Blog·14 August 2026

Skein vs Craft

These two apps are less alike than the category suggests. One is for documents other people see. The other is for a folder only you open.

Craft is the most handsome piece of document software on the Mac. It is also, in the sense that matters here, not really a competitor: it is built to make things other people read, and Skein is built to keep a folder only you open. Comparing them is still worth doing, because a lot of people are choosing between the two without having noticed that.

The question that decides it

Does the thing you are making need to be seen by someone else?

If yes, Craft is better at that than Skein will ever be, and it is not close. Sharing links, collaboration, publishing, a genuinely good PDF and Word export, a template gallery, Windows and Android and web so the person you are sending it to can open it. Skein has none of that and no plan to have it.

If no, the calculus inverts, and it inverts on where the file lives.

Where your notes actually are

Craft stores your documents on its own servers, hosted on AWS, encrypted at rest and in transit. There is a local option, External Locations, and Craft’s own documentation is candid about its limits: sharing and collaboration are not available in it, folders have to be re-added after you log out or switch device, and using one across several machines is explicitly not recommended because it can cause conflicts and data loss.

There is also a structural point underneath that. Craft’s data model is blocks, not files: every paragraph is a block, pages are nested blocks, documents are collections of them. That is what makes the app able to do the things it does. It is also why a Craft document is not a file in the way a .md file is a file.

Skein’s notes are .md files in a folder you chose, on your disk, with no account and no server. The app has no network code in it at all. That is a much smaller promise than Craft’s and it is the reason the app exists.

A Markdown note open in Skein, with its YAML properties shown as a table and the vault listed on the left — A Skein note. What you see is what is in the file, and the file is in a folder you picked.

The table

	Skein	Craft
Your notes live in	A folder you chose, as .md files	Craft's own cloud on AWS by default. A local option exists and is documented as second class
Price	Free	Free to 1,500 blocks. Plus about $8/month billed annually
Platforms	macOS 14+	macOS, iOS, Windows, Android, web, visionOS
Download	11.1 MB	312 MB
Collaboration	None	Yes, and it is a main reason to use it
Canvas	Yes, as .canvas files in your vault	Yes, as whiteboards inside documents
Graph view	Yes, local to the note you are reading	No built-in graph
Works with no account	Yes	No

What Craft does better

Everything about sharing. Links, permissions, collaboration, publishing. Skein cannot show your note to anybody.
Every platform. Mac, iPhone, iPad, Windows, Android, web and visionOS. If a colleague is on Windows, this is the end of the discussion.
Documents that look designed.Craft’s output is presentable in a way a Markdown file is not trying to be.
Whiteboards inside documents, alongside collections that work as databases, tasks and a calendar, all in one app.
A real template gallery, and Family and Team plans that bundle several seats at a fixed price.

What Skein does better

Your notes outlive the app. Ordinary files, no account, no server, nothing to export from if the company changes its mind or its prices.
It costs nothing and has no ceiling.Craft’s free tier stops at 1,500 blocks, which in practice is not many notes.
Links and backlinks as the point. Craft has both, and they are a feature. In Skein they are the architecture: local graph, unlinked mentions, outgoing links and an outline in one inspector.
Search that finds the middle of a word.Craft’s own documentation says its search “only matches the beginning of words”. Skein uses full-text search with ranking.
Tags that nest as deep as you like.Craft’s go one level.
Nothing leaves your Mac. Not as a setting. As an absence of code.

Who should use which

Use Craft if your notes become documents, if other people read them, if you work across Windows or Android as well as a Mac, or if you want the thing you write to look good without effort.

Use Skeinif your notes are for thinking rather than for sending, if you want them to be files you can still read in twenty years, or if the idea of your writing living on somebody else’s server is the thing you are trying to get away from.

These are not really rivals, and plenty of people should have both: Craft for the report, Skein for the thinking that went into it. Skein is free, so trying it costs you a download and a folder.

Figures checked 14 August 2026, from craft.do, Craft’s support documentation and its Mac App Store listing (version 3.5.4). Craft’s pricing page shows an annual-billing monthly equivalent; the monthly price is higher. I have deliberately not stated what Craft is built with or what its local files look like on disk, because Craft does not document either and I am not going to guess about a competitor. If any of this is wrong, tell me.