Markdown apps for the Mac, compared honestly
Nine Markdown tools for macOS, what each is genuinely best at, and which one to pick depending on whether you are reading, writing or keeping a repository tidy.
Most comparisons of this kind are a ranked list with the author’s product at number one. This one is written by the people who make Hem, so treat the recommendation at the end accordingly — but the rest is an attempt at a fair map, because the tools below are good at genuinely different things and “best” depends entirely on what you are doing.
Start with the question, not the list.
- I want to read a file somebody sent me. You want a viewer, and ideally a Quick Look extension. Skip everything with “vault” in the description.
- I want to write long prose. You want a writing app. Distraction-free mode, typewriter scrolling, good defaults.
- I want to maintain documentation in a repository. You want something that edits Markdown without reformatting it, and you probably already have an editor open.
- I want a second brain. You want a note system, and Markdown is an implementation detail of it.
Prices below were correct when this was last updated; check before buying.
Viewers and previewers
QLMarkdown
Free, open source, and for a long time the default answer to “how do I preview Markdown in Finder”. Feature-rich, with a lot of rendering options.
It is built on the older .qlgenerator style of plugin, a mechanism Apple deprecated with Catalina. It still works for many people; it has also broken across OS upgrades more than once. Worth knowing before you build a habit on it. See how Quick Look extensions work for why the distinction matters.
Glance
A native macOS Markdown viewer with a Quick Look extension, Mermaid and LaTeX, and a deliberately small binary. Free to read; editing is a paid upgrade (around $10 one-time at the time of writing, after a trial).
It is a genuinely nice piece of work and the closest thing to a direct comparison with Hem. The differences that matter: Glance renders natively rather than through WebKit, and Hem is free for editing and MIT-licensed.
Marked 2
Not an editor at all — a previewer that watches a file you are editing somewhere else and renders it beautifully, with export, style sheets, readability statistics and scriptable processors. Around $14, one-time.
If you write in a text editor and want a serious preview window beside it, this is the specialist. It has been maintained for well over a decade.
Editors
MarkEdit
Free, open source, and shaped like TextEdit: a plain text editor that happens to understand Markdown. Syntax highlighting, no preview pane, no opinions about your file. Native, small, actively maintained.
If your objection to visual editors is that they rewrite your file, MarkEdit solves it by never parsing it. The trade is that you read | --- | --- | rather than a table.
Typora
The app that made “the document is the editor” popular: you type Markdown and it becomes formatted text in place, with no source pane. Tables, maths, Mermaid, themes, export. Around $15, one-time, for up to three machines.
It is polished and pleasant. It is also a full round-trip editor, so it normalises your file on save — fine for documents you own, worth testing before you point it at a repository (the two-minute test).
MacDown
Free, open source, classic split pane: source on the left, preview on the right. Themeable, lightweight, and the answer a lot of Mac developers have used since 2014. Development is quiet these days, which is either a problem or a sign that it is finished, depending on your view.
iA Writer
A writing application that uses Markdown, rather than a Markdown application. Focus mode, syntax control, content blocks, a typeface designed for the job. Around $50 on the Mac.
Nobody buys iA Writer to read a README. People buy it to write twenty thousand words, and for that it is very good.
Note systems
Obsidian
A local-first knowledge base built on a folder of Markdown files. Free for personal use; the plugin ecosystem is enormous and the graph view is the thing people show their friends.
Two caveats for the use case this article started with. Obsidian wants a vault, so opening one file that lives somewhere else is awkward. And its dialect includes [[wiki links]] and other extensions that are not standard Markdown, so files written in it do not always travel well.
Bear, Craft, Notion
Note and document apps with Markdown-flavoured input. Excellent at being note apps. They are not the tool for a file on disk that other software also edits, because in each case the file is not really the source of truth — the database is.
The comparison, in one table
| App | Quick Look | Edits | Preserves your formatting | Price | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hem | Yes | Yes, visual | Yes, by design | Free | MIT |
| Glance | Yes | Paid upgrade | — | Free / ~$10 | — |
| QLMarkdown | Yes, legacy plugin | No | n/a | Free | Open |
| Marked 2 | No | No | n/a | ~$14 | Closed |
| MarkEdit | No | Yes, source | Yes, never parses | Free | Open |
| Typora | No | Yes, visual | No, normalises | ~$15 | Closed |
| MacDown | No | Yes, source | Yes, never parses | Free | Open |
| iA Writer | No | Yes, source | Mostly | ~$50 | Closed |
| Obsidian | No | Yes, both | Mostly, own dialect | Free / paid sync | Closed |
| VS Code | No | Yes, source | Yes, never parses | Free | Open |
“Preserves your formatting” means: after you edit one word and save, does the rest of the file still contain the bytes it did before? That is the property that decides whether the app is safe to point at a git repository, and it is the one most comparisons leave out.
What we would actually recommend
Reading files, all day, in Finder: something with a Quick Look extension. Hem or Glance; both are small, both are native, both render Mermaid and maths. Hem is free for editing too and its source is public; Glance renders without WebKit and has a longer track record.
Writing a book or a long essay: iA Writer, or Typora if you prefer to see formatting as you type.
Maintaining docs inside a repository: MarkEdit or your existing code editor if you are happy reading source; Hem if you want the rendered page and an edit that leaves the rest of the file alone.
Building a personal knowledge base: Obsidian, and accept that you are choosing a system, not a file viewer.
All of the above: a viewer plus an editor, which is what most people converge on. They are different jobs and the tools that try to be both usually compromise one.
Hem is our attempt at the first and third of those: a free, MIT-licensed Markdown viewer and editor for macOS 14 and later, with a Quick Look extension, Mermaid, LaTeX, and saving that rewrites only the blocks you changed. 5.7 MB, no telemetry, for Macs with Apple silicon.
