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Scrivener, and what a smaller tool gives up.
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If you're looking for a simpler Scrivener alternative, the main difference isn't the number of features. It's what the writing tool assumes you need around the manuscript.
Scrivener is the tool most people writing a book eventually hear about, and it earned that. It is a project manager for a manuscript: a corkboard, a binder, research documents, character notes, snapshots and a compile step that turns all of it into something you can hand over. If the hard part of your book is holding a large amount of material in order, that is a real answer to a real problem, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise.
Minimal Writer is a different bet. It assumes the hard part is the prose, and that the material around it is mostly something you already carry in your head or keep somewhere else. So there is no corkboard, no research bin and no compile step — there is a page, an outline of it, and the few tools that help a draft get finished.
What Scrivener does that this does not
Research lives inside the project. Scrivener will hold your PDFs, your reference images, your interview transcripts and your notes in the same file as the manuscript, a click away from the scene they belong to. Minimal Writer has nowhere to put any of that. If your book is reported, footnoted or built out of sources, that absence is not a simplification — it is a missing floor, and you will feel it on day one.
Output is the other one. Scrivener's compile turns a manuscript into a formatted, submission-shaped thing: front matter, section breaks, the layout somebody on the other end expects. Minimal Writer exports the text — Markdown and RTF on any plan, and PDF and Word on Pro — and stops there. It gives you a clean manuscript, not a typeset one, and the formatting for whoever receives it happens somewhere else.
What you get for giving those up
A page with nothing on it. The interface steps back until what is left is the text and the line you are writing, and you choose how much of the rest stays lit — the whole document, the paragraph, or the single sentence. Nothing is arranged around the manuscript, because nothing needs to be.
The structure that does exist is the one the writing already has. Headings become an outline you can drag a section around in, and a chapter can be its own document nested inside the book it belongs to, so closing it makes it one line and opening it makes it a page again. An export flattens the nest back into a single file. That covers the shape of a book without asking you to keep a second model of it in a binder.
And it opens in a browser, on whatever you are sitting at, with your work saved to that machine first and synced after. There is nothing to install, nothing to license per device, and a dead connection changes nothing about writing.
Which one to pick
If your project is research-heavy — a history, a biography, a thesis, anything where the sources outweigh the sentences — take Scrivener. Nothing here replaces its binder, and a workaround built out of separate documents will cost you more than the interface it saves you.
If the manuscript is mostly prose, and what actually slows you down is the number of things on screen between you and the next paragraph, the smaller tool is the better one. That is the whole bet: writing a book chapter by chapterin something that gets out of the way, and handing the formatting to whoever is going to reformat it anyway.
Every account starts with a full trial and no card, so this is answerable by trying it rather than by reading about it. If it turns out you needed the binder, you will know within a week and you will have lost nothing.