What is Craft Docs?
Craft Docs is a note-taking and document creation application designed primarily for users within the Apple ecosystem. It positions itself as a tool for creating beautiful, structured documents that can combine text, images, videos, code blocks, and embedded content from other services into a visually cohesive whole. Unlike many plain-text or markdown-first editors, Craft emphasises a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editing experience with a strong focus on layout, typography, and the ability to create nested, collapsible blocks of content. Its core functionality revolves around building interconnected personal or shared documents that feel more polished than standard notes.
The application is developed by Luki Labs Limited, a software company founded in Hungary. The team has a stated focus on crafting high-quality, design-led applications for Apple platforms, which is evident in Craft's tight integration with macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. The company operates a subscription-based business model to fund ongoing development and cloud syncing services. While a capable free tier exists, the company's premium Pro subscription unlocks advanced collaboration and publishing features, aligning with its vision of Craft as a tool for both individual knowledge management and professional team documentation.
Who is Craft Docs best for?
Craft Docs excels for users who prioritise aesthetics, structure, and a fluid editing experience within Apple's walled garden. It is less suited for those seeking deep cross-platform support, highly complex database functionalities, or a purely minimalist, distraction-free writing environment. Its ideal user values the process of creating visually appealing documents as much as the content itself and often works in scenarios where sharing a polished final product is important.
- Apple-centric professionals who need to create client-facing proposals, internal memos, or project plans that look exceptionally polished.
- Students and academics who want to organise research, lecture notes, and essays in a hierarchical, linkable format with strong multimedia support.
- Content planners and creators drafting outlines, scripts, or editorial calendars where visual layout and embedding references is beneficial.
- Individuals building a personal knowledge base (PKM) who appreciate a block-based, nested structure over a traditional folder-only system and enjoy crafting visually distinct notes.
- Teams already using Apple hardware that require a simple, elegant tool for shared documentation without the overhead of a full-scale wiki platform.
Key features
Block-Based, Nested Editing
Every piece of content in Craft - a paragraph, image, to-do list, or heading - exists as an independent, movable block. You can easily drag these blocks to reorder them or, most distinctively, drag one block onto another to nest it, creating a collapsible, hierarchical outline. This allows for creating complex, organised documents where you can hide detailed sub-points under a main heading, providing both a high-level overview and granular detail within the same page.
Stylish Publishing and Sharing
Craft allows you to publish any document to the web with a single click, generating a clean, publicly accessible webpage with a customisable URL. You can choose from different themes, disable copying, and see view analytics if you are a Pro user. This goes beyond simple link sharing, creating a fully designed micro-site for your document, which is ideal for portfolios, public guides, or shared reports where presentation matters.
Backlinking and Document Graph
By typing `[[` you can quickly link to another existing Craft document or create a new one, establishing a bidirectional connection. A dedicated "Backlinks" panel at the bottom of every page shows all other documents that link to it. This network of connections is visualised in the "Graph" view, providing a map of how your ideas and notes interrelate, a core tenet of modern networked thought applications.
Deep Apple Ecosystem Integration
Craft leverages Apple's system frameworks to a high degree. It supports system-wide text shortcuts (Snippets), integrates with Share Sheets for capturing content from other apps, and offers robust support for keyboard shortcuts and trackpad gestures. On iPad and iPhone, it includes excellent Apple Pencil support for inline drawing and handwriting, which are treated as first-class content blocks that can be moved and nested like text.
Embedded Content Cards
Instead of just pasting a raw URL, Craft can fetch rich previews for a wide array of services. Pasting links from YouTube, Twitter, Spotify, Google Docs, Figma, and many other sources automatically creates an interactive, visually rich card embedded directly in your document. This turns a document into a dynamic dashboard or a curated collection of resources, keeping reference material directly accessible and contextual.
Craft Docs pricing
Craft operates on a freemium model. The Free plan is surprisingly capable for individual use, offering unlimited personal documents, basic sharing, block editing, and publishing (with Craft branding). The core limitation is collaboration: you can only invite one other person to collaborate on a document.
The Pro plan is priced at $5 per month (billed annually at $55) or $6 billed monthly. This unlocks team features, including unlimited guest collaborators on documents, document history versioning, increased upload storage, the ability to remove Craft branding from published pages, and access to viewing analytics for published documents. In our view, the free tier offers exceptional value for a solo user, providing nearly the full creative experience. The Pro subscription is essential for any collaborative work and is competitively priced against similar tiers in apps like Notion, though it offers a different, more Apple-focused feature set.
What we like
- The block-based editor is exceptionally intuitive and fluid, making complex document structuring feel effortless.
- Published documents are genuinely beautiful and professional, setting a high bar for visual sharing.
- Apple Pencil integration on iPad is superb, treating handwritten notes as seamlessly as typed text.
- Performance is consistently snappy across Mac, iPhone, and iPad, with reliable iCloud syncing.
- The balance of powerful features in the free tier makes it one of the most generous trials in its category.
What could be better
- There is no native application for Windows, Android, or web, severely limiting its utility in cross-platform environments.
- While it handles tables, it lacks the database and spreadsheet-like relational capabilities found in competitors like Notion.
- Advanced text formatting options and markdown import/export could be more robust for users with specific technical writing needs.
- The organisational structure relies heavily on nested pages and backlinks, which some may find less straightforward than a traditional folder hierarchy for large-scale archives.
Craft Docs verdict
In our view, Craft Docs is a standout application that redefines expectations for how elegant and interactive personal and professional documents can be on Apple devices. It is not a jack-of-all-trades workspace like Notion, nor a minimalist markdown haven like iA Writer. Instead, it carves a compelling niche as a design-conscious, block-oriented editor for creating linked, publishable content. Our testing suggests its greatest strength is the sheer pleasure of using it; the tactile, responsive editing experience encourages organisation and creativity.
We recommend Craft Docs wholeheartedly to individuals and teams who live primarily within the Apple ecosystem and for whom the visual presentation of notes and shared documents is a key priority. It is perfect for consultants, designers, writers, and students who want their digital notes to feel curated and polished. However, if you require strong Windows or Android support, need complex databases, or prefer a plain-text, markdown-centric workflow with complete portability, Craft will feel frustratingly constrained. For those users, alternatives like Obsidian, Notion, or OneNote may be more appropriate.
Ultimately, Craft Docs demonstrates that powerful functionality and beautiful design are not mutually exclusive. It delivers a focused, refined experience that, for its target audience, is difficult to match. If its platform limitations are not a deal-breaker, it is one of the most compelling note-taking applications available for Mac, iPad, and iPhone today.