdown as HTML, which can be copied or exported. GitHub-flavored Markdown is supported, and export options include HTML, Pandoc, MultiMarkdown, and commonmark. Focus Mode highlights a selected area around the cursor, such as a line, sentence, paragraph, or three lines. Full-screen mode and Hemingway Mode provide other writing setups; Hemingway Mode disables backspace and delete. The editor includes light and dark themes, with options to create custom themes. Writers also get live word counts, document and session statistics, a document outline, autosave, and file backups. Linux installation instructions cover Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch Linux. The Windows download page lists a portable 64-bit version for Windows 10. On macOS, users must compile the source because an installer is not available. Ghostwriter is distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3.0.