Reedsy and Vellum represent two fundamentally different approaches to book formatting. Reedsy is free, runs in your browser, and is accessible to anyone with an internet connection. Vellum costs $250, runs only on Mac, and produces the best book interiors in indie publishing.
Both tools can take a manuscript and turn it into a publishable book. The differences are in output quality, control, file ownership, and what happens when you scale beyond your first title. If neither fits your needs — Reedsy’s limitations or Vellum’s Mac-only requirement — Cambric offers a cross-platform alternative at $109 one-time with Typst-based typesetting and local file storage.
What Reedsy Book Editor is
The Reedsy Book Editor is a free, browser-based tool for writing and formatting books. You create an account, write or paste in your manuscript, apply basic formatting, and export to EPUB or PDF.
Reedsy the company is a marketplace that connects authors with freelance editors, designers, and marketers. The free editor is the front door — a genuinely useful tool that introduces authors to the Reedsy ecosystem. This business model means the editor doesn’t need to charge money, but it also means the formatting features will always be secondary to the marketplace.
The editor is clean and functional. For a free tool, it does remarkably well. It won’t match the output of premium software, but it produces books that are publishable and respectable.
What Vellum is
Vellum is a dedicated desktop formatting application for Mac. At $249.99, it’s the most expensive standalone formatting tool available to indie authors. It’s also the benchmark. When authors compare any formatting tool’s output quality, they compare it to Vellum.
Vellum does one thing — format books — and does it better than anything else. The typography is refined, the templates are elegant, and the workflow is fast. Import a Word document, pick a style, export. The print-ready PDFs and EPUBs it produces are consistently accepted by every major retailer and distributor.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Reedsy Book Editor | Vellum |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | $249.99 (one-time) |
| Platform | Web browser (any) | Mac only |
| Writing editor | Yes | No |
| Ebook export | Yes (EPUB) | Yes (EPUB) |
| Print export | Yes (PDF) | Yes (PDF) |
| Retailer support | All (standard formats) | All |
| Template options | ~5 basic styles | 25+ refined styles |
| Drop caps | No | Yes, genre-specific |
| Ornamental scene breaks | No | Yes, customizable |
| Front matter control | Basic | Full control |
| Running headers | No | Yes |
| Custom trim sizes | Limited | Full range |
| Typography quality | Clean, basic | Industry-leading |
| File storage | Reedsy’s cloud | Local (your Mac) |
| Internet required | Yes, always | No |
| Offline access | No | Full offline |
Pricing: genuinely free vs genuinely premium
Reedsy’s editor costs nothing. No trial period, no feature gates, no “free for the first book.” It’s free because Reedsy makes money from their freelancer marketplace, not from the editor. This is a real advantage for authors who are starting out or working with tight budgets.
Vellum costs $249.99 for the ebook + print bundle (or $199.99 for ebook only). It’s a one-time purchase — not a subscription — with unlimited exports. At 10 books, that’s $25 per title. At 25 books, it’s $10 per title. For prolific authors, the math works out quickly.
The question isn’t whether free is better than $250. It’s whether the quality difference justifies the investment for your specific publishing business.
Output quality
This is where the comparison becomes lopsided, and it’s fair to say so honestly.
Reedsy produces clean, readable interiors. The text is properly formatted, chapters are clearly delineated, and the output validates with major retailers. For a free tool, the quality is impressive. You can publish a book with Reedsy’s output and no reader will think it’s broken.
Vellum produces interiors that look like they were typeset by a professional. The difference shows up in:
- Chapter openers. Vellum offers styled drop caps, decorative elements, and genre-appropriate chapter heading designs. Reedsy uses simple, clean chapter titles.
- Scene breaks. Vellum provides ornamental scene break glyphs that match the book’s style. Reedsy uses basic spacing or simple markers.
- Typography. Vellum handles fine typographic details — kerning, tracking, optical margins, widow/orphan control — that Reedsy’s web-based renderer doesn’t address.
- Front matter. Vellum’s title pages, copyright pages, and half-title pages look designed. Reedsy’s are functional.
- Print margins. Vellum’s default margin settings create interiors with proper breathing room and gutter compensation. Reedsy’s margins are adequate but not optimized.
