The last time I remember opening Microsoft Word, it was to read someone else’s edits on a feature, and I closed it again about four minutes later. Nothing I’ve written professionally has started its life within the software for years, and that’s not a stand against Microsoft or even the usual argument for swapping it out for LibreOffice or another free app claiming to replace Word or Docs. My objection is actually more specific, and probably more annoying.
Word has always been a great place to finish a piece of writing but a terrible place to start one, since almost nothing I write is a finished product while I’m working on it. For that earlier stage, I’d pick something like Scrivener over Word every time, as it treats a piece of writing as a collection of parts rather than a single page. And – great news for anyone who’s done the Microsoft 365 math lately – you only pay for it once.
Why Word fails at the first draft
Even if most of the work happens before that
Word started out as a descendant of print, and it’s never really pretended otherwise. Open a blank file, and you’ll see the page, margins, a style gallery, and a word counter ticking along at the bottom, all of which assume you already know what you’re going to create. That’s an assumption that holds up beautifully if you’re working on a contract, a cover letter, or a report with a neat table of contents, but it’s far less useful for a commissioned feature the morning before it’s due.
At that point I’m usually working with a folder of links, a transcript, a spec sheet I’ve only skim-read, two openings that might work (but probably won’t), and a middle section I already suspect belongs somewhere else. Word’s answer to all of that is one long scroll with a navigation pane bolted to the side, which becomes a chore around the 1,500-word mark.
The best example I have of this is a 3,000-word feature from a few years back, written in Word because the client wanted a .docx and I wasn’t fast enough to question it. By the third round of restructuring, I had multiple versions saved under file names I’d thought up far too late at night, and no reliable way of knowing which one contained the paragraph I wanted to reinsert. That may say more about me than Word, but it wouldn’t have happened in an app that expected that kind of chaotic workflow.
Word itself has evolved, of course, but not in the direction I would have liked. New documents created in Word for Windows now live in the cloud with AutoSave enabled from the first keystroke, landing in OneDrive with a date where the file name should be, in what Microsoft frames as modernizing how files are created and stored. For most people, that’s a pretty straightforward improvement, and it’ll most definitely save somebody a lost draft this week. But it’s all beside the point if all you want is a blank page that stays on your own machine until you say otherwise.
How the Scrivener binder works
It does more work than the famous corkboard
A Scrivener project isn’t a file in the same way a .docx is. Instead, it’s a container with a binder on the left-hand side, where every section of a piece is its own small document you can drag above or below the others. That means reordering an argument takes a second, not a cut, a scroll, and a paste.
The research folder is also in the same project, and it’s the feature I’d lead with if I were trying to sell the app to another working writer. PDFs, images, saved web pages, a press release, and a screenshot of a spec table all sit alongside the draft rather than in a browser window, and if you split the screen, the source is on one side while your own words are on the other. Suddenly, alt-tabbing across a working day drops to almost nothing.
Snapshots are the dark-horse feature for me, and probably the most valuable one if you rewrite in stages as I do. If you take one before reworking a section, the previous version stays attached to it, rather than living on in a file called feature-v3-FINAL-revised.
At the end, you compile, which is Scrivener’s term for assembling the pieces into a more traditional document. Out comes a .docx, a PDF, plain text, Markdown, or an ePub, formatted to whichever preset you picked, and the document only needs to exist for about ten minutes at the very end of the process.
Pricing and perpetual licenses
The real difference shows up when you stop paying
Scrivener is $59.99 for macOS or Windows, a one-time purchase. That buys a perpetual license for the current major version, including all 3.x updates, so the next bill arrives only if Literature & Latte ships version 4 and you decide to upgrade. The iPhone and iPad app is a separate $23.99, moving between Mac and Windows is a discounted cross-grade, and owning all three comes to around $120, a figure the company itself compares to a year or two of a subscription writing app.
Microsoft 365 Personal, meanwhile, is $99.99 a year (or billed monthly, if you’d rather feel the pain more often), and Microsoft’s store pushes hard in that direction. What you might miss is that the money buys you access and nothing more.
Microsoft’s own FAQ is admirably blunt about this fact. If you let a subscription expire, the apps enter read-only mode, and you can view and print documents but can’t edit or create new ones. Further down, there’s a clause about staying online: if you don’t connect at least once every 31 days, the apps revert to reduced functionality mode until you do.
A perpetual option still exists in Office Home 2024: a one-time purchase for a single PC or Mac. Microsoft’s listing carries a restriction that rules it out for most people reading this, though, as it’s licensed for non-commercial use only.
Scrivener’s trial, for what it’s worth, runs for 30 days of actual use rather than 30 calendar days, so a quiet couple of weeks won’t burn through it.
Where Scrivener gets annoying
Because nothing in this world comes without friction
Expect the first week using Scrivener to feel worse than Word, because it will be. The binder, the inspector, and the compile pane each carry their own logic, and until that clicks, you’ll be slower than you were. On deadline, I realize that’s a hard sell.
Compile, for example, can do genuinely clever things with formatting, and most people find one preset that produces a clean .docx and never touch the rest of it again.
There’s no real-time co-editing either, so the moment an editor wants to leave comments in the margin, you’ll need to export to Word and work there anyway. Word never entirely leaves your life. It just stops being the place where most of the writing happens.
The iPhone and iPad versions also sync via Dropbox and require a Dropbox account, which may be a dependency you don’t want to deal with. Licenses are sold per platform, so a household split between a Mac and a PC pays twice unless you buy the bundle, and if most of what you write is a page long, this is a lot of machinery for no obvious gain.
Who I’d tell to switch
It depends on your process
The question I’d ask before any of these is less about features than about how you actually like to work, and specifically how much of your writing happens before it looks like something people would want to read, what the app costs you over three or four years, and whether you still want to own your files once you stop paying.
If you write long things in bits and pieces (features, scripts, a dissertation, a newsletter, the novel you’ve restarted three times), I’d take the trial and give it two full weeks before deciding. The friction is front-loaded, and the payoff probably won’t show up before the second or third piece.
If you want a Word-shaped word processor without the subscription, LibreOffice covers that for nothing, and whichever you land on, one of the better grammar checkers will do more for your copy than any app switch. If you want plain text and nothing else, Obsidian is also free for personal use and keeps everything as Markdown files you can open anywhere.
Most writers pick an app once, early on, and then bend their habits around it for a decade, and I’d guess plenty of the contention people put down to writing itself is really about a tool built for someone else’s way of working.
