🚫 MarsEdit, a not so powerful, or useful, WordPress client for Mac

WordPress clients might be only area where the Mac is lacking options. There are several iPad choices, and the actual WordPress client. It worked well until it stopped working for me.

To get back on track, I looked for alternatives with as the most common choice. After using it for a couple of days I can’t understand why. It’s lackluster and feature deficient.

To start, the price is outrageous at $50. By comparison, Scrivener, the greatest word processor ever written, is $45. Further, WordPress is free, why charge so much?

With that, the MarsEdit editor is a step below rudimentary. Writing a long article is a painful and cumbersome experience.

MarsEdit has no idea what Markdown is.

MarsEdit is prone to crashes.

It has issues on a large blog with dozens of categories, hundreds of tags, and thousands of posts. It times out and throws errors.

For $50, MarsEdit doesn’t support the latest features of WordPress. It uses the Classic editor for posts. It has no concept of the now default “blocks.”

After a few tries MarsEdit was removed and replaced with a browser specific install of Waterfox. I get all the features of WordPress and don’t have to spend $50. I could have also used Webcatalog.io, which I might try in the future just to compare.

Either way, the marketing suggests MarsEdit is a powerful text editor and full featured WordPress client. It’s not either of those. I found an overpriced, rudimentary editor that threw plenty of errors at me. At $15 it wouldn’t be value for money.

The only cool feature was the Preview window, but that’s not worth the ridiculous asking price.

Save yourself time and frustration, make a dedicated browser app. You’ll get all the WordPress features like dashboard, stats, access to plugins, article list, etc, etc, etc.