Writing Software without AI That Has No AI to Turn Off

Short Answer

LibreOffice Writer is the best writing software without AI, because it ships no artificial intelligence (AI) feature for you to switch off. In the guides we publish at Ban the Bots, we score a writing app on whether the AI code ships at all.

An absent feature cannot return in an update, and no administrator can re-enable it. A hidden feature can do both. That gap decides whether a manuscript is still safe after the next update.

For a novel, Scrivener from Literature & Latte is the pick, because it keeps the entire manuscript in a project folder on your own disk and ships no generative AI feature. Both picks have a cost. LibreOffice Writer will not co-edit a document with five people at once, and Scrivener charges per platform and syncs only through a folder you configure yourself.

The Two Questions That Decide It

Two questions decide whether a writing app has any AI in it: whether the AI code ships inside the app at all, and who is allowed to switch it off. The second question is the easier one to answer, and an app with a tidy off switch can look equivalent to an app that never had the feature.

Three apps here answer the first question with nothing, and each says so in writing. The Document Foundation published the LibreOffice 26.8 announcement on 26 August 2026, and it says the suite "contains no generative AI features".

It adds that "no component of the suite requires network access to function". FocusWriter and Ellipsus each publish a commitment of their own, quoted in full below.

The second group ships the AI and lets you hide it. Apple Pages, Ulysses, Google Docs and Microsoft Word all sit here. A setting gets reset by a software update, a new laptop, a fresh profile, or a policy your employer changes without telling you.

Microsoft Word is the clearest case. Microsoft's Copilot privacy documentation spells out the off switch.

If an organisation turns off connected experiences that analyse your content, "Microsoft Copilot features won't be available to your users" in Word, Excel, OneNote, Outlook and PowerPoint. On a work laptop, that control belongs to your IT (information technology) administrator, and you do not get a vote on it.

A separate question decides where the text goes while you write. LibreOffice Writer, FocusWriter, Scrivener, iA Writer and Obsidian all keep the file on your own disk.

No terms clause about model training can reach a document that never left the machine. Ellipsus and Google Docs hold your draft on their own service, and Ulysses syncs through iCloud.

Writing Software without AI Compared

Only three of the eleven options here ship no generative AI code and say so in writing, and only two of those three keep the file on your own disk. Prices were checked against each company's own store page in September 2026 and change without notice.

How Gemini and Copilot Sit inside Google Docs and Word

Google Docs and Microsoft Word both place a generative AI prompt inside the document window itself. Neither keeps it in a separate app you can leave closed. Google's Workspace Updates blog describes the Docs feature this way: "With Help me write, simply prompt Gemini from the new bottom bar or side panel to make edits across your doc." Google began that rollout to Rapid Release domains on 22 April 2026 and to Scheduled Release domains on 6 May 2026.

Google does publish a limit on training. The Generative AI in Google Workspace privacy hub says: "Your content is not human reviewed or otherwise used for Generative AI model training outside your domain without permission."

Read the last five words. The sentence limits training outside your domain, and it allows training with permission.

Turning the prompt bar off is possible on a personal Google account, and it costs you more than the prompt bar. The switch is Google Workspace smart features in Gmail settings, and it also removes Gmail events in Calendar and personalised Drive search results.

Google's own help page for that setting says smart features are off by default in the European Economic Area (EEA), Japan, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. It names no other region, so check the setting yourself on the first Google account you open.

Microsoft states its training position more plainly. The Copilot privacy page says "Prompts, responses, and data accessed through Microsoft Graph aren't used to train foundation LLMs, including those used by Microsoft Copilot", where LLM means large language model.

That is a firmer sentence than Google's. It still does nothing for a novelist, because it promises no training rather than promising your text stays on the machine.

Who holds the switch decides how much either promise is worth to you. A personal Google account lets you turn Gemini in Docs off yourself, at the price of the Calendar event import and Drive search you probably wanted. A managed Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace account does not, so if your confidential draft lives on a work laptop, the guarantee you are relying on is your employer's configuration.

Word Processors without AI for Everyday Documents

LibreOffice Writer is the only free, full word processor that ships no generative AI code and covers what an ordinary document needs. Styles, tracked changes, footnotes, mail merge and a real page-layout view are all there, so a contract or a dissertation chapter comes out looking the way it did in Word. It opens and saves .docx, which means you can hand a file back to a colleague still on Microsoft Word without exporting anything.

