Ampersand vs
Ulysses
Ulysses is the most refined long-form writing environment on Apple platforms. Ampersand is the same kind of quiet, but on plain files, on three desktop platforms, bought once.
Ulysses is the app people finish books in. Sheets gathered into groups, saved filters, keywords, a typographic setting that stays out of the way for eight hours at a stretch — it is a library built for a project that runs for a year, and after more than a decade of refinement it shows. The iPhone and iPad versions are close enough to the Mac one that starting a chapter on a train and finishing it at a desk has no seam in it. Very few writing apps get that far.
Two things follow from how it is built, and both are deliberate. It is a subscription — $39.99 a year or $5.99 a month, covering Mac, iPad and iPhone, shareable with up to five family members — and by default your writing lives in the Ulysses Library, a CloudKit-backed container rather than a folder of files you can open in something else. You can opt out of the second part: External Folders make Ulysses read and write plain Markdown or Textbundle files in a real folder, on iCloud Drive or anywhere else. It is a genuine escape hatch, and most people never switch it on.
Ampersand starts where that escape hatch ends. Every note is a plain .md file in a folder you chose, always, with no library to be inside and nothing to export from. It is one payment rather than a renewal, it runs on Windows and Linux as well as macOS, and it encrypts individual notes with age rather than locking them behind the interface. It also has no phone app at all, no sync of its own, and nothing like Ulysses’ publishing pipeline, and those are not small omissions against this particular app.
Ampersand and Ulysses, row by row
Every row states what both apps do. A dot marks whichever one leads — including the rows Ulysses takes.
| Feature | Ampersand | Ulysses |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Advantage: Ampersand.Free, then a one-time $29 (regularly $49) for export, AI agents, encryption and extra vaults. Three devices, 14-day money back, never a subscription. | Subscription only: $39.99 a year or $5.99 a month, covering Mac, iPad and iPhone, shareable with up to five family members. 14-day full-featured trial, no card required. |
| Where notes live | Advantage: Ampersand.A folder you pick. Plain .md files with optional YAML frontmatter, readable by anything, with no library around them. | By default the Ulysses Library — a managed CloudKit container, not individual files you can open elsewhere without exporting. External Folders are opt-in and do write real .md or Textbundle files. |
| Works offline | Everything except cloud AI, and running a local model through Ollama removes even that. | Everything. It writes offline and syncs when the connection comes back. |
| Platforms | macOS 14+, Windows 10+ and Linux, on both Intel/AMD and ARM. There is no phone app yet. | macOS, iPadOS and iOS. No Windows, no Linux, no Android and no web app. |
| Phone and tablet | Nothing. There is no Ampersand phone app today, on any platform. | Advantage: Ulysses.iPhone and iPad apps at close to Mac parity, included in the same subscription and synced by default. |
| Sync | None of our own. Point it at iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing or a git repo — a vault is just a folder, so you set this up yourself. | Advantage: Ulysses.First-party, included in the subscription, over iCloud. End-to-end encryption depends on Apple’s account-wide Advanced Data Protection being switched on. |
| Encryption | Advantage: Ampersand.Per-note, using age (X25519 + ChaCha20-Poly1305) under one vault passphrase, with Touch ID on a Mac and a recovery kit. The file on disk becomes ciphertext. | Password Lock is access control, not encryption: Ulysses’ own help pages say the data stays unencrypted on disk and remains reachable through Time Machine or the raw iCloud container. |
| Export | Vector PDF from a real layout engine with running headers and controlled page breaks, editable Word with native equations, self-contained HTML and Markdown. No ePub. | Advantage: Ulysses.Plain text, rich text, Markdown, DOCX, HTML, ePub and PDF, with a style system controlling the typography of the PDF, DOCX and ePub output. The broader pipeline of the two. |
| Publishing | 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. | Publishes a draft straight to WordPress, Medium, Ghost or Micro.blog from inside the app. A different job, done well. |
| Organising a large library | Folders on disk, tags, wiki-links with backlinks, and search across the whole vault. | Advantage: Ulysses.Sheets gathered into groups, with saved filters and keywords. Built for one long manuscript rather than a folder tree, and it holds up at that size. |
| 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. | Scoped to a sheet, a group or the whole library, and saveable as a filter — conditions like “text contains” that keep matching as you write. Filters rather than patterns: there is no regex, and nothing is read out of images. |
| Version history | 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. | Automatic local backups, hourly for the last twelve hours, daily for a week and weekly for six months, browsable in a Time-Machine-style view where you can compare versions, restore one or lift a fragment out. Included in the price, but local only, and it covers the Library rather than External Folders. |
| 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. | Native tables without formulas, and code blocks highlighted across 48 languages. No diagrams and no charts, no callouts, and maths is not first-class — it takes a raw source block plus MathJax included by hand for HTML export, which is a workaround rather than rendered maths in the editor. |
| AI | Advantage: Ampersand.Bring-your-own-key throughout: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Apple Intelligence, local models through Ollama, and CLI agents, routed per feature. We resell nothing. | Writing Tools through Apple Intelligence — proofread, rewrite, summarise — once enabled in System Settings, plus an optional ChatGPT extension. No API keys of your own, no local model management. |
| Meeting recording | Advantage: Ampersand.Records a meeting in person or on a call and transcribes it on your own Mac with a local Whisper model, then writes the note. macOS only, and part of Pro. | Nothing built in. |
| Real-time collaboration | None. | None. No co-editing and no built-in commenting for collaborators. |
| Open source | No. The encryption is the standard age format, so the files outlive the app either way. | No. |
Across these 17 rows, Ampersand leads 7, Ulysses leads 4, and 6 are a draw. The dot marks the leader. Where Ulysses 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.
