Feldar vs Plottr

At a glance

How the work differs

Plottr and Feldar both treat the scene as the unit of a novel. Plottr is where you see every scene at once. Feldar is where you write them.

The timeline and the chapter outline

Plottr's timeline is a grid. Chapters or beats run along one side, plotlines along the other, and each scene card sits where its chapter and its thread meet. The romance subplot gets a lane, the antagonist's arc another, and you can see at a glance that the mentor vanishes for eight chapters. Colours, filters and a flipped view make it easy to ask who is doing what, and when. For a book with five point-of-view characters, that view is hard to replace.

Feldar does not have it. Its scene plans live chapter by chapter, in the Outline on each page: a list of scenes with a title and a short description. There is no grid that lays every chapter and subplot out in lanes. What you get in exchange is that the plan sits next to the prose it describes, and the tools use it. Draft Page writes a first pass of the chapter from those scenes at the word count you set, and when you write it yourself the scenes stay in view beside the page.

Templates and blank pages

Plottr ships with more than 30 plot templates, among them the Hero's Journey, the Snowflake Method, Three Act Structure, Romancing the Beat and a 12 Chapter Mystery, plus scene and character templates. If you build books on a known structure, you start with the beats already in place.

Feldar's Outline starts from your description of what happens next, not from a structure. You can type beats from any structure in as scenes, and our guide on how to outline a novel walks through one by hand, but Plottr does more of that work for you.

The story bible

Plottr's bible is a set of organized records: characters with custom attributes and templates, places, notes, tags and categories, all sortable and filterable, with images. Across a series, the bible and a series timeline span every book.

Feldar's Canvas is a board rather than a database. Characters, locations, plot beats, items, factions and notes are cards you place and link with labels like Part of, Causes or Opposes. Branch from a card to start a related one. When Feldar suggests a line or drafts a chapter, it draws on these cards, so the names and history in your bible are the ones that turn up on the page.

After the plan

With Plottr, the plan ends in an export. You send the outline to Word or Scrivener and write there, and from then on there are two copies of the story: the plan and the draft. When the draft changes, you update the plan by hand, or it drifts. Plottr is good at the second pass too: its FAQ makes the fair point that after a first draft you still have to rework arcs and plot holes, and the timeline is a good place to do that.

In Feldar there is one copy. You plan, draft and revise in the same project, and revision has its own tools: Polish, Deepen and Enhance for a passage, Checks for grammar, clarity, repetition, dialogue and point of view, and Lens for a reader's response before anyone else reads it.

Plottr vs Scrivener, briefly

They are not rivals so much as partners. Plottr plans; Scrivener holds and compiles the manuscript. Plottr exports straight to Scrivener and imports Scrivener projects, and many writers use the two together. Choose Plottr alone if you mostly need the plan, Scrivener alone if its corkboard is enough planning for you, and both if you want Plottr's timeline and Scrivener's compile. Our Feldar vs Scrivener page covers the writing side in detail.

When Plottr is the better choice

• You think in timelines. Plotlines in lanes, scenes you can filter by character or tag, a view of the whole book at once.
• You write series. A series view with unlimited books and a bible shared across them.
• You start from a structure. 30+ plot templates, plus scene and character templates.
• You want no AI. Plottr lists "No AI" on every plan. Feldar's AI is optional, but it is part of the app.
• You want to own a licence or work offline. A lifetime option and a desktop app on Windows and Mac that works offline.
• You plan with a co-author. Plottr Pro has real-time collaboration. Feldar has no sharing today.

When Feldar is the better choice

• Your outlines go stale. In Feldar the scene plan sits on the chapter, so changing one means looking at the other.
• You want one app, not two. Plan, draft, revise and export in the same place, instead of an outliner plus a word processor.
• You want help turning a plan into prose. Draft Page gives you a first pass from your scenes to rewrite in your own words, and Continue from here helps when a scene stalls. New text appears in blue or in a card and stays only if you accept it.
• You want your bible to do some work. Canvas cards are the context Feldar's suggestions draw on, not just notes to look up.
• You want a first reader. Lens and Reader reactions respond to a chapter the moment it is written.

Cost over a year

Plottr's page shows sale prices with higher list prices struck through, so these may change. Prices in US dollars, checked November 5, 2026.

If you only need to plan, Plottr costs less than a paid Feldar plan. The honest comparison for most novelists is Plottr plus the app you draft in against Feldar alone. Writing, planning and organizing in Feldar never use credits, so the free plan covers a book you write entirely yourself. The paid plans pay for the AI: rewrites, chat, Checks, scene generation and drafting. See the pricing page for Pro and Ultra.

Moving from Plottr to Feldar

Feldar does not open Plottr files, so the move is by way of Word and a little rebuilding.

1. Export from Plottr to Word. Plottr exports your outline, characters, places and notes to a Word document.
2. Import the .docx in Feldar. Choose Import manuscript in your Library, or Import in the editor's Options menu. Feldar takes DOCX, PDF, Markdown and plain text up to 20 MB a file. Keep the imported outline as a reference while you set up the book.
3. Add your chapters and their scenes. For each chapter, put its scene cards into the page's Outline. If you wrote the manuscript elsewhere, import that file too.
4. Rebuild the bible on the Canvas. Add the main characters, places and objects as cards and link them. Plotlines can become plot cards joined by Causes.

What does not carry over: the timeline layout, plotline lanes and colours, tags and custom attributes as fields, images, and the series view. Keep your Plottr file. If you love the timeline, you can keep planning there and write in Feldar.

Questions

Sources

Plottr facts come from Plottr's own pages, checked November 5, 2026.

1. Plottr pricing (plans, prices, platforms, offline, collaboration, "No AI", FAQ)
2. Plottr features (timelines, story bible, templates, series, import and export)
3. Plottr free trial (30 days)
4. Buy Scrivener (for the Plottr and Scrivener cost line; macOS price from Literature & Latte support)
5. Feldar pricing