If you're writing a lot of markdown on your Mac, you'll want an editor tailored to that specific purpose. That means we've excluded the likes of Sublime, VS Code, and Atom as code editors, but they may still work for markdown.
You might be more interested in a markdown editor designed specifically to manage markdown, rather than general-purpose code editors. That means the options here focus on tools such as IA Writer, Typora, Mark Text, Obsidian, and MD Docs — all are specifically designed to manage markdown documents and content. However, some of these also include features or functions to make them particularly well suited to one kind of use case.
We’ve selected our best free Markdown Editor for Mac, which we consider to be Obsidian, because it's both powerful and flexible. However, depending on what you're doing with markdown, another tool could suit you better.
Obsidian: The top choice for managing knowledge
Obsidian is one of the most popular applications for creating a second brain (a.k.a., a knowledge base). While its core function remains the same across platforms, Obsidian adds a few things that make it feel more at home on the Mac: support for multiple document types including PDFs, plus integration with several macOS features such as Apple’s Handoff feature. Obsidian has an intuitive interface that feels very much like other apps that have been optimized for macOS.
Obsidian has grown substantially over the past few years, adding many new features and expanding beyond just markdown into other forms of documentation. Obsidian supports many third-party integrations and plugins, too, though none are currently available for macOS.
Obsidian is a great option for those who want to create and manage extensive bodies of information without worrying about formatting them. It doesn’t solve the problem of exporting your markdown to destinations like Google Docs, Slack, or email, however. You can export directly from Obsidian, but if you need to integrate markdown with other applications, you’ll likely want something else.
IA Writer: The academic writer’s choice
The second-best option here is IA Writer. It’s not quite as strong as Obsidian, but it’s a good fit for writers who don’t necessarily want to do everything that Obsidian does. Instead, it’s focused primarily on writers who are concerned about citations and using Zettelkasten methodology.
IA Writer’s strength lies in the fact that its community is smaller than Obsidian’s, so there’s a tighter focus on the use cases IA Writer addresses. Still, it’s active, and has some nice extras, such as syncing with a service called Papers, which provides access to journals and articles via subscription.
Typora and MarkText: Markdown editors designed for simplicity
Typora and MarkText both take a clean, minimalist approach to markdown editing. They’re similar to IA Writer and Obsidian, but their interfaces are less busy, and they’re focused more on letting you write and edit markdown than they are on organizing your thoughts. We’re fans of Typora, especially given its ease of use. If you prefer the way that Word or Pages format documents, MarkText is worth checking out, too.
Markdific: Clean WYSIWYG for simple markdown
Markdific is a recently launched markdown editor. It’s clean, simple, and uses the “write what you see” approach to editing. Unlike IA Writer and others, it doesn’t really offer advanced functionality; instead, it just works well, autosaving as it goes along. It has multiple themes to choose from, and you can export to PDF, Word, and HTML when you’re done.
MD Docs: The portable markdown editor
For now, there aren’t any notable markdown editors available only for Windows, and this seems unlikely to change anytime soon. But if you’re looking for a free markdown editor that runs entirely on your Mac, then we recommend MD Docs. The app shows your markdown side by side with multiple synchronized HTML previews.
MD Docs comes as a portable application for Mac and PC, meaning that you can install it wherever you’d like. You don’t even need to register it before you can start using it.
MarkText and Ghostwriter: Free markdown alternatives
Finally, we’ll just mention two additional markdown editors worth knowing about. Both MarkText and Ghostwriter provide a clean, simple interface to markdown, and both are actively maintained. MarkText is a great alternative to IA Writer and Typora, especially if you’re trying to find a way to edit markdown that’s easy to learn.