Plottr Reviews

I love Plottr. I needed something to help me map big projects (novel/papers) - and this was it. Go Plottr or go home.

It's a great product. It's easy to use and definitely helps me visualize the outlining process. Moreover, when one is trying to juggle multiple timelines or layers of data, Plottr's lines facilitate the story/writing plan.

The outlining layout (which I don't use much) could be improved to facilitate entries/visual understanding.

I write complex books. As in 5-POV characters. Trying to keep track of that is a pain. I like notecards, but I have nowhere to put them on a wall in my house, so they're relegated to a pile which is a pain to pull out and put away. Then I remembered that Plottr exists, and boy howdy, am I glad I downloaded it! I love seeing all of my storylines on one page. Moving scenes around is sooo easy. The extra fields to fill out make keeping track of everything easy too. I keep recommending it to everyone I know. I can't say enough good things about it!

Literally everything. I love the whole program. It's absolutely essential for outliners/plotters, but pantsers can use it too after they've completed their first draft.

I wish it had Save the Cat! beats as a template, but I'm surviving just fine.

Well worth the money for the program! This service has greatly improved my experience and ease for writing!

Plottr is amazing and is so useful when it comes to helping with plot points. It even has templates to help those who wish to have a guide on plotting. The character sheets even have templates to help you flesh out full rounded characters! They are always adding new features and updates to improve the service!

I think my main thing is having it easier to actually write the chapters in a single combined document minus the notes. I also hope a future feature to be added can be to able to write the book and able to see the timeline/outline on the side!

For me is the best tool in town. Plottr is the starting point for a good book and the best companion for Scrivener and other writing tools.

A lot of templates. Different views. Export to Scrivener for me is key. Plottr is the starting point for a good book.

The UX should improve. The Interface it's very classic.

So far, Plottr has really helped me to juggle the scenes and developments as I have worked through the plotting of my novel. It has helped me take a few rough ideas and create a story arc in less time than usual.

This is a great story plotting tool. I start by writing character descriptions, and there is a function for writing and tagging them.

Next, it's easy to create the elements of your story and organize them the way you want. Plottr uses digital index cards, which can be moved and linked as needed. There are lots of ways to organize these elements: main plot and subplots; by character; or however you want to conceptualize the threads of your story.

Then you can look at these cards in outline form, adding the characters, places and tags that are involved.

There are a number of templates available to jumpstart your project using a framework you can customize as you like.

I'm using a structure defined in the book "Save the Cat!" and there is no template for that built into Plottr. I had to create it from scratch. I might submit a template based on this method as a template for others, if that's possible.

I haven't found a print function. You can export your data to Word and other word processing programs, but the formatting is not very good. It will take some clean up if I need printouts to share with others. I'm not sure that is necessary for me, though.

Plottr is a fantastic tool for authors. As an author who prefers to plot her stories, this tool makes it easy to organize and keep everything I need to outline my stories in an easy-to-read format. I believe that even those writers who do not prefer to plot out their stories ahead of time will find this helpful tool a perfect addition to their toolbox.

I love the layout options, the large variety of templates available to use. I also like the color choices. When I needed assistance, I got it the same day which is great.

There is a small amount of a learning curve, but the tutorial videos truly help in that arena.

My overall experience has been very positive. Even my one experience with customer service that ended up being user error was addressed quickly.

With Plottr, as simple as it may seem, my favorite feature is the color-coded plot timeline. I have used many applications, and while they are all good at what they and benefit you, none have benefitted me personally as much as the versatility of Plottr's timeline and its ability to be altered, rearranged, and personalized with templates. When I first started using it a few months ago, it helped me locate and fix three plot holes I didn't know existed until I saw each plot point laid bare before me. I am more confident in my writing as a result.

My second favorite part is the ever growing list of templates for characters, locations and story structure. These have allowed me to practice with a few different varieties and find the style that allows me to be the most productive. I am extremely grateful for these tools.

My only concern with Plottr is not always understanding how to use a feature as Im a very literal person. However, they do address a lot of these features with occasional guides and live videos for new features. As I'm still new to Plottr, I'm sure there are even more tools to help users learn the ropes, and I'm just still discovering them. So this may not be an actual con, but user error as I learn the ropes.

I was hesitant to purchase Plottr, because I felt I had all my characters and scenes under control. Then, my characters started developing, my scenes changed, and I needed... something. I watched a Plottr demo, and decided to try the product. Within a day, I was hooked. I may still be "mostly a Pantser" but I'm a "Plottr Pantser" for sure.

Plottr doesn't force me to become a rigidly-structured author overnight. Good thing, because I've been writing for most of my 72 years. It lets me use the available tools as I want or need. Which means, when I needed somewhere to gather my characters together, Plottr saved the day, with basic templates that I could adapt as I needed. (I started out with the bare bones and now my character pages are becoming mini-bios.) It allows me to tie each character to every book they are in, as well.Then, there's the story arc, which I am not yet using but looks promising for future writings. Examples they've shared - like HAMLET and GOLDILOCKS AND THE THREE BEARS - show you how versatile the software is.