The gap is real. Whether it matters depends on your genre, your audience, and your standards. A reader buying a $4.99 Kindle romance may not notice. An author holding their first print proof next to a traditionally published book on their shelf will.
Where your files live
This is a meaningful difference that doesn’t show up in feature tables.
Reedsy stores your manuscript on their servers. You need an internet connection to access your work. Your project lives in Reedsy’s infrastructure, tied to your Reedsy account. If Reedsy changes their terms, has an outage, or shuts down the editor, your access depends on their decisions.
You can export your manuscript at any time, and you should — regularly. But the working copy, the one you’re actively editing, lives on someone else’s computer.
Vellum stores your project as a file on your Mac. No cloud sync, no account required for the software to function, no internet needed. If Vellum the company disappeared tomorrow, your files and your app would keep working. The file on your hard drive is the single source of truth.
For authors whose manuscripts represent months or years of work — and whose publishing income depends on those files — this distinction matters more than any feature comparison. For a deeper look at why file ownership matters, see why local-first matters for your manuscript.
Writing capabilities
Reedsy includes a writing editor. You can draft your manuscript directly in the tool, organize chapters, and move from writing to formatting without exporting to a separate application. The editor is basic compared to dedicated writing tools like Scrivener, but it works for straightforward manuscripts.
Vellum has no writing editor. It’s a formatting tool. You write your manuscript elsewhere — Word, Scrivener, Google Docs — and import the finished .docx into Vellum for formatting. This is a clean separation of concerns (write in a writing tool, format in a formatting tool), but it means managing two applications and an export step.
If you want one tool for everything, Reedsy has the edge here. If you already have a writing tool you love, the lack of an editor in Vellum is irrelevant. Cambric combines both capabilities in a desktop app — a structured manuscript editor for drafting and organizing, plus professional formatting with 20+ templates — without requiring a browser or cloud account.
Platform access
Reedsy runs in any modern web browser. Windows, Mac, Linux, Chromebook, iPad — if it has a browser and internet, you can use Reedsy. This is the broadest platform support of any formatting tool.
Vellum runs only on Mac. Not on Windows, not in a browser, not on iPad. Apple hardware is a hard requirement. For the roughly 75% of PC users on Windows, Vellum simply doesn’t exist as an option.
If you’re on Windows and choosing between these two, the comparison is over before it starts — Reedsy is available and Vellum isn’t. Cambric is also available on Windows at $109, offering a local desktop alternative with professional output quality and no internet dependency. For a full list of options, see our Vellum alternative for Windows guide.
Retailer and format support
Both tools export files compatible with major ebook retailers. Reedsy produces standard EPUB files. Vellum produces EPUBs optimized for each retailer’s specific requirements.
For print, both produce PDFs. Vellum’s print PDFs are compatible with KDP, IngramSpark, and other print-on-demand services, with precise control over trim size, bleed, and margins. Reedsy’s print PDFs work but offer less customization.
If you distribute through IngramSpark or other services with strict PDF specifications, Vellum’s precision matters. If you’re primarily on KDP, both tools produce acceptable files. Cambric generates platform-specific exports for both KDP and IngramSpark from a single project, handling spine width, bleed, and PDF specification differences automatically — use our spine calculator to verify the numbers.
When to use Reedsy
Reedsy is the right choice if:
- Your budget is zero and you need a functional formatting tool today
- You’re publishing your first book and want to minimize upfront investment
- You want writing and formatting in one tool without paying for software
- You’re on Windows or Chromebook and need something accessible
- Your genre doesn’t demand premium interior design — or your readers primarily buy ebooks where formatting differences are less visible
Reedsy is an excellent starting point. Many authors use it for their first few books before graduating to premium tools as their income and standards grow.
When to use Vellum
Vellum is the right choice if:
- You’re on a Mac and want the best output quality available
- Interior design matters to you, your genre, and your readers
- You publish multiple books per year and the per-book cost of $250 becomes negligible
- You want your files on your own machine with no cloud dependency
- You sell on multiple platforms and need optimized exports for each
A third path
If you want premium output quality without the Mac restriction, or a writing editor without the cloud dependency, Cambric bridges the gap. It’s a desktop app for Windows and Mac at $109, with 20+ professional templates, local file storage, and a built-in writing editor. All the control of a desktop tool, at a price point between free and $250.