Comparison · Checked 13 August 2026

New Quest vs Scrivener

Scrivener is Literature & Latte's desktop writing app, and it is still the genre standard for long manuscripts. You buy it once: US$59.99 for macOS or Windows, US$50.99 with an educational licence, US$95.98 for both platforms, and US$23.99 more for the iPad and iPhone app. The binder holds a 300,000-word book as a tree of documents you can reorder, split and merge without fear, and Compile turns that one manuscript into whatever an agent, a store or a printer asks for. Corkboard, outliner, snapshots, split-screen research, collections, word targets. It is fully local: no account, no internet connection required, and no server ever sees your prose. Literature & Latte state plainly that Scrivener contains no AI and does no data scraping. The current versions are 3.5.0 on macOS and 3.1.6 on Windows; there is no Scrivener 4 and they have said they are not yet building one.

Scrivener is where the book gets written; New Quest is where the book's facts get kept, in a form your model can read while you write.

Everything below was true on Scrivener’s own site on 13 August 2026. If we have it wrong, tell us and we will change it. Their site.

The ledger

The same question, asked of both.

Can my LLM read this while I draft?
Scrivener
No official route, and by stated policy there will not be one: Literature & Latte's own knowledge base says Scrivener contains no AI. There is an open-source community MCP server, writerslogic/scrivener-mcp, which reads and writes .scriv files on your machine and exposes them to Claude, Cursor and VS Code. It is unaffiliated with Literature & Latte and you maintain it yourself.
New Quest
A hosted remote MCP server is the product, not a bridge to it. You paste a URL into Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Cursor and the bible is there, from any device, with no local process to keep running.
What do I pay, and for how long?
Scrivener
US$59.99 once for macOS or Windows. Paid upgrades between major versions, and nothing else. The iPad and iPhone app is a separate US$23.99.
New Quest
$39 a month for the app on its own, $29 a month through the Guild, which includes the Skool community. It is a subscription and it does not stop.
Where does my manuscript actually sit?
Scrivener
On your disk. No account, no internet connection required, no server involved at any point.
New Quest
On our servers, encrypted, never used to train anything, exportable and deletable whenever you ask. That is still a server you do not own.
What comes out at the end, ready to publish?
Scrivener
Compile: DOCX, EPUB, PDF and paperback-ready output from one manuscript, with per-format overrides. Footnotes, print interiors, the lot.
New Quest
EPUB out, and the whole book compiles to a single Markdown file. Nothing approaching Compile's control over a print interior.
Can I ask what was true in chapter 40?
Scrivener
A character is a text document in a folder. Nothing enforces that an eye colour in chapter 4 still matches in chapter 91, and there is no queryable state or timeline to interrogate.
New Quest
Every change is an event tied to a scene, so the state at chapter 40 is a lookup rather than a memory. The continuity check that reads it is deterministic and never calls a model.
Does book seven know what happened in book one?
Scrivener
Each book is its own .scriv project. Sharing a character across books means copying the folder, or keeping a separate bible project and syncing it by hand.
New Quest
The world sits underneath the series rather than inside one book. Book seven reads the same records book one wrote.
Can I track levels, XP and skills as numbers?
Scrivener
As prose, in a document, like everything else. There is no stat model, so progression maths is yours to keep straight.
New Quest
Stat blocks, levels, XP, skills and inventory are typed fields, so HP over max is something software can catch. All of it optional if you do not write LitRPG.
Can I write on a second machine, or on my phone?
Scrivener
The iPad and iPhone app is US$23.99 and syncs through Dropbox only. Literature & Latte have said there are no plans for iCloud or OneDrive, and the sync is manual rather than continuous, which is where the conflicted-copy stories in their forums come from. No browser version.
New Quest
It runs in a browser, so any machine with a connection works and there is nothing to sync. With no connection there is nothing at all.
Do I have to give up the tool I already know?
Scrivener
The binder, corkboard, outliner and snapshots are the deepest manuscript structure anyone ships, and years of muscle memory live in them.
New Quest
New Quest imports Scrivener projects and Word documents, so you can draft in the binder and keep the bible here. Nothing in the design assumes you left.
Is anything I write used to train a model?
Scrivener
No. Nothing leaves your machine, so there is nothing to train on.
New Quest
No. Your work is yours and is never trained on. It reaches a model only when you connect one, on your own account, and the continuity check runs without any model at all.

Choosing

One of these is probably you.

Choose Scrivener if

You would rather pay US$59.99 once and own the software forever. Two months of New Quest costs more than the licence does, and then it keeps going.
You want your manuscript on your own disk and nowhere else. Scrivener needs no account and no connection, and no server sees a word. New Quest is hosted and cannot match that. If that is your first principle, stop here.
Your book has real formatting demands at the end: footnotes, several output formats from one source, control over the print interior. Compile is deeper than anything New Quest ships and we are not close.
You are already fluent in the binder and have a compile format that works. That is a large investment in muscle memory, and keeping it is the rational move.

Go and look at Scrivener →

Choose New Quest if

You draft with an LLM and you are tired of pasting the same character notes into every new conversation. The bible is served over MCP to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Cursor, on whichever account you already pay for.
The series is long enough that book seven can contradict book two, and one .scriv project per book has stopped being an honest record of your world.
You write progression fiction and the numbers matter. Levels, XP, skills and stat blocks are typed data, which is what makes a continuity check possible without asking a model to guess.
You want to keep Scrivener. Import brings the manuscript across and the bible sits alongside it rather than replacing the binder.
You are heading for audiobook, and a narrator is about to ask you how forty invented names are pronounced.

Join the Guild · $29/mo →Or the app alone · $39/mo

An open book on a writer's desk with a golden network of characters, cities and mountains rising from its pages, surrounded by floating panels of stats for kingdoms, houses and trade routes.

Questions

What people ask before switching.

Scrivener is US$59.99 once. Why is New Quest $39 a month?

Because it is a hosted service rather than a file on your disk. There is a server answering your model's questions, storing your world and your prose, and staying reachable from Anthropic's or OpenAI's cloud while you draft. That has a running cost and a one-off payment cannot cover it. If the price is the problem, start on the free tier with one book, or come in through the Guild at $29 a month, which includes the community.

Can I bring my existing Scrivener project across?

Yes. New Quest imports Scrivener projects and Word documents, and the manuscript lands split into chapters and scenes. The bible is not extracted for you: characters, locations and stat blocks are yours to build, which is the part that makes them queryable later.

Do I have to stop using Scrivener?

No, and most people should not. Draft in the binder, keep your compile format, and use New Quest as the record your model reads while you write. The two tools are answering different questions.

There is already a community MCP server for Scrivener. Why not use that?

You can, and if you are comfortable maintaining it, it is a genuine option that costs nothing. writerslogic/scrivener-mcp is open source and reads and writes .scriv files directly. Two things to know: it is unaffiliated with Literature & Latte, so nobody is obliged to keep it working, and it runs on your machine, so it reaches desktop clients like Claude, Cursor and VS Code rather than a model on your phone. What it exposes is also still a folder of prose documents, so the model can read your notes but cannot ask what level anyone was in chapter 40.

What happens to my book if I stop paying, or if you disappear?

Export hands you the whole thing: the world data and the manuscript, with the book compiling to a single Markdown file and EPUB on the way out. Delete means delete. Prose storage is new, so keep your own copy as well, exactly as you would with any hosted tool.

Does connecting a model mean my book gets used for training?

No. Your content goes only to the LLM you connect, on your own account and under that provider's terms. We never train on it. The continuity check is deterministic and calls no model whatsoever, so you can run the whole bible with nothing connected at all.