The software is so thorough it scared me at first. That's the biggest negative I've got. I can't say anything about how it exports to Scrivener (which I don't use, but which Plottr WILL export to), or to MS Word (I use LibreOffice in MS-Word mode), but everything I have used tells me that those features are as robust as everything else.

As a planner, this tool has saved me lots of time organizing and helped me get back to the writing. It has freed me from my whiteboard of sticky notes, and has allowed me to take my creativity on-the-go, which has done wonders to improve my work. It’s integration with other apps makes it feel like a natural step in any drafting process, rather than an independent exercise. It will be an organizational boon to anyone who plans their work, and especially to those visual planners who enjoy seeing things from different angles. Highly recommend!

Plottr is an incredible tool for planning. The visual timeline has so many customizations, from chapter titles to entire plot threads. Color-coding and tagging allows you to follow different ideas through your outline, which is a game-changer when looking for consistency. The visual timeline automatically populates into an outline which can then be exported to other writing apps. This saves so much time, as I’m no longer needing to re-write/copy over my planning work. You can organize your works in series, allowing you to maintain characters, settings, and tags across books, once again, saving time. Plottr has a library of different structures called templates, which can provide maps for different kinds of stories. As someone writing my first book in a new genre, being able to see examples of different formats gives me insight that would have taken hours of research to match. Overall, the greatest asset of this tool is that it takes the busy work completely out of writing, allowing for amazing planning that lets you focus on what’s important: the writing.

The iPad app is a little finicky. The visual timeline doesn’t work as well with a touch screen, and it is definitely pared down and doesn’t include some of the abilities you have in the desktop version of the app. I would love to see improvements made to the iPad version!

It is easy to install and to keep up with the upgrades and improvements. The videos keep you right on track with what's new. The team asks you for what feature you want next, and they really deliver. I've had to sue support a couple of times, and they are on it and do a great job. For me this is a 'must' tool. I use it all the time.

Very easy to use right out of the box—intuitive. Visually, it's very helpful, especially for those details in your novel. You can keep track of time and characters with tags. I love the templates. I made my own for my scenes, and there are some really good ones that are included. The tutorials are just right in terms of time and detail. The support team is fantastic. I love the fact that if I want to change a scene in my book, I can do it on Plottr first and see how it flows, then do it in Scrivener.

I like it. I can't think of a con. I mean, what's not to like?

Love it and will keep using it. There are so many projects that I can use this for and it makes organizing thoughts so much easier.

The layout and functions of the software is amazing + exactly what I was looking for. 10/10 would recommend.

Can’t add tags + characters in the plot line page.

I used it for story purposes but manly for research purposes.
It does the job better that any other software that I know.

It is easy to use.
It is fast.
It is very visual.
It has a lots of features (tags, categories, notes) that are flexible and adaptable to each project.

I can't figure out how to work efficiently online with other members of the team.
When the timeline has a lot of information sometimes it slows down (Im a Mac user) and maybe it.

As someone who works with words and pictures together, the visual impact I get with Plottr is, literally, eye-opening. I can 'see' what I can't see in my mile-long Scrivener list of chapters and scenes. I purchased a lifetime Plottr with updates because it is in a continuous phase of innovation and enhancement. [Note: I scored 4 on Ease and Features only because I'm certain there is so much more to come; so, Good, but Excellent, too.]

I came to Plottr primarily for the Timeline, after test-driving two lesser options. I'm editing my 120,000-word literary memoir (in which I had to write 'everything' to find the 'something'), and being able to see its 500 scenes on the timeline is incredible. I superimposed my manuscript on the six-stage plot structure and was thrilled to discover a very close match. Thanks to Plottr, I've realized what my 'crisis/climax' point is and is not. And viewing the timeline is 100% helping me spot which scenes to delete, combine, shorten, etc. And, oh, the colours! And there's so much more I'm learning from the videos, which I'll be using on future projects (perhaps as a plotter!). And, of course, the help response is exceptional. My timeline setup is a bit different from the 'norm,' but Plottr allows such flexibility.

There isn't anything I don't like. There are features I'd like to see in the future, the odd glitch here and there to be fixed, etc. But, sorry, no cons, cuz Plottr is visually beautiful and functionally dynamic.

Overall Plottr is great for pre-writing, re-writing, and even post-writing structural evaluation. A lot of authors (like me) use it to plot their stories after the first draft, which really helps define and organize the structure when doing rewrites. My friend uses it because she needs a complete structure before she writes. (I don't work that way.) So it's flexible and useful for all types of writers.

This is a tool that comes with a great feature set of templates, ideas, and tools but is also extremely flexible to organize and use it in any way you like. We all write, organize, and think differently, and Plottr is very flexible for all types of brains! The videos and learning tools are really great, too. So easy to learn, or just play with it until you get it.

I can't think of anything I don't like. Perhaps it doesn't have enough specific science fiction structures and templates, but I easily made my own.

