The best Markdown viewer for Mac, app by app.

These are the apps to compare if you write somewhere else and want a good window to read the result in. MacMD Viewer, Marked and QLMarkdown are all linked here, and so is Imark, which I wrote. Imark now lets you fix the open file, but reading remains its default and its purpose.

None of these is a viewer, and all of them are here because the search results are full of them. If you write more than you read, one of them is a better answer than anything above. Typora, Obsidian, iA Writer and MacDown are the four worth knowing.

Before buying anything, two of these are already installed and the rest cost less than a coffee. The Markdown preview in VS Code is Shift-Command-V, or Command-K then V for a pane beside the source, and it updates as you type. TextEdit opens any .md file as plain text, which is enough to read a short one.

Three cases, and they are common ones. If you mainly write, use Typora or iA Writer; Imark is still a reader with a correction path, not a writing workspace. If your notes live in an Obsidian vault, stay in Obsidian. If you need this on Windows or Linux, Imark is Mac only by decision, so Typora, Obsidian and VS Code are the ones that cross over.

This is the one row where Imark is unusual rather than merely competent, so it deserves a contest. Plannotator is the real rival: 7,900 stars, Apache-2.0, browser based, and it handles code diffs and pull requests as well as plans across nine agents. It beats Imark on breadth and on reviewing code. Imark is narrower: a Mac app, documents only, and the notes are written into the .md file itself rather than into the tool, so the record survives in Git. Marked 3 covers the reading half by watching a folder of agent output, without a way to answer back. The agent review page explains the workflow, and annotating a document for review explains what the notes look like.

On 18 August 2026 I opened every product page linked above and read the price off the seller's own checkout, then opened the same folder of about 40 Markdown files, agent plans and READMEs mixed together, in the apps I could run. What separates them in practice is not the feature list: it is what happens to a document with a Mermaid diagram, a table wider than the window and an equation in it. Do the same with your own worst file before you pay for anything.