Ampersand vs
Typora
Typora is $14.99 once for the cleanest WYSIWYG Markdown window there is. Ampersand costs more and does more. Which of those you want is genuinely the whole question.
Typora is the app on this list we would most readily tell someone to buy instead of ours. It costs $14.99 once, for one user on up to three devices, with no expiration and no subscription. It writes plain Markdown files to your own disk, so your library is as portable as it is possible for a library to be. And the writing surface is the best argument for it: a WYSIWYG live preview with nothing else in the window, which for a lot of people is exactly and only what a Markdown editor should be.
So the honest version of this page starts with a recommendation rather than a rebuttal. If what you want is a beautiful window over a folder of Markdown, and you have no interest in the machinery around it, buy Typora. It is a superb $14.99 and you will not be talked out of it by a feature table, nor should you be.
The difference is scope, and it is not a difference in quality. Ampersand is trying to be the place a document finishes as well as the place it starts — a vault with search and links across all of it, a vector PDF and a genuinely editable Word file produced by first-party engines, per-note encryption, a history of every save, bring-your-own-key AI, and meeting recording transcribed on your own Mac. Typora has none of those, on purpose: no encryption of any kind, no AI, no meeting recording, no sharing or publishing, and no plugin API. Its restraint is a design position, and it is why the app feels the way it does.
Both store the same plain .md files in the same kind of folder, which means this is one of the few comparisons where trying the other one costs nothing at all. Point either app at the same directory and see which window you would rather be in.
Ampersand and Typora, row by row
Every row states what both apps do. A dot marks whichever one leads — including the rows Typora takes.
| Feature | Ampersand | Typora |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free forever with the full editor, search, wiki-links, backlinks, version history and Markdown export. Pro is a one-time $29 (regularly $49), three devices, 14-day money back. | Advantage: Typora.$14.99 once, one user on up to three devices, no expiration and no subscription. Roughly half the price of Ampersand Pro, and among the best-value paid licences in the category. |
| Where notes live | A folder you pick. Plain .md files with optional YAML frontmatter, openable by any text editor on any machine. | Plain Markdown files on local disk — the WYSIWYG view is a live-preview layer over the same text. No database, no proprietary format, nothing to export before another app can read it. |
| Works offline | Everything except cloud AI, and pointing it at a local model through Ollama removes even that. | Everything. A purely local desktop editor with no cloud dependency of any kind. |
| Platforms | macOS 14+, Windows 10+ and Linux, on both Intel/AMD and ARM. There is no phone app yet. | Native macOS, Windows and Linux desktop apps. No iOS, no Android and no web app — requested on Typora’s own issue tracker since at least 2017 and never shipped. |
| Encryption | Advantage: Ampersand.Per-note, in the app, using age (X25519 + ChaCha20-Poly1305) under one vault passphrase, with Touch ID on macOS and a recovery kit. Free users can always unlock and decrypt existing notes; only creating new encrypted notes is Pro. | None. No note locking, no passwords and no local encryption — the files are exactly as readable as any other file in the folder. |
| Export | Advantage: Ampersand.Vector PDF from a real layout engine with running headers, controlled page breaks, syntax-highlighted code and real maths; editable Word with native OMML equations and real styles; self-contained HTML; and Markdown for a note or the whole vault. All first-party, nothing else to install. | PDF, styled and unstyled HTML, and image, natively — image export being one Ampersand has no equivalent of. Word, ODT, RTF, ePub, LaTeX and MediaWiki all route through a separately installed Pandoc, so the format list is longer than ours and the fidelity of those six depends on Pandoc rather than on Typora. |
| AI | Advantage: Ampersand.Built in and bring-your-own-key: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Apple Intelligence, local models through Ollama, and CLI agents, routed per feature. Rewrite, expand, grammar, translate, summarise and autocomplete are free; agents and ask-your-whole-vault are Pro. | None. No built-in assistant, no bring-your-own-key, no local models. Some people are choosing Typora precisely because of this. |
| Search | Advantage: Ampersand.Full text across the whole vault, with case-sensitive, whole-word and regex toggles, and #tags, wiki-links and backlinks indexed alongside it. It covers encrypted notes too while the vault is unlocked. It does not read text inside images or PDFs. | In-document find and replace, plus cross-file search carrying the same case-sensitive, whole-word and regex toggles — an identical toggle set to ours. The scope is the folder you happen to have open rather than an indexed vault, and there is no OCR and no searching inside attachments. |
| The writing surface | A block editor with slash commands, drag-to-reorder and focus, typewriter and Zen modes — more furniture in the window, and more to learn. | WYSIWYG live preview with nothing else in the window — no source pane, no toolbars, no chrome. It is the fastest and quietest Markdown writing surface of the two, and for a lot of writers that is the only feature that matters. |