The version to install is LibreOffice 26.8, released on 26 August 2026, and available for Windows, macOS and Linux from the LibreOffice download page. It is free under the Mozilla Public License version 2.0, with no account, no subscription and no feature held back behind a payment. The Document Foundation called the absence of AI "a deliberate position", and gave the reason: an organisation handling confidential, legally privileged or personal data needs to know where that material goes.

FocusWriter is the runner-up, and it does a narrower job well. It gives you a full-screen page, a daily word goal and a timer, with the toolbars hidden until you move the mouse to the edge.

Nothing on screen offers to write a sentence for you. Version 1.9.1 arrived on 23 July 2026, it is free under the GNU General Public License version 3, and it runs on Linux and Windows.

Graeme Gott, who writes FocusWriter, wrote this in a post dated 12 February 2026: "I will never add an AI assistant to FocusWriter: your words are your own, and are safe." He also wrote that he will never merge code or documentation produced by a large language model. That second sentence covers the update path that turns a clean app into an AI app a year later, because a maintainer who accepts no model-written patches cannot merge one by accident.

Neither app offers the grammar suggestions Google Docs shows you as you type. If proofreading is the feature you would miss most, our guide to Grammarly alternatives covers the tools that do that job without a generative model attached.

Novel Writing Software without AI

Scrivener is the strongest pick for a manuscript, because it organises a book the way a book gets written and keeps every word on your own disk. The corkboard and outliner let you reorder scenes without cutting and pasting through a 400-page file, and split-screen editing lets you hold research beside the draft.

Literature & Latte lists no AI feature anywhere in the Scrivener 3 feature set for macOS, Windows or iOS. On macOS 15 and macOS 26 the system Apple Intelligence Writing Tools still appear in Scrivener's menus, and Literature & Latte says there is no way to exclude them from the app, so the only off switch is the system-wide one.

There is a caveat. Literature & Latte states that Scrivener contains no AI, but that page describes the software as it stands and makes no promise about future releases. We can tell you what the current release does.

We cannot tell you what Scrivener 4 will do. If a written commitment is your requirement rather than a preference, that ranks Scrivener below LibreOffice Writer and FocusWriter on this one axis.

Scrivener is also not free. The iOS version is $23.99 on the Literature & Latte store.

The macOS and Windows licences are priced separately on that same page, and the two together are sold as a discounted bundle. There is no subscription and no cloud account, and syncing between a laptop and an iPad means pointing both at a folder you set up yourself.

Ellipsus is the alternative when a co-writer is involved and you want the pledge in writing. Its generative AI page states: "We will never integrate or use generative AI within Ellipsus", alongside "We will never sell your data or use your works for exploitative purposes." The free plan covers unlimited documents and collaborators, and Ellipsus Plus is $6 a month, $60 a year, or $99 once.

Weigh that pledge against the storage question, because Ellipsus keeps version history and collaborators on its own service. If your rule is that the manuscript never leaves your machine, no promise about training satisfies it, and Scrivener or LibreOffice Writer is the answer instead.

Obsidian is worth knowing about as a drafting surface. It saves everything as plain Markdown text files in a folder you choose, collects no telemetry, and is free for personal use.

The core app ships no AI, though community plugins can add it, which makes the guarantee yours to maintain rather than Obsidian's to keep. For capture and note-taking specifically, our guide to note-taking apps without AI goes deeper than this page does.

Apple Pages, Ulysses and iA Writer

Apple Pages and Ulysses both expose Apple Intelligence Writing Tools inside the editor, and iA Writer exposes none, which is why it sits apart from the two. Pages is free on any Mac, iPhone or iPad, and Apple Intelligence Writing Tools appear in the Edit menu and the contextual menu rather than writing anything on their own. Apple's support page on Apple Intelligence says that if you turn it off, the on-device models are removed from the device, which is a stronger outcome than a greyed-out button.

Ulysses is Apple-only and subscription-priced at $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, with iCloud sync across Mac, iPhone and iPad. The Ulysses help page for Writing Tools says: "Your texts in Ulysses stay securely on your device unless you explicitly choose to send them to Writing Tools." It is a good long-form app with a clean library, and the AI arrived with Apple Intelligence rather than by a decision at Ulysses.

iA Writer is the odd one, and for one audience it is the right answer. It generates no text and calls no AI service.

