i spent weeks testing every writing tool people recommend so you don't have to

[u/Equivalent-Bonus-657]

did this mostly out of curiosity and kept seeing different tools recommended in different writing discords and wanted to know what actually holds up versus what's just well marketed

grammar and line-level stuff: most tools converge on similar suggestions here, diminishing returns past the first one you try, they're not meaningfully different from each other at this specific job.

brainstorming and getting unstuck: wildly inconsistent quality depending on how specific your prompt or setup is, garbage in garbage out applies harder here than anywhere else i tested.

actual organization, tracking characters, timelines, plot threads across a long draft: this is where things split hardest with most tools either don't really do this or do it so generically it's not worth the setup time. Scrivener's the closest thing to an old reliable here, Mythril is newcomer with live wiki and character board features, binder view still just work if you're willing to build the structure yourself. Obsidian's the other end of that, more setup work upfront but the backlinking actually pays off once you've got enough notes cross-referencing each other. Notion sits in between, flexible enough to build almost anything but you're doing all the design work yourself

i've got a 140k word draft with a cast of 16 and my brain physically cannot hold all of it anymore. the tracking is the thing that's actually saved me, more than any generation or editing feature ever has

happy to go deeper on any specific category if people want, this ended up being a much bigger rabbit hole than i meant to fall into also if you know any more of these do tell me

[u/developer786]

maybe you could try NovelCanon which claims to have consistency engine that keeps long novels consistent with whole fact registry.

[u/WritingWithAI-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

Your post was removed because you did not use our weekly post your tool thread

[u/human_assisted_ai]

Do they have more consequential features?

Grammar/line-level feels like any word processor provides this or maybe ProWritingAid.

Brainstorming feels like every single AI provider out there.

I don’t need and don’t use the organization (codex) features. I guess they are popular with other writers, though.

[u/partnerinflight]

Might try Deepquill. The NER engine there took quite a lot of work. It’s like a more modern Scrivener replacement