I spent 40 hours in every major markdown editor. Here's the honest verdict

I write in markdown all day, and I kept second-guessing whether I was even
using the right editor. So I did the dumb, thorough thing: I wrote the same
documents — an essay, a résumé, a proposal, a research report — end to end
in nine different markdown editors. About 40 hours total. Here's what I'd
actually recommend.

The short version

Best overall: Obsidian — local-first, free, plugin ecosystem that won't quit.
Best WYSIWYG: Typora — $14.99 once, hides the syntax as you type.
Best on Mac: iA Writer — the prettiest writing surface ever shipped.
Best for academics: Zettlr — free, citations built in, Pandoc under the hood.
Best for teams: Notion — the only one with real collaboration (but the worst export).
Best designed-PDF export: mdclaudy — full disclosure, that's the one I build.

What I learned ranking them

The thing nobody tells you: the editor barely matters; the export does.
Every tool here writes fine markdown. Where they diverge wildly is the
moment you have to hand the document to a real person.

Obsidian's PDF export is plain. Typora's is solid. iA Writer's is clean but
unbranded. Notion's is — and everyone agrees on this — genuinely bad. The
gap between "I wrote it" and "I shipped something that looks designed" is
where most of these tools quietly give up.

That gap is the reason I built mdclaudy, so I'll
flag the conflict of interest loudly: if my verdict bugs you, any of the
other eight are great editors. The export gap is real either way.

The criteria that actually mattered

Typing feel — latency, focus mode. The editor has to disappear.
File model — plain .md in a folder you own beats any proprietary database. Notion is the only one here that fails this.
Export — the reason you wrote it. PDF, DOCX, HTML.
Workflow fit — notes vs. essays vs. dissertations vs. proposals are four different jobs.