Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

HackMD VS Zoho Writer

Compare HackMD VS Zoho Writer and see what are their differences

HackMD logo HackMD

Fast and flexible, real-time collaborative markdown, inspired by Hackpad.

Zoho Writer logo Zoho Writer

Create. Review. Distribute
  • HackMD Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-08-04
  • Zoho Writer Basic formatting options
    Basic formatting options //
    2023-12-26
  • Zoho Writer Insert various images
    Insert various images //
    2023-12-26
  • Zoho Writer Add tables to visually represent information
    Add tables to visually represent information //
    2023-12-26
  • Zoho Writer Perform complex operations with equations
    Perform complex operations with equations //
    2023-12-26
  • Zoho Writer Customize documents to your needs
    Customize documents to your needs //
    2023-12-26
  • Zoho Writer Various advanced customization options for your documents
    Various advanced customization options for your documents //
    2023-12-26
  • Zoho Writer Automate document generation and collect data and esignatures securely
    Automate document generation and collect data and esignatures securely //
    2023-12-26
  • Zoho Writer Access your documents across all devices
    Access your documents across all devices //
    2023-12-26

Zoho Writer is an online word processor that allows you to write, edit, and collaborate on documents, as well as publish them on multiple platforms. With powerful editing tools, an AI-powered, multilingual writing assistant, and a multi-stage approval workflow, Writer is just the right tool for all your content-writing needs.

Writer is a powerful, cloud-based word processor that allows you to easily and efficiently create online documents.

With Writer you can: - Collaborate with your team in real-time and leverage their collective knowledge to build informative and engaging documents - Receive writing and style suggestions from the smart writing assistant - Instantly check for plagiarized and duplicated content in your document - Automate document creation and simplify business processes with mail merge, fillable forms, and e-signature collection - Confidently finalize all documents with multi-stage document approval workflows - Publish and distribute documents in multiple channels

Zoho Writer

Website
zoho.com
Pricing URL
-
$ Details
free
Platforms
Cross Platform Web Mac OSX Windows Linux Android iOS Amazon REST API Google Chrome
Release Date
2005 September

HackMD features and specs

  • Collaboration
    HackMD offers real-time collaborative editing, which allows multiple users to work on the same document simultaneously. This feature enhances teamwork and productivity, especially for remote teams.
  • Markdown Support
    HackMD is built around Markdown, providing a simple yet powerful syntax for formatting documents. Markdown compatibility makes it easy to create well-structured content with minimal effort.
  • Version Control
    The platform includes version history, allowing users to track changes, revert to previous versions, and compare different iterations. This feature ensures that work is not lost and can be systematically reviewed.
  • Integration
    HackMD integrates with popular platforms like GitHub, GitLab, and Dropbox, allowing for seamless workflow integration. This makes it easy to incorporate HackMD into existing development and project management processes.
  • Accessibility
    HackMD is a web-based tool, meaning it can be accessed from any device with an internet connection. This ensures that users can collaborate and edit documents from different locations and devices.

Possible disadvantages of HackMD

  • Limited Offline Support
    Since HackMD is primarily a web-based tool, it offers limited functionalities when offline. Users may face challenges accessing and editing documents without an internet connection.
  • Subscription Model
    While HackMD offers a free tier, advanced features and greater collaboration capacities are locked behind a subscription model. This could be a disadvantage for users and small teams with limited budgets.
  • Learning Curve
    Users unfamiliar with Markdown or collaborative editing tools may have a learning curve to overcome. This could affect initial productivity and user experience.
  • Data Privacy
    As a cloud-based service, users may have concerns about data privacy and security. Sensitive information stored on the platform could potentially be accessed by third parties or become vulnerable to data breaches.
  • Performance Issues
    Under heavy usage or with large documents, some users might experience occasional performance issues such as lag or slow syncing. This can disrupt the workflow and collaborative efforts.

Zoho Writer features and specs

  • Clean UI
    Tools appear contextually as part of your process.
  • Integrations
    Third party integrations: Adobe Sign, DocuSign, and SignEasy for signatures, Google Drive, Dropbox, OneDrive and Evernote for storage, WordPress and Blogger for publishing.
  • Free to use
    Free and always will be
  • File sharing
    Share documents to any number of people
  • Collaboration Tool
    Work on a document with upto 50 people at the same time
  • Content editor
    Content review tools like Track Changes, No-Markup modes, Commenting, and more
  • API
    Create documents, and send them for sign in bulk via APIs
  • AI Powered
    Writing assistant for grammar, writing quality and readability suggestions
  • Automation
    Generate documents automatically via APIs, CRM Data and Custom Functions
  • Merge documents
    Generate personalized documents in bulk and store them, send them for signature collection, and more.
  • Fillable documents
    Create fillable forms, turn PDFs into fillable forms and collect data securely
  • Signable documents
    Draft contracts, purchase orders, and more and securely collect eSignatures from your recipients

Analysis of HackMD

Overall verdict

  • Overall, HackMD is a strong choice for those looking for an effective and flexible markdown editor with robust collaboration features. Its convenience, ease of use, and extensive features make it a good option for both personal and professional use.

Why this product is good

  • HackMD is popular because it offers a collaborative markdown editing environment that's particularly useful for teams and individuals who need to work on documentation, notes, or any kind of markdown-based content. It allows real-time collaboration, version control, and easy sharing, making it ideal for productivity. Its interface is user-friendly, and it supports a variety of integrations with tools like GitHub, Google Drive, and Dropbox. This flexibility and the ability to seamlessly work across different platforms make HackMD a valuable tool for many users.

