Draftwell Pro is a local writing app that organizes your book, tracks your time, analyzes your prose, and manages your submission pipeline — all on your own machine, with no subscription and no AI.
Most writing software was designed by product managers, not writers. You end up managing the tool instead of the book.
No record of when Elena first appeared, what she looks like, or why she's afraid of horses. It's in your head — somewhere.
You've been "working on it" for eight months. How many actual writing hours is that? You don't know. You've never known.
Forty agents, each with different portals, response windows, and statuses — tracked in a Google Sheet that hasn't been touched since March.
Another few dollars a month to fight an interface that still looks like it was designed for screenwriters in 2007.
Your book lives in a clean three-level hierarchy: Book → Chapter → Scene. A sidebar shows your full structure at a glance. Click a scene, write in it. That's the whole interface.
Real formatting — bold, italic, headings, lists.
Changes saved automatically whenever you've written something new. You will never lose a sentence.
A built-in Notes tab on every scene, plus unlimited custom tabs for research, character beats, or reference material.
Right-click any word for synonyms. Offline-first — works without internet.
Known characters, locations, and items glow in the editor as you type — continuity problems become impossible to miss.
Starting a new book from scratch isn't the only path in. Import an existing manuscript, then plan the rest on a visual board built for rearranging chapters and scenes.
Select an existing .docx file and import it straight into a book. No copy-pasting scene by scene.
Point Draftwell Pro at any .docx manuscript you've already been writing in.
Choose how the document's headings and breaks map to chapters and scenes before anything is imported.
Confirm the mapping and Draftwell Pro builds out the full Book → Chapter → Scene hierarchy for you.
A corkboard-style planning view — lay out every chapter and scene as a card with its own synopsis, then drag to rearrange until the shape of the book is right.
Every scene gets a card with a short synopsis — see the whole story's shape without opening a single scene.
Reorder scenes within a chapter or move them across chapters entirely — the manuscript structure updates with the board.
Zoom out for a bird's-eye view of the full book, or zoom in to focus on a single act while you plan.
Six analytical dashboards. No guessing whether your second act is thin, your protagonist is underwritten, or your prose reads like a legal document — or like it wasn't written by you at all.
Six industry metrics on one screen. See where your prose excels and where it needs work — at a glance.
Includes: Flesch, Flesch-Kincaid, ARI, Coleman-Liau, Gunning Fog, SMOG, MATTR, Dialogue Ratio, Pacing Index, Adverb Density, Filler Word %, and more.
An overall AI Detection Score plus six underlying signals — Sentence Rhythm, Scene Consistency, Lexical Entropy, Hapax Richness, Phrase Variety, and Transitions — so you know whether your prose reads as human before an agent or reader does.
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Every character, location, item, and event in your story — tracked in a live panel alongside the editor. When you're writing a scene, Draftwell Pro surfaces exactly which entities appear in it. No digging.
Link any entity to any other — with a direction, a label, an in-story date, and a description.
Auto-detects recurring capitalized names in your prose you haven't formally defined yet. Surfaces the characters you forgot to track.
See which scenes mention each entity and how often. Reveals the chapters where a character goes completely dark.
One search bar. Scene prose, scene names, chapter names, notes, outlines, brainstorming, entity names, relationships, and every custom research tab — all indexed, all searchable, all click-to-navigate.
Searches the body text of every scene, plus chapter names, scene names, scene notes, book outline, brainstorming, and all custom tabs you've created.
Every tracked character, location, item, event, and entity relationship is searchable by name — surfaced alongside prose results in one unified view.
Every result links directly to its location. Click a scene result — you land on that scene. No hunting through the sidebar.
A full submission pipeline built as a drag-and-drop Kanban board. Every agent, publisher, and contest — tracked with dates, follow-ups, and a complete paper trail.
Drag cards between columns to update status · Status changes log automatically in the comment thread · Archive old queries without losing history
Draftwell Pro tracks every writing session automatically. Open a book, start typing — you're clocked in. Step away for 30 minutes — you're clocked out. No buttons to push. No logging.
The timer starts when you start writing. Elapsed time shows live in the top navigation bar.
Step away from your desk and the session ends cleanly. No runaway timer logging three hours of you staring at the ceiling.
Derived automatically from word count snapshots at clock-in and clock-out, across all sessions.
Session goals are simple: pick a word count target, watch Draftwell Pro track your progress in real time as you write. Confetti fires when you hit it.
Set a word target. Watch the bar fill as you type. As simple as it sounds.
Because finishing deserves a moment. Confetti fires when you cross the line.
Every goal stays on record. Total words written toward goals, tracked across all sessions.
A Kanban board for writing-adjacent work: research to finish, scenes to rewrite, people to email. Anything with a status and a deadline.
Write a character name in a task and Draftwell Pro surfaces a direct link to that entity's detail view · Start & due dates generate a progress bar that turns amber at 80%, red when overdue
When you're ready to get your book out of Draftwell Pro and into the world, the exporter gives you full control over how it looks.
Optional, opt-in backup and sync to your personal Google Drive or Dropbox. Your books go to your storage — no Draftwell Pro server ever sees them.
Books sync directly to your own Google Drive or Dropbox — not to us. We never have access to your files or your account.
Install Draftwell Pro on a second machine and pick up exactly where you left off. Your .auth files follow you.
Edited the same book on two machines? Draftwell Pro detects the conflict and walks you through a scene-by-scene diff so you decide what to keep.
Disabled by default. Connect when you want it, disconnect whenever you like. Nothing moves without your say-so.
