Comparison
A Marked alternative for reading and fixing Markdown
Marked has spent a decade as the preview-and-export companion for people who write in their own editor. Glance covers the reading half for free, previews in Finder without a second purchase, exports the same PDF, and lets you correct the document you are looking at.
Glance vs Marked
GlanceMarked shows you what your editor saved
Marked's App Store listing puts it in capital letters: it is a Markdown preview application and not an editor. That is the design. You write in BBEdit or iA Writer or Vim, Marked watches the file, and the rendered result updates beside you. When a sentence is wrong you fix it in the editor, because Marked has no way to take the change.
Glance takes the change. Click the sentence on the rendered page and type. Select two words for a formatting toolbar, click a table cell and Tab through the row, or rewrite a Mermaid diagram over the diagram it draws and press ⌘↩ to redraw it. Glance writes plain Markdown back to the file, so nothing about it becomes Glance-shaped.
Glance watches the file too. Save in your editor and the open document re-reads itself, including the atomic saves most editors perform.
The wider point is how many surfaces you keep in your head. Marked's design gives you two windows, one holding the source and one holding the result, and you read in the second while typing in the first. Glance has one window and no modes: no reading-versus-editing toggle, nothing to switch. The page you are looking at is the page you change. ⌘\ puts the Markdown beside it when you want to see it, but you never have to.
Finder previews are not a second purchase
Pressing Space on a .md file in Finder is not something Marked does. That is Marked QL, a separate $9.99 app on the Mac App Store, sold and installed on its own.
Glance ships its Quick Look extension inside the app and registers it the first time you launch. One download covers reading in Finder and reading in a window, and both draw from the same renderer, so the preview and the document match.
Read Markdown free, right in Finder
Free to read, Pro to edit · v0.2.2 · 9.8 MB · macOS 14+
What you pay
Marked 3 sells at $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year, with an $89.99 permanent unlock and a $69.99 one-time Pro version on the Mac App Store. Marked 2 remains a $14.99 one-time purchase, last updated in March 2025.
Reading in Glance costs nothing and keeps costing nothing: Quick Look, Mermaid, LaTeX, code highlighting, ⌘F, zoom, ⌘P, and PDF export. Editing is $9.99 once, after 14 days free, covering three Macs. There is no subscription and no account.
Where Marked is the better tool
Marked exports to HTML, DOCX, and RTF, and Glance exports PDF only. Marked takes custom CSS and lets you inspect the preview in Safari's inspector, which is the right shape for producing a styled document from Markdown. It also carries a decade of writing tools: word counts and readability statistics, scope and included-file handling, repeated exports of a long manuscript.
If your work ends in a styled export, buy Marked. It is built by someone who has been doing this longer than most, and Glance is not trying to replace that.
Pick by what you do all day
Choose Marked if Markdown is your writing surface and the finished artifact is a formatted export.
Choose Glance if Markdown is what you read: README files, specs, notes, docs your coding agent left behind. Press Space and it renders, press Return and you can fix it. Free to read, native in Quick Look, and 9.8 MB to download.
Related
New to Quick Look extensions? Start with Markdown Quick Look for macOS or the step-by-step Finder preview guide. Replacing an older plugin instead? See the QLMarkdown comparison. Weighing paid editors? See Typora and the roundup of Mac Markdown apps.
FAQ
They start from opposite ends. Marked is a preview companion for a writing workflow: you type in your editor, Marked watches the file and shows the rendered result, then exports it. Glance starts in Finder. Press Space on any .md file to read it, press Return to open it, and click the page to change it.
Yes. Command-P prints and Shift-Command-E exports a PDF through the same path, so the file you save is what the printer would produce. Pages break between lines and between table rows rather than through them, and a heading is never left alone at the foot of a page.
Reading is free forever, with no account and no trial timer: Quick Look previews, Mermaid, LaTeX, syntax-highlighted code, find, zoom, print, and PDF export. Editing the rendered page is Glance Pro, free for 14 days and then $9.99 once for up to three Macs. No subscription.
Yes, and it does it without a browser engine. Mermaid diagrams and LaTeX equations are drawn to images as the document opens, in the Glance window and in the Quick Look preview alike.
Yes, and it is included. Quick Look previewing with Marked means buying Marked QL, a separate $9.99 app. Glance bundles its Quick Look extension and registers it the first time you open the app.
Yes. Glance watches the open file and re-reads it when another app writes to it, including the atomic saves most editors perform. Your unsaved edits in Glance are not overwritten by a change on disk.
Marked exports to HTML, DOCX, and RTF, takes custom CSS to restyle the preview, and carries a deep set of writing tools built up over a decade. Glance exports PDF only and offers no theming. If your work ends in a styled export, Marked is the tool for it.
Ready to glance?
Free to read, Pro to edit · v0.2.2 · 9.8 MB · macOS 14+
Notes
- Compared 30 July 2026 against Marked 3.1.12 and Marked QL 1.0.5. ↩
- Marked 3 sells at $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year, with an $89.99 permanent unlock, plus a $69.99 one-time Pro version on the Mac App Store. Marked 2 remains a $14.99 one-time purchase, last updated March 2025. Reading Glance is free with no account and no time limit. Editing is Glance Pro: free for 14 days, then a $9.99 one-time license covering up to three Macs. There is no subscription. ↩
- Quick Look previewing with Marked means buying Marked QL, a separate $9.99 app on the Mac App Store, sold and installed on its own. ↩
- Marked's own App Store listing describes it as a preview application and states in capitals that it is not an editor. ↩