| Structured content | Advantage: Ampersand.Notion-style blocks over plain Markdown: tables whose cells take spreadsheet formulas, Mermaid diagrams, Vega charts, KaTeX maths, live calculation blocks with units and currency, callouts and highlighted code — all round-tripping as ordinary .md. | Mermaid is native — 11.9 in recent releases — alongside flowchart.js and sequence-diagram.js, with MathJax maths inline and block and highlighted code blocks. GitHub-style alerts are native but switched off until you enable them in preferences. GFM tables take no formulas, and there are no charts and no live calculation. |
| Themes and extensibility | Light and dark, per-document font and width, and three writing modes. No user themes, no plugins and no scripting API. | Advantage: Typora.Six built-in themes plus any .css theme you or someone else writes, with user overrides on top. No plugin or scripting API either, but the CSS route means the app can be made to look like almost anything. |
| Sync | None of our own. You bring iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing or a git repo — a vault is just a folder. | None built in and no first-party service. Entirely bring-your-own, and it works well precisely because the files are plain text in an ordinary folder. |
| Version history | Advantage: Ampersand.Every save, snapshotted into a git repository kept outside the vault, with a timeline and a line-by-line diff. Browsing and diffing are free; one-click restore is Pro. You set how long it keeps. | Nothing of Typora’s own. On a Mac you get macOS document versioning — File, then Revert To, then Browse All Versions — and on Windows and Linux there is none at all beyond crash recovery of an unsaved draft. No diff view on any platform. |
| Trying it and getting your money back | Free forever, with no time limit — the free tier is a tier rather than a trial. Pro carries a 14-day money-back guarantee. | A 15-day free trial, then $14.99, with a 30-day money-back window. A longer refund period than ours, against a trial that ends rather than a free tier that does not. |
| Meeting recording | Advantage: Ampersand.Records a meeting in a room or on a call and transcribes it on your own Mac with a local Whisper model, then writes a note with a summary, the decisions and the action items as checkboxes. No bot joins, nothing is uploaded. macOS only, and part of Pro. | None. |
| Sharing and publishing | Advantage: Ampersand.No real-time editing. A share link you control: expiry of 7, 30 or 90 days or never; an optional password, or an email allowlist that can cover a whole domain; and a choice of how much a chat app may preview. Never indexed, no scripts, and changing the password signs every existing reader out. Pro; taking a note down never is. | None. No real-time editing, no sharing and no publishing — Typora is a single-writer local editor and does not attempt to be anything else. |
| Open source | No. The notes are plain Markdown and the encryption is the standard age format, so the files outlive the app either way. | No. The files are plain Markdown regardless, which is the part that matters for outliving either app. |
Across these 17 rows, Ampersand leads 8, Typora leads 2, and 7 are a draw. The dot marks the leader. Where Typora leads, the dot is on its side of the table.
Ampersand is desktop-only today. An app for iPhone and iPad is in development and not yet released. The roadmap is where that gets announced.
Typora details checked against its own pricing and documentation pages on . If something here has gone out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
Where Ampersand pulls ahead
Notes you can lock
Per-note encryption with age — X25519 and ChaCha20-Poly1305 — under one vault passphrase, unlocked with Touch ID on a Mac, with a printable recovery kit and a standard file format that outlives the app. Typora has no encryption at all: no note locking, no passwords, nothing. If any of what you write needs to be unreadable on a stolen laptop, that settles it.
AI in the editor, on your own key
Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Apple Intelligence, a local Ollama model or a CLI agent, configured once and routed per feature, with rewriting, grammar, translation, summarising and autocomplete free. Typora has none — no assistant, no bring-your-own-key, no local models — so this is a capability you either want in your editor or actively do not.
Export that needs nothing else installed
The PDF comes out of a real vector layout engine with running headers, controlled page breaks, syntax-highlighted code and real maths, and the Word file is genuinely editable with native OMML equations and real styles. Typora reaches more formats, but only by handing Word, ODT, ePub and LaTeX to a Pandoc binary you install and maintain yourself.
Meetings recorded and transcribed on your Mac
Record a call or a room and a local Whisper model turns it into a note with a summary, the decisions and the action items as checkboxes, plus the full transcript. No bot joins the call, nothing is uploaded, and the audio is deleted once the transcript exists unless you ask to keep it. Typora has nothing in this area and does not aim to.
A free tier rather than a trial
The full block editor, search across the whole vault, wiki-links, backlinks, version history, inline AI and Markdown export are free with no time limit, so you can decide over months rather than days. Typora gives you 15 days and then asks for $14.99 — a fair ask, but a different shape from being able to simply keep using it.
