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Vellum for Windows: what to use instead

Vellum is Mac-only and its maker publishes no Windows version. You can rent a Mac by the hour to run it, or use a tool that runs on Windows. What each route costs, and what it asks of the book.

The Nueel team7 min read

There is no Vellum for Windows. Vellum calls itself “Mac-only software”, lists macOS 13 or newer as its requirement, and sells no PC licence. A search for a Windows installer ends at a download site you should not trust.

That leaves three real routes: rent a Mac and run Vellum on it, buy a Mac, or use a formatter that runs on Windows. The first is cheaper than it sounds. Whether it is the right one depends less on the hourly rate than on where the book lives once it has been formatted.

Route one: rent a Mac by the hour

This is Vellum’s own answer, and it publishes a guide to it. MacinCloud rents a remote Mac that you drive from your PC through Microsoft Remote Desktop, with pay-as-you-go plans that start at about $1 an hour. Vellum is usually already installed on it.

The workflow, as Vellum describes it:

  1. Sign up for a MacinCloud plan, choosing the location nearest you and a recent macOS.
  2. Open the connection file they email you in Remote Desktop, at the largest window size your screen can hold.
  3. Get your Word file onto the remote Mac through Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive, installed on both machines.
  4. Import it in Vellum, style it, and preview it. All of that is free.
  5. Buy the Vellum licence ($249.99 for print and ebooks, $199.99 for ebooks only) from the Purchase button when you are ready to generate the files.

For one book the arithmetic is kind. An evening of styling and a second evening of proofreading come to a few dollars of rental on top of the licence.

What the arithmetic leaves out is the second edition. A formatted book is a file you go back to: the typo a reader emails you in March, the new back-matter page when book two comes out, the price change that needs a new copyright line. Each of those means renting the Mac again, finding the Vellum file in the cloud folder you saved it to, and remembering how you set it up. Vellum’s guide says plainly to save the Vellum file to that synced folder, because your files on the rented Mac go when the account lapses.

So the rented Mac is a good answer for a book you will format once and leave alone. It is a tiresome one for a series, where the back matter of every book changes each time a new one comes out.

Route two: a Mac of your own

If the books are going to keep coming, a Mac stops being an extravagance and becomes the production machine. Vellum’s licence follows you: a licence bought on a rented Mac can be moved to your own later with a restore request, so starting on MacinCloud does not waste the purchase.

This is the route to take if you have already decided that Vellum’s page is the page you want. It is our judgement, and we have said so elsewhere, that Vellum sets a better page than most of what competes with it. That is worth a computer to some authors. It is not worth one to most.

The route that does not work: a virtual machine

Forum threads still pass around instructions for running macOS in VirtualBox or VMware on a PC. Apple’s licence for macOS permits virtualisation only on Apple hardware, so on a Windows PC it is outside the licence, and in practice it breaks with each macOS update. The book you are producing is the one file you cannot afford to lose to a broken virtual machine.

Route three: a formatter that runs on Windows

The tools that compete with Vellum on Windows nearly all run in the browser, which is why they run on Windows at all.

Tool Price Runs on Worth knowing
Atticus $147 once Browser; installs like an app on any OS Drafting and formatting in