The iA Writer Authorship feature lets you mark a passage as your own or paste text in as another author, and shows text marked as AI in a different colour. It runs entirely on the device with no server call, and it strips the author metadata on export to Markdown, HTML, PDF and Word, so the record lives in your working file rather than in the copy you hand in.

No other app compared here has it, and it addresses a different problem from the rest. A student flagged by an AI detector for work they wrote themselves has no evidence, because a finished .docx file looks identical either way.

Drafting in iA Writer and tagging each pasted passage leaves a running record of where each sentence came from, which you can show a tutor. That is a different job from avoiding AI, and a more useful one if you are the person being accused.

iA Writer costs $49.99 on Mac, $29.99 on Windows and $49.99 on iPhone and iPad, all one-time, per its pricing page. Android is the exception and is sold as a subscription. If your worry is being accused rather than being trained on, iA Writer is the buy.

What Google Docs Does That LibreOffice Writer Cannot

Google Docs does four things LibreOffice Writer does not, and three of them have a replacement elsewhere. Real-time co-editing, threaded comments, share-by-link and browser-based version history are the four. People who ignore that end up back in Docs within a month.

• Real-time co-editing. LibreOffice Writer has no equivalent. Ellipsus does it with a written no-AI pledge, so use Ellipsus for the shared draft and LibreOffice Writer for the final document.
• Comments and suggestions. LibreOffice Writer has tracked changes and comments that survive a round trip to .docx, so a colleague on Word can still review your file.
• Share by link. You go back to sending files. A shared folder on any storage service handles it, at the cost of one person owning the current version.
• Version history. Scrivener takes snapshots of a document before you rewrite it, and Obsidian plus a folder in version control does the same for plain text.

The simplest option of all is a plain Markdown file in a text editor. No company, no terms document and no update channel can add a feature to a text file. The cost is that you format later, in LibreOffice Writer or with a converter, rather than as you type.

One more thing does not travel with you. Google Docs and Microsoft Word both offer to rewrite a sentence for you.

If that is the feature you wanted to keep, the fix is a method rather than an app. Our guide to paraphrasing without AI covers how to do that rewrite by hand, and the wider AI-free apps hub covers the same question for browsers, phones and photo editors.

Who This Is Not For

Do not move if your daily work runs through a team already committed to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. You will lose more in coordination than you gain in principle.

The better move is to turn off Google Workspace smart features on your own account, or to ask your administrator to turn off connected experiences that analyse content in Microsoft 365. Neither removes the AI from your colleagues' copies, and that is the tradeoff you are accepting.

Do not move if you depend on a Word add-in. Reference managers, legal document-comparison tools and several screen-reader workflows are built against Microsoft Word specifically, and LibreOffice Writer will not load them. Losing a citation manager mid-thesis costs more than a Copilot button in the ribbon.

A third group cannot leave at all, because their school requires submission through a Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account it controls. Draft in iA Writer or LibreOffice Writer, then paste the finished text into the school's system at the end. The document that gets submitted still passes through the school's tools, and the drafting record that proves you wrote it stays on your own machine.

What Would Change Our Answer

Three specific events would move these picks, and the first is the one to watch. If The Document Foundation ships a generative AI feature in LibreOffice Writer, even switched off by default, LibreOffice drops into the same tier as Apple Pages.

FocusWriter would become the everyday recommendation. The Document Foundation restated the position in the 26 August 2026 release announcement, and each new announcement is where a change would show up first.

The second is Scrivener. If Literature & Latte publishes a written commitment to keep generative AI out, Scrivener moves up beside LibreOffice Writer on the first axis.

If Scrivener 4 arrives with a drafting assistant, we move the novelist pick to LibreOffice Writer with a chapter-per-file folder. Neither has happened as of September 2026.

The third is Google. Suppose Google split the Gemini prompt bar off from the Google Workspace smart features setting, so a personal account could drop the generative feature and keep the Drive search personalisation. Much of the reason to leave Google Docs for everyday documents would go with it.

Until then, LibreOffice Writer is the shortest route to writing software without AI. Download LibreOffice 26.8 from the LibreOffice download page, open a .docx file you already have, and check the formatting survives.