Tons of people use WordPress, and if you don’t, chances are you’ve heard of it. If you haven’t, WordPress is a site that lets you create your own blog free and easy, right in your browser. It’s incredibly popular due to its flexibility, ease of setup, and overall ease of use. I myself use it to run two of my personal blogs, and the tech site I write for, MakeTechEasier.com, also uses it. Sometimes though, when I’m writing for these sites, I just don’t want to have my browser open, as its often distracting and frankly, sometimes just not the best thing for doing serious work in. This led me to my search for WordPress editors that are native Mac applications, and little did I know, there are some real gems out there, so read on for my impressions!

1. Blogo v1.3

Blogo is pretty slick. The greatest part about it is its simple, clean user interface. There are two big buttons at the top – “New” and “Edit”. I’m not going to explain what these are, as I think its pretty self explanatory, but I do want to point out one thing. The app defaults to New, and you may not realize, but this is very important. The reason being that when you click Edit, the app has to pull down all your posts from the server. This takes time, and if you’re just jumping in to throw a quick post up or start a new, longer one, pulling the list of Posts down would be annoying and slow the program down. This implementation of separating New and Edit makes the program much quicker than it otherwise would be. It’s additional features include post scheduling, rich formatting, image insertion as well as image editing, and tags/categories. Literally every great feature about WordPress, in a fast, easy to use, focused application. For $25, Blogo offers great functionality at a good price.

Blogo – $25

2. ecto 3

WordPress editor ecto might be the easiest application with which to manage multiple WordPress accounts, but fails in one (sometimes huge) category: editing.  Don’t get me wrong.  You can easily do all of the things WordPress let’s you do when editing a post, including rich text and images, and ecto is awesome at starting new posts.  The problem though, is editing.  You can use all of WordPress’ features when creating a New post, but (and please correct me dear readers if I’m wrong here) I couldn’t figure out a way to edit an existing post!  ecto pulls down a list of all your posts, but even after customization, my toolbar at the top only included the ability to add a New Post, and right-clicking was no help either.  This is a major fault in the eyes of some writers, but ecto is also half the price of MarsEdit.  While I absolutely love the simple tree navigation for multiple blogs (because I write on a few of them) and it is great for new posts, sometimes you want to edit a post you’ve already written, and in the case of ecto, you’ll have to log in to the web browser to do it.

Ecto – $19.95

3. MarsEdit 3.1.1

MarsEdit is fantastic.  It’s not as clean looking or feeling as Blogo, but has a nice nested view for multiple blogs like ecto does.  It also allows you to edit posts already saved or published on your blog, as well as create new ones.  One feature MarsEdit offers in an easy to access way that the others don’t is the option to edit in Rich Text view or HTML view, depending on your preference.  If you need to manage multiple blogs and absolutely want the ability to edit old posts, MarsEdit is for your, end of story.  If however, you don’t need the complete functionality MarsEdit offers, you can almost certainly get a better value with one of the other editors, as MarsEdit comes in at the highest price point of them all.

MarsEdit – $39.95

Wrap-up

These are what I consider the top WordPress editors for Mac. When it comes down to it, your choice of editor is based completely on your needs.  If you’re editing a single blog, Blogo is probably the fastest, nicest looking choice.  If you work on multiple blogs, ecto or MarsEdit will suit you, but if you need to edit older posts, MarsEdit is the only way to go. Remember, all these applications come with trial periods, so give them a shot and see what you like best!  If you think you know of a better editor that I left out, or find certain features of another compelling enough that it should be included, let me know in the comments!