Where Typora is the better tool
Every page here names at least two, because Typora genuinely has them and a comparison that pretended otherwise would not be worth reading.
It costs $14.99, once
One user, up to three devices, no expiration, no subscription — roughly half what Ampersand Pro costs, with a 15-day trial and a 30-day money-back window rather than our 14. For a very large number of writers, that is the correct amount to spend on a Markdown editor and Typora is the correct thing to spend it on.
The writing surface is the whole app
A WYSIWYG live preview with no source pane, no panels and no chrome competing for the page. Ampersand does considerably more, and doing more has a cost measured in calm; if the only thing you want is the shortest possible distance between a thought and a formatted paragraph, Typora is better at it than we are.
Themes are just CSS
Six built-in themes plus any .css file you or anyone else writes, with user overrides on top, so the app can be made to look like almost anything without waiting for a vendor. Ampersand ships light and dark and a per-document font and width, and that is the end of the list — there is no theming API at all.
A longer list of export formats, via Pandoc
Point Typora at an installed Pandoc and it will write ODT, RTF, ePub, LaTeX and MediaWiki alongside its native PDF, HTML and image export. Ampersand’s export is first-party and stops at PDF, Word, HTML and Markdown, so if you need ePub or LaTeX out of your editor, Typora reaches further than we do.
Which one should you use?
Choose Typora if
you want the cleanest, quietest WYSIWYG Markdown window there is, at half the price, with plain files and nothing else going on. Typora is genuinely excellent at that, it will not surprise you, and there is no version of this page where recommending it is a hedge.
Choose Ampersand if
you want the same portable files but also the vault around them — encryption, a real export engine, version history, AI you bring your own key to, meeting transcription — and you would rather have those built into the editor than assembled from a Pandoc install and a folder of scripts.
Moving from Typora
Asked plainly
Is Ampersand a good Typora alternative?
It is if you want more than an editor. Both store plain Markdown files in an ordinary folder, so the notes themselves are equally portable, but Ampersand adds per-note encryption, bring-your-own-key AI, a first-party PDF and Word export engine, version history over every save, and meeting transcription. If all you want is a beautiful WYSIWYG window over a folder of Markdown, Typora is a superb $14.99 and there is no need to replace it.
How much does Typora cost?
Typora is $14.99 as a one-time purchase, covering one user on up to three devices with no expiration and no subscription. There is a 15-day free trial and a 30-day money-back window, and there is no bulk or team licence. Ampersand is free to use indefinitely, with Pro at a one-time $29 (regularly $49) for three devices and a 14-day money-back guarantee — so Typora is roughly half the price and Ampersand is the one you can stay on for free.
Does Typora have a mobile app?
No. Typora ships native desktop apps for macOS, Windows and Linux only — there is no iOS app, no Android app and no web version, and mobile support has been requested on Typora’s own issue tracker since at least 2017 without shipping. Ampersand is desktop-only as well, on macOS 14 or later, Windows 10 or later, and Linux, so neither app gives you anything to open on a phone.
Can Typora export to Word?
Yes, but through Pandoc rather than natively. Typora exports PDF, styled and unstyled HTML and image on its own; Word .docx, along with ODT, RTF, ePub, LaTeX and MediaWiki, requires a separately installed Pandoc binary, and the fidelity of those files depends on Pandoc rather than on Typora. Ampersand produces Word directly with native OMML equations, real styles and syntax-highlighted code, and needs nothing else installed — but it does not reach ePub, LaTeX or MediaWiki at all.
Does Typora have AI?
No. Typora has no built-in AI assistant, no bring-your-own-key support and no local model integration, and for a number of its users that absence is part of the appeal. Ampersand includes AI throughout the editor on your own key — Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Apple Intelligence, local models through Ollama, or CLI agents — routed per feature, with rewriting, grammar, translation, summarising and autocomplete available on the free tier. A local model through Ollama keeps the text on your machine and costs nothing to run.
Can I open the same folder in both Ampersand and Typora?
Yes, and it is the easiest way to compare them. Both apps read and write plain .md files in an ordinary folder with no database and no import step, so you can point Ampersand at a folder you already write in with Typora and keep both installed. The one caveat is that a note you encrypt in Ampersand becomes a .md.age file, which Typora cannot read until you decrypt it again.
Other alternatives
Stop reading tables.
Open the app.
Ampersand is free to start and there is no account to make. Point it at the folder your notes are already in — including the one Typora keeps them in — and see for yourself.
Free to start · Mac, Windows & Linux · No account required