Ulysses 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
Plain files, with no library around them
Every note is a .md file in a folder you chose, so there is no export step between you and your own writing and nothing to be inside. Ulysses can do this too through External Folders, but it is an option most people never switch on; here it is the only way the app works.
Encryption, not a lock on the door
A locked note is age-encrypted on disk under one vault passphrase, opened with Touch ID and recoverable with a recovery kit. Ulysses is clear in its own documentation that Password Lock does not encrypt the underlying data. Both choices are defensible; only one of them survives someone reading the file.
It runs on Windows and Linux
Native builds for macOS, Windows and Linux, on Intel/AMD and ARM alike, all from one $29 licence covering three devices. Ulysses is an Apple-platform app and shows no sign of being anything else, which matters the day work hands you a Windows laptop.
Pay once
One payment of $29 at the launch price, regularly $49, with a 14-day money-back guarantee and no renewal. Ulysses is $39.99 a year for as long as you want to keep opening your own writing, which over a five-year book project is a different number entirely.
Where Ulysses is the better tool
Every page here names at least two, because Ulysses genuinely has them and a comparison that pretended otherwise would not be worth reading.
The iPhone and iPad apps
They are close to the Mac app in capability, they are in the same subscription, and they sync without you arranging anything. Ampersand has no phone app at all. If a meaningful share of your writing happens on a phone or an iPad, this difference decides it and nothing else on this page will change that.
Sync you do not have to build
One account, iCloud, included in the price, working the first time on every device you own. Ampersand has no sync service — you point it at iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing or git and take responsibility for the setup and for anything that goes wrong with it.
A publishing pipeline that is genuinely finished
ePub for a book, DOCX and PDF driven by a real style system, and one-step publishing to WordPress, Medium, Ghost and Micro.blog. Ampersand exports beautifully but stops at the file — there is no ePub and no way to push a post to a blog from inside the app.
The writing environment itself
A decade of sanding down one surface until nothing on it asks for attention, with a library structure — groups, filters, keywords — that still makes sense at book length. It is the best long-form writing environment on Apple platforms and that is a considered opinion, not a courtesy.
Which one should you use?
Choose Ulysses if
you write on an iPhone or an iPad as well as a Mac, you want sync that works the first time without configuring anything, or you publish — to a blog, to ePub, to a styled DOCX — often enough that the pipeline matters more than the file format underneath. Ulysses is a superb piece of software and none of those is a consolation prize.
Choose Ampersand if
you want your writing to be ordinary Markdown files in an ordinary folder rather than in a library, you would rather pay once than renew, you need the app to run on Windows or Linux too, or you want notes that are genuinely encrypted on disk rather than hidden behind the interface.
Moving from Ulysses
Asked plainly
Can I use Ulysses on Windows?
No. Ulysses is available for macOS, iPadOS and iOS only — there is no Windows version, no Linux version, no Android app and no web app, and the vendor has never shipped one. If you need the same writing app on a Windows machine, you need a different app; Ampersand ships native builds for macOS 14 and later, Windows 10 and later, and Linux, though it has no phone app at all.
Is Ulysses’ password lock the same as encryption?
No, and Ulysses says so itself. Password Lock is access control: it stops the app showing a locked sheet without your password or Touch ID, but the company’s own help pages state that the underlying data stays unencrypted on disk and can still be reached through a Time Machine backup or the raw iCloud container. That is a reasonable choice for a writing app. It is not the same as encryption, and it is worth knowing which one you are relying on. Ampersand encrypts the note body itself with age, so the file on disk is ciphertext.
Is there a Ulysses alternative without a subscription?
Ampersand is one — free to use for as long as you like, with Ampersand Pro a single $29 payment at the launch price (regularly $49) covering three devices, with a 14-day money-back guarantee and no renewal. Ulysses is subscription-only at $39.99 a year or $5.99 a month, which does include the iPhone and iPad apps and family sharing for up to five people. The trade is real in both directions: you stop paying rent, and you give up the phone apps and first-party sync.
Can I open my Ulysses sheets in another app?
It depends on where you keep them. Sheets in the default Ulysses Library live in a managed CloudKit container and have to be exported before another app can read them. Sheets in an External Folder are ordinary Markdown or Textbundle files in a real folder, and those can be opened and edited anywhere — that is the point of the feature. Textbundle keeps images and annotations that plain Markdown loses when edited elsewhere, and Ulysses notes that external folders are not automatically backed up.
Does Ampersand have an iPhone app like Ulysses?
No. There is no Ampersand app for iPhone, iPad or Android today, and this is the biggest single gap between the two products. Ulysses’ iPhone and iPad apps are close to its Mac app in capability and are included in the same subscription. Ampersand runs on macOS, Windows and Linux only. Because your notes are plain .md files in a folder, you can read and edit them on a phone with any Markdown editor pointed at the same synced folder, but that is a workaround rather than an answer.
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 Ulysses keeps them in — and see for yourself.
Free to start · Mac, Windows & Linux · No account required