As a person who writes long-form novels but often loses steam or patience during the outlining process, Plottr has been a very helpful tool for streamlining and beautifying what I previously thought to be the most tedious part of writing. The other writing apps I'd tried felt rigid, like I needed to read a manual to understand precisely what each button did before I could use it "properly" or “correctly,” but Plottr allows each of its offerings to be used in as many ways as any author could dream of. The block-based timeline view in particular allows for several different threads of scene, mood, character, etcetera to be tracked in an accessible view where a longer, traditional outline document can leave individual ideas impossible to parse from the larger body of planning. The app makes it as simple as possible to plug in as much or as little information about character, setting, and narrative as you wish, which encourages quick thinking and quicker writing. With the certainty that I'll know where I'm going, I've been able to write every day, even opening the Plottr app before I open my documents because I'm proud of the work I've done and am newly excited to reach my ending.

The scene-based tagging system is helpful for suspense writing as it assists me personally with the management of subplot, foreshadowing, and the momentary details I wish to return to later but can never seem to remember. Similarly, dragging segments of plot between chapters and scenes is easily done and does not jumble or rearrange the items around it.

Can’t export the block timeline view into PDF form. Timeline view is my favorite. :)

I know I'm not yet using this product to anything near its full capacity, but I'm enjoying using the features I'm familiar with and looking forward to learning more.

Easy and intuitive. Love being able to use the story template of my choice and upload images and info for characters and settings. Being able to edit cards or move them around helps me to stay loose while setting things up without worrying over making a mistake. Tutorials are clear and simple, and there are many of them.

You do need to remember to save as you go. I have lost work before because I forgot to do this, but that was my mistake.

My overall experience with this app is great - it is easy to use, never crashes, updates often, and keeps my work organized. That's all a writer can ask for. There are additional things I'd love the developers to add - but the app as it stands today is still the best organizing app I've ever used for my stories.

So, I love Plottr. It is so easy to use for organizing all of my thoughts in my stories, coming up with plots and making sure the timeline and outline flow well, and it's so easy to start using, it is portable across devices, and it's affordable and worth the price. If you are planning on writing your first novel, or you're an avid author like me, I recommend this app over it's competitors.

If I could add one thing, it would be an area for brainstorming. Sometimes I need to write a bunch of ideas that seem a bit scattered, and the Notes section isn't really the best place, because then I may end up with 10 new notes, and they're not connected with each other. A "Brainstorm" page where I can write whatever I want, drag it like a text box, kind of like a "Mind Mapping" tool. That would make this app even more superpowered, and I wouldn't have to use other apps for my mind mapping.

My journey of finding the perfect plotting method stopped when I discovered Plottr. It's easy to use and versatile so I can use it to plan my newsletters and anything else I need to plan. Highly recommend!

I'm an independently published author of 10 books. I was a discovery writer for half of those and for the past 5, I've tried various methods of outlining as recommended by other writers. But none of them clicked for me. Until now. Plottr has me completely hooked and I don't ever see myself changing (hence, buying the lifetime membership). I'd always thought of plotting to be as exciting as marketing, but Plottr changed that!

So far, I cannot say I've found a single thing I don't like.

I've always been a pantser using physical notebooks, but now that I have a series with more than three books and a few spin-offs, I needed something more robust. Plottr has gone above and beyond to answer the call. If you're a visual person like I am and don't want to keep using post-it notes on the wall of your office, this is a game changer.

More than just a timeline and outline. Plottr works amazingly as a quick reference for key details from my series bible.

Multiple rows on the timeline are not only great for different character POVs, but also the templates. For example, I like to add the Romancing the Beat template below the two leads' POV rows, and at a glance, I can match beats to what I've already got. It also helps me see what beats I'm missing.

The ability to filter attributes is great. As a fantasy romance writer, I have a huge cast of characters and roster of locations and of course a ton of chapters. At a glance, I can figure out where I last left a character that might not have been seen in a while. I can also make sure I'm not using a certain location too much and not neglecting the other fantastic settings I've worldbuilt.

The colors! I've always color-coded my physical notes, and Plottr makes it really easy to incorporate that color code. In the Notes section, I can assign each note to a particular book and brainstorm the basic outline there before bringing it over to the timeline. With colors, I can see at a glance which plot/subplot threads are carried through and if they need to be spaced out. I then create tags in the Tags section in the same color code and tag each chapter with each particular plot/subplot.

There currently isn't an easy way to copy attributes through characters over books in a series, but I'm happy to see that this is on the developer's roadmap as something they are working on fixing.

Pictures added to locations are placed in an awkward position halfway down descriptions and off to the right side. It'd be nice if there were an option to set a main picture for the icon and to have an image gallery or carousel at either the top or bottom of location entries.

There are too many templates being added which is overwhelming at first.
Plottr provides a strong visual tool for developing story structure and developing words on the page. Other tools like Scrivener are very competitive, however, exchanging files is not satisfactory.
Cut and paste from other applications need enhancement.

I like having access to a visual representation of the story outline and the ability to rearrange this with simple changes to the Plottr outline. There is so much detail in outlining a story that the visual graphics give a digestible outline.

Passing files between Plottr and Scrivener does not work smoothly. At the draft stage this interchange of structure would be very useful. Currently, exchanging files between Scrivener and Plottr is clunky and work intensive. Could a Scrivener template be developed to minimize this exchange process? A detailed analysis of the Plottr outline for a well known novel, as an exemplar, would be informative.