Tabularia compared with Novlr

Around the writing, and under it

Novlr is a writer-owned platform, and the platform is the point. Around the editor are Academy courses, writing groups with a community around them, and an author website to publish from, with streaks and analytics to keep you turning up. Much of what you are paying for is what surrounds the page.

Tabularia puts everything under the page instead. You will not find courses or an author site here. There is a manuscript, and what it carries is there to write and revise a long book. It is one typeset composition with outline moving through the whole of it and timelines fastened to the passages that carry them, and a draft is where a change goes while you decide about it. It has word-count goals and a writing timer for the days you want a target, and they stay in the document header rather than in front of the writing.

Where the manuscript lives

Novlr's manuscript lives on Novlr's servers and reaches you through a browser, and syncing it between your devices is a large part of what the account is for.

Tabularia's lives on your device. It opens, writes and revises with no connection at all, which is the difference between a train with no signal being a writing session and being a wasted hour. The Cloud plan, at $20 a month, adds backup and sync between your devices, along with sharing for review. It is continuity on top of a manuscript that is already yours and already on the machine in front of you.

What the plans count

Novlr's plans meter how many projects you may keep and how far back your version history goes. Studio removes both limits, with a lifetime option above the monthly tiers.

Tabularia counts neither. Keep as many projects as you like, at any length, with Snapshots that have no cutoff and everything else it carries beside them. The Local plan provides local writing without a capacity meter. A Cloud subscription adds continuity between devices.

Why to switch

Novlr wraps the writing in a platform you can lean on when you are stuck or need a group expecting pages from you, and it lives in a browser tab on whatever machine you sit down at.

Switch if you want the manuscript itself to be the product. That shows most once the draft is long. The Minimap lets you drag to any part of the book in one motion, and an anchor marks a scene you will want again so it is always one press away. The timeline drawer holds the plan under the page, whether you laid it down by hand or from a story shape, while Sheets keep the cast beside it. The page stays quick as the word count climbs, and it is typeset as a book from the first sentence. The two overlap more easily than they compete — nothing about learning your craft in one place stops the book living in the other, and prose arrives here in DOCX, Markdown or plain text and becomes a structured manuscript.

Exporting from Novlr

Use the ⋯ menu on the project and export DOCX. Novlr keeps its heading hierarchy in the file, which is exactly what the import reads: a Heading 1 becomes a Chapter, and nothing needs re-marking.