Tabularia compared with LivingWriter

Two ideas of help

LivingWriter organizes a book quickly. Chapters and scenes drag into order in the sidebar, while Boards collect the structure, the research, and the elements of the story beside the draft. It is built for fiction and non-fiction alike. Its other half is generation, which runs from an outline built out of a prompt to a rewrite of the passage you highlight, with characters and settings generated along the way. The help on offer is words you have not written yet.

Tabularia offers a different kind of help, aimed at the words you did write. A draft is somewhere to try the paragraph another way — or the chapter, or the whole book — and when you bring it back you decide on each difference in turn, with the writing around it still there to judge it against, or take every one at once. Snapshots hold a state you can return to. Timelines follow a character's inner change or a promise waiting to be paid off through the passages that carry them, so rewriting a paragraph takes the marker on it along.

Arranging is as quick here. The Outline reorders by drag too, and a scene can leave its chapter for any other; what moves is the writing itself, since the Outline is the manuscript's own headings rather than a list kept beside it. Two scenes become one when you delete the scene break between them.

Where the research lives

LivingWriter gives research a board of its own, opened from the sidebar. Each section on it collects cards of four kinds — an article saved as a link with a comment, a note, an image, and a DOCX or PDF you upload — so the reading behind a book is gathered in one place, away from the prose.

Tabularia keeps it as close to the words as it can get. A thought about a paragraph is a comment on that paragraph, and a thread you are following is an anchor fastened to the passages that carry it. The people, places and objects are sheets beside the page. Pictures sit in the sidebar's Assets tab, and one drag puts one on the page, sized and wrapped. There is no drawer for whole documents, and that is deliberate: a note filed somewhere else is a note you have to remember to go and read.

What happens when you change your mind

Rewriting a passage is easy in both, and that is where the two part company. What Tabularia is built around comes after the rewrite: deciding whether it was right, while the version you abandoned is still there and you can see what the change disturbed three chapters later. LivingWriter keeps saved versions of a chapter, and you revert to one or copy from it; there is no branch to try a rewrite in and nothing to merge back. Tabularia's Snapshots have no cut-off.

There is one composition underneath all of it, typeset as you write, so the outline, the minimap, search and the Working Scope are all moving through the same thing you are writing. Narrow the page, the search and the word counts to a chapter, a scene, or a thread you pin, and widen again when you want the whole book back.

That typesetting is the other gap. LivingWriter lays a book out at export, into DOCX, PDF, EPUB, or a print-ready file for Amazon KDP. Tabularia sets the trim size, the running heads and the chapter openings on the page you write on, and exports EPUB, PDF and DOCX among eight formats. It also keeps the manuscript on your own device, so it writes and saves with no connection at all; LivingWriter saves to its cloud.

Why to switch

LivingWriter puts a drafting assistant in the room and holds a project on boards. Its one-click outlines are the feature writers name first: a project that would have been a blank page arrives with a plan in it. Tabularia now offers the same shapes and puts them somewhere else — into the manuscript rather than onto a board beside it. Choosing one seeds the Acts and Chapters you will actually write in, each Chapter named for the beat it opens on and carrying a note saying what that beat is for, with the beats themselves fastened through the prose as anchors you drag onto the scenes as they arrive.

The assistant is metered. LivingWriter's free plan offers a taste of AI, the Pro subscription offers everyday use, and the most generous allowance comes with the Pro + AI tier above it. The free plan also stops at one manuscript of 25,000 words, exported only to PDF. Tabularia meters neither words nor requests. On the Cloud plan, its connector points the assistant you already pay for at the manuscript, and whatever it suggests waits in a Draft of its own rather than landing in the prose, unless you ask it to write in the prose itself.

LivingWriter is ahead in places. It has apps in the iOS and Android stores, it recognizes a character's name as you type and links it to their card, and its goals take a deadline and its statistics run by the day, week and month. If a built-in assistant is what you want, it has one.

Switch if the writing is yours to do and the hard part is keeping a long book in hand while you revise it. Labels on the Outline's rows mark a point of view or a scene that needs a pass, and filtering to one label gives you a list of exactly those scenes to jump between. An anchor holds a place you will want again through every edit around it. And if you write more than one book, each is its own project in the Projects tab, or a series can sit in one manuscript with the threads running through every volume. The page stays as quick at the end of the draft as at the beginning.

Moving out of LivingWriter

On Pro, open the manuscript's Export, choose DOCX, and include the chapter notes and elements. Import that .docx and read the Outline once, because chapters come from the heading styles in the file. An account that has dropped back to the free plan can still export, but only to PDF, and a PDF keeps printed pages rather than structure: the import is best-effort and the chapters need checking. Once it is in:

• Elements included in the export arrive as text in the manuscript. Move the characters and locations you use into Sheets and delete the rest.
• The Research board and the planning boards have no export, so copy across the cards you still need before you close the account.
• LivingWriter's version history stays behind. Take a snapshot after the import so the book as it arrived is kept.