Ulysses & iA Writer for Ghost: the two-way sync they don’t do
If you write in Ulysses or iA Writer and publish to Ghost, you already have a calm place to draft. Both are genuinely excellent writing apps, and both have official Ghost integrations. But there’s one thing neither does: pull your whole blog back down as local markdown and let you edit posts you’ve already published. That’s the gap this page is about, and it’s why people end up searching for a Ulysses Ghost alternative or a way to get real iA Writer Ghost sync.
This isn’t a takedown. It’s a fair look at what each tool does, where the shared limitation sits, and how Specter slots in alongside them rather than replacing them.
What Ulysses does with Ghost
Ulysses has an official Ghost integration. You connect your site URL and a staff access token, then publish a sheet straight to your publication. The first heading becomes the title, attached keywords map to existing tags, the first attached image becomes the featured image, and the first note becomes the excerpt. It’s a polished workflow, and it works on Mac and iOS.
Ulysses also lets you update a post you previously published from Ulysses, which is more than most editors offer. The key phrase is “from Ulysses”: the round-trip stays inside the app’s own publishing history. As of writing, it does not crawl your Ghost site and reconstruct existing posts (including ones written elsewhere) as local files you can edit. Pricing is subscription-based.
What iA Writer does with Ghost
iA Writer also ships an official Ghost integration. You write, then choose File, Publish, New Draft on Ghost, and your content lands as a draft in Ghost Admin, images included. There are formatting options for how markdown is converted, including a markdown-card mode.
The limitations are documented and worth knowing. As of writing, it sends a draft and that’s it: no managing categories, no setting the featured image, no slug control, and the title comes from the filename rather than your H1. It’s a one-way, one-time upload, so changes you later make in the Ghost editor do not sync back to iA Writer. iA Writer is a one-time purchase and runs across multiple platforms.
The shared limitation: one-way, no round-trip
Both apps push writing toward Ghost. Neither pulls Ghost back to you. That means:
- Posts you published months ago aren’t sitting in your folder as editable files.
- Posts you wrote directly in Ghost Admin never reach your local library at all.
- Edits made on the Ghost side don’t flow back to your drafts.
For drafting new posts, none of this matters. For treating your entire blog as a folder of local markdown you can search, back up, and edit both ways, it’s the whole ballgame.
Where Specter fits (and why it’s complementary)
Specter is a native macOS menu-bar app that does one job: two-way sync between Ghost and a folder of local markdown. It edits posts you’ve already published, not just new drafts. Point it at any folder, run a dry-run preview to see what will change, and resolve anything ambiguous through conflict prompts. Frontmatter is preserved. It syncs posts.
Crucially, Specter is not a writing app and isn’t trying to be. You can keep drafting in Ulysses or iA Writer, publish however you like, and let Specter mirror your live Ghost posts down to local files and push your local edits back up. Because everything lives as plain markdown in a folder, you can also point your own AI tools at that folder to revise existing posts. Specter ships no built-in AI; you bring your own. See using AI to edit Ghost posts for how that works.
Specter is local-first, $49 one-time, with a free tier of five file syncs per month. It needs macOS 14 or later on Apple Silicon. To get started you’ll grab a Ghost Admin API key and connect Specter to Ghost.
A fair comparison
| Ulysses | iA Writer | Specter | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sync direction | One-way publish (can update its own published posts) | One-way, one-time draft | Two-way sync |
| Edits existing Ghost posts | Only posts published from Ulysses | No | Yes, any published post |
| Platform | Mac, iOS | Multi-platform | macOS 14+, Apple Silicon |
| Pricing model | Subscription | One-time | $49 one-time (free tier: 5 syncs/mo) |
| Best for | Distraction-free drafting | Clean markdown drafting | Whole blog as synced local files |
So which do you need?
If you mainly want a beautiful, focused place to draft new posts and send them to Ghost, Ulysses and iA Writer are excellent and worth every penny. Keep using them. If what you actually want is your entire blog as local files, synced both ways, with the freedom to edit published posts and run your own tools over them, that’s the layer Specter adds. They’re not rivals so much as different parts of the same desk, and you can absolutely write in Ulysses or iA Writer and sync with Specter.