Works with Google Drive and Dropbox
Draftwell Pro runs entirely on your own computer by default. Nothing is ever sent to a server unless you turn on cloud sync yourself. No account required. No telemetry.
All data stays on your machine. No internet connection required to write. No server. Cloud sync is opt-in — off unless you switch it on.
Each book is a single .auth file. Back it up, move it, copy it to a USB drive — it's just a file.
Draftwell Pro runs a GFS (Grandfather-Father-Son) backup system automatically. Every time you open a book, a timestamped snapshot is created. If you blew up a chapter at 2am — it's still there.
Last 5 opens · 7 daily · 4 weekly · 12 monthly. Never an infinite pile — capped at ~28 backups per book.
Browse your backup history and compare any snapshot to the current version before restoring.
Worth being direct about.
Draftwell Pro does not generate, suggest, or rewrite your prose. There is no autocomplete. Every word in your manuscript is yours.
Buy it once. No monthly fee. No annual renewal. No "your files are locked until you upgrade" gotcha.
No account required, no forced sign-in. Cloud sync is opt-in to your own Google Drive or Dropbox — Draftwell Pro's servers never see your files.
Chapter/scene planning without the overhead. No compile step. No snowflake method wizard. No 47 preference panels. A sidebar, an editor, an Outline board, and a lot of data about how you're actually writing.
Here's an honest, feature-by-feature look at where each one actually wins.
| Feature | Draftwell Pro | Scrivener 3 | Atticus | Dabble | yWriter |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | $10 one-time (reg. $19.99) | $59.99/platform · $95.98 bundle | $147 one-time | $9–$29/month, or $699 lifetime | Free (optional one-time donation, up to $24.95) |
| Free trial | 10 hours of active writing time, non-consecutive | 30 days of actual use, non-consecutive | No free trial — 30-day money-back guarantee after purchase | 14 days, no credit card | Not applicable — free forever, no trial needed |
| Subscription | None | None | None | Optional monthly/annual plans (lifetime option also available) | None |
| Works offline, no account required | Yes — fully local, no account | Yes — fully local, no account | No — browser app, account & cloud storage required | No — cloud-first, account required (offline edits sync later) | Yes — fully local, no account, no cloud at all |
| Import from Word | Guided wizard — maps headings to chapters/scenes | Imports .docx, no chapter/scene mapping step | Imports .docx, but requires manual Heading-1 & page-break prep first | No file import — copy/paste only (auto-detects chapter/scene breaks) | Imports via RTF conversion — requires exact “Chapter N” headings & “* * *” scene-break markers |
| Outline / Corkboard | Chapter/scene/synopsis board, drag to rearrange, zoom | Freeform corkboard — labels, colors, grid/list layouts | Not available (on roadmap) | Plot Grid — spreadsheet-style story/timeline grid (Standard plan+) | Storyboard view — drag/drop scene cards, more basic than Scrivener's |
| Entity & relationship tracking | Dedicated panel, relationship mapping, name scan, mention analytics | No dedicated system — keyword/metadata workarounds | Not available (on roadmap) | Story Notes — character/world sheets, no relationship mapping (Standard plan+) | Character/location/item database, no relationship mapping or auto-detection |
| Entity highlighting in editor | Known characters/locations/items glow as you type | Not available | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| Writing style analytics | 6-axis dashboard — readability, vocabulary, rhythm, pacing | Not available | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| Story structure analytics | Words/chapter & act-weight charts | Not built in | Not available | Plot Grid organizes structure, but no analytics charts | Word-count stats per scene/chapter, no act-weight charts |
| AI-signal detection | Perplexity, burstiness, repetition & more, scene-by-scene | Not available | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| Writing activity heatmap | 12-month heatmap, sessions, best day | Writing History log, no heatmap view | Not available | Goal & word-count stats, no heatmap | Basic project word-count stats, no heatmap |
| Automatic time tracking | Auto clock-in, 30-min idle timeout, WPM velocity | Manual targets/session stats only | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| Session goals | Live progress bar with confetti on completion | Word-count targets with progress bar | Not available | Goals & stats tracking, incl. NaNoWriMo-style targets | Per-scene/chapter word-count targets, no live progress bar |
| Query/submission tracker | Built-in Kanban — agents, publishers, contests | Not available | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| To-do board | Built-in Kanban, linked to entities | Not available | Not available | Not available | Not available |
| Revision backups | Automatic GFS snapshots (~28 per book) | Manual/on-compile snapshots | Not available (on roadmap) | Basic revision history; snapshot/restore still planned | Not available |
| Export formats | DOCX, EPUB, HTML, PDF (password option) | DOCX, EPUB 3, MOBI/Kindle, PDF, HTML — deeper Compile engine | EPUB, MOBI/Kindle, print-ready PDF | Word, Google Docs, text & web only — no EPUB, PDF, or MOBI | RTF, DOCX, HTML — no EPUB, PDF, or MOBI |
| Book design templates | Style options — fonts, spacing, margins, headings | Compile styles — flexible, but DIY | 17 templates, 1,200+ design combinations | Not available | Not available |
| Collaboration (co-writer/editor/beta reader) | Not available | Not available | Owner/Co-Writer/Editor/Beta-Reader roles with comments | Real-time co-authoring (Premium plan) | Not available |
| Cloud sync | Google Drive or Dropbox, opt-in, conflict diff viewer | Dropbox or iCloud only | AWS cloud — mandatory, not optional | Dabble's own cloud — mandatory, not optional | Not available — entirely local, no cloud option |