Recommended for

  • Teams needing real-time collaboration on documents
  • Developers working on project documentation
  • Educators and students for note-taking and sharing
  • Writers preferring markdown for content creation
  • Anyone looking for a cloud-based markdown editor with integrations

HackMD videos

hackmd.io opensource application review

More videos:

  • Demo - Techstars Paris 2018 Demo Day - HackMD pitch
  • Review - Screencast-Tutorial zu HackMD

Zoho Writer videos

Introduction to Zoho Writer

More videos:

  • Review - Introducing the new Zoho Writer - Guided Tour

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to HackMD and Zoho Writer)
Task Management
100 100%
0% 0
Office Suites
0 0%
100% 100
Productivity
100 100%
0% 0
Project Management
57 57%
43% 43

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing HackMD and Zoho Writer.

What makes your product unique?

Zoho Writer's answer:

Zoho Writer is a cloud-based word processor that allows you to create documents with various formatting options. Users can also insert images, perform complex operations with equations, customize the documents with the various advanced options, automate document generation with its mail merge templates, and collect data and eSignatures securely with fillable and sign templates without having to write custom code. Users can also access their documents in any device of their choice.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

Zoho Writer's answer:

Users can choose Zoho Writer for their document needs because of being a cloud word processor, its easy to use functionalities, clean UI, and ability to generate personalized documents in bulk without having to write custom scripts, and accessibility across all platforms.

How would you describe your primary audience?

Zoho Writer's answer:

Companies and teams of all sizes who want to create professional business documents from anywhere, on any device.

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare HackMD and Zoho Writer

HackMD Reviews

We have no reviews of HackMD yet.
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Zoho Writer Reviews

7 Best Scrivener Alternatives
Zoho writer is one of the Scrivener alternatives. Zoho writer offers a lot of templates to help you start writing your document. This writing tool software has a lot of variety of templates on it’s own repository.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, HackMD seems to be a lot more popular than Zoho Writer. While we know about 67 links to HackMD, we've tracked only 5 mentions of Zoho Writer. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

HackMD mentions (67)

  • MinIO Removes Web UI Features from Community Version, Pushes Users to Paid Plans
    The most established option is Ceph, which has a (optional) web ui too. Before investigating it for eventual production use, I heard quite a bit about how complicated it was to use, but for my use case (storage for enterprise and academic k8s clusters) it's actually been quite simple to deploy and use. Cephadm (one of many ceph management tools) can handle nearly all our bootstrapping and management needs. Little... - Source: Hacker News / 16 days ago
  • If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
    HackMD already does this. It has a dual-pane view for raw markdown and formatted output, supports WYSIWYG editing, and allows real-time collaboration. Surprised no one mentioned it. - [HackMD: Your Collaborative Markdown Workspace for Knowledge Sharing](https://hackmd.io/). - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • TL;DR of Deep Dive into LLMs Like ChatGPT by Andrej Karpathy
    [2]: https://hackmd.io/@opensourceinitiative/osaid-faq#What-is-the-role-of-training-data-in-the-Open-Source-AI-Definition. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Web scraping with GPT-4o: powerful but expensive
    About this document ===== [0] https://hackmd.io/@sparna/semantic-markdown-draft. - Source: Hacker News / 10 months ago
  • Tor: From the Dark Web to the Future of Privacy
    It seems, at the beginning of the 90s there were a lot of expectations in regard to DC-nets, considered to be a way better alternative to remailers of the time [1]. At least that's my impression after reading Tim May's FAQ (The Cyphernomicon) [2]. Any progress on this front? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_remailer [2]: https://hackmd.io/@jmsjsph/TheCyphernomicon. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 year ago
View more

Zoho Writer mentions (5)

  • Why are comments not WYSIWYG-editable or even formattable?
    Would you like to try Zoho Writer?It has all the features of Google Docs and some more, including ability to leave rich-formatted comments and to restrict visibility of who sees what comments - https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/writer/user-guide/reviewing-revising/comments/articles/comments#Filter_commentschanges_from_a_specific_author. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Auto HyperLink
    You can easily do this in Zoho Writer. Zoho Writer has support for autocorrects with formattings (including links) - https://help.zoho.com/portal/en/kb/writer/user-guide/editing-formatting/working-with-text/articles/working-with-text#Autocorrect. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Is there a way to have a word appear with a specific formating automatically?
    In Zoho Writer, autocorrect with formatting is possible. That's an option, if you'd like to switch from Google Docs. Zoho Writer comes with all of the features of Google Docs + some more. Source: almost 2 years ago
  • Beyond Markdown
    We are implementing markdown support in Zoho Writer (https://zoho.com/writer) and I can confirm how difficult it is to handle bold and italics. It definitely is a weird choice to use *s for both bold and italics. Parsers could be implemented much easier, if both had a different delimiter as mentioned in the post. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • 5000x Faster CRDTs: An Adventure in Optimization
    I've been looking for a practical OT alternative for our online word processor (https://zoho.com/writer). We already use OT for syncing our realtime edits and exploring CRDTs for handling stronger consistency for tackling offline edits (which are typically huge, since the edits are not syncing in realtime) So the baseline is that OT has a better model for holding state in terms of performance/memory, since the... - Source: Hacker News / almost 4 years ago

What are some alternatives?

When comparing HackMD and Zoho Writer, you can also consider the following products

Boardist - Personal workspace for all the data

AbiWord - AbiWord is a free software word processor.

Documize - Enterprise-grade wiki and knowledge management platform

Microsoft Word - Microsoft Word is a commercial word document processor for Windows.

ReadTheDocs - Spend your time on writing high quality documentation, not on the tools to make your documentation work.

Google Docs - Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.