Scrivener for Windows is missing Mac features

Is there Scrivener for Windows?

Yes. Literature & Latte sells Scrivener 3 for Windows, for 64-bit Windows 10 or later, from its own store and the Microsoft Store. The free trial counts the days you actually use it, thirty of them, rather than thirty calendar days. It is a separate purchase from the Mac edition.

First, check which Scrivener you have

Much of what writers read about the Windows version being behind dates from Scrivener 1 for Windows, which trailed the Mac edition for years. Scrivener 3 for Windows closed most of that gap when it arrived. Open Help → About Scrivener to see your version number. If it starts with a 1, upgrading is the single largest step toward what Mac users describe.

Advice and tutorials written for the Mac also use Mac menu names and keyboard shortcuts. A feature that seems missing is sometimes under a different menu, or on Ctrl where the tutorial says ⌘. Scrivener's user manual for Windows, available from the Help menu, is the place to confirm before concluding that something is absent.

What still differs

Some differences remain, and they tend to follow the operating system. Features built on services that macOS supplies and Windows does not have no direct counterpart, and the two editions have not always received the same additions at the same moment. Rather than trust a list from a forum thread of uncertain age, look at Literature & Latte's own material: its knowledge base and its user forums keep the current state of Mac and Windows differences, and staff answer questions about them there.

Literature & Latte's cross-platform article names a few that bite when a project moves: research linked into the binder from disk will not open on the other system, a web page archived on one cannot be read on the other, and fonts or list formatting can change in transit. A few other points are settled too:

• A Scrivener 3 project opens on either system. On Windows the .scriv package shows as a folder, and you open the .scrivx file inside it.
• A license covers one operating system. Using both a Mac and a PC takes a second license, which Literature & Latte sells at a discount to existing owners.
• A project shared through a sync folder should be closed on one computer before it is opened on the other. Scrivener's documentation is firm about this.
• There is a Scrivener for iPhone and iPad, and no Android or Linux edition.

In Tabularia

Because Tabularia is a browser app, the Windows edition and the Mac edition are the same program. There is nothing to be behind. It opens on Linux and Android too, with one caveat: a phone gets a smaller single-column Studio that leaves out the designed page and a few tools that need one.

If the reason for looking is a Scrivener project, it does not need rebuilding. Folder import reads a .scriv project directly, and the Binder's nesting becomes chapters and scenes. Compare the imported Outline with the Binder before deleting anything on the Scrivener side.

What Tabularia does not have is Scrivener's compile step or its corkboard. Instead, the typeset book page is what you type on, and the Outline plays the Binder's part. Writers who lean on Compile to produce several editions from one draft will miss it.