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Wretify vs Atticus
Wretify is a clean, minimalist writing app for nonfiction writers, built for focus — with an AI that has read everything you've written and refuses to write it for you.
What is the difference between Wretify and Atticus?
Atticus is a browser-based book writing and formatting tool that turns a manuscript into print-ready PDF and ePub files.
Wretify is a clean, minimalist writing app for nonfiction writers, built for focus — with an AI that has read everything you've written and refuses to write it for you.
Atticus shines at formatting a book for print and ebook; Wretify is where the book gets written and thought through. Its AI has read everything you have written and brings real, cited research to the chapter, and the reference list is built from your footnotes automatically.
What is Atticus best at?
Atticus is made for the last mile: formatting a finished book into professional print and ebook files, with an automatic title page, copyright page and table of contents, proper footnotes and endnotes for print, and a one-time price with free updates. It also has writing goals and a sprint timer.
Self-publishing authors, fiction or nonfiction, who want to format their own books for print and ebook.
Wretify and Atticus, side by side
| Wretify | Atticus | |
|---|---|---|
| Made for | Nonfiction books and articles. | Writing and, above all, formatting books for self-publishing. |
| Devices | In the web browser, on a computer or a phone. Nothing to install. | In the browser, or installed on Windows, Mac, Linux, Chromebook, iOS and Android. |
| Price | One plan with every feature: $7 a month or $45 a year. The first 1,000 writers get 3 months free. Opens October 27, 2026. | $147 one-time, with free updates and a 30-day money-back guarantee. |
| Where your writing lives | Plain Markdown files in a Wretify folder in your own Google Drive. Wretify keeps no other copy. | Your Atticus account in the cloud, with a backup file you can download. |
| AI | Bring your own key (Claude, Gemini or DeepSeek). The AI reads everything you have written, thinks with you and brings you real research and your own earlier passages. It does not draft your chapters; nothing reaches the page unless you press Replace or Insert, or drag it there. | None mentioned. |
| Footnotes and citations | Footnotes inside the sentence they support. Each chapter builds its own References list (APA 7) from them. Sources come from 250 million real papers (OpenAlex), never invented. | Footnotes (print), end-of-chapter and end-of-book notes; a bibliography is written by hand. |
| Export | A chapter as Markdown, Word or PDF; a whole book as Markdown, Word or EPUB, with a bibliography. | EPUB, print-ready PDF and Word (DOCX). |
| Offline | Once opened on a device, you can keep writing offline; it syncs to your Drive when you reconnect. The AI needs a connection. | You can write offline; importing and exporting need a connection. |
Should I choose Wretify or Atticus?
Choose Atticus if your manuscript is finished and you want print-ready and ebook files without hiring a formatter.
Choose Wretify if you are still writing a nonfiction book and want your sources, footnotes and earlier writing in the same room as the draft.
Can I use Wretify and Atticus together?
They fit end to end: write in Wretify, export the book as a Word file, and format it in Atticus, which imports Word documents with their footnotes.
How does Wretify compare to other writing apps?
Every major writing app is good at something different. The full guide answers what the best software for writing books is, app by app.
Sources
- Atticus — www.atticus.io/
- Accessing Atticus (devices, offline) — www.atticus.io/accessing-atticus/
- Atticus footnotes and endnotes — www.atticus.io/footnotes-and-endnotes/
- Atticus updates — www.atticus.io/updates/
Updated . Prices and features of other apps are taken from their own websites on that date and can change. Wretify is our product, so we have tried hard to be fair to the others. If something here is wrong or out of date, tell us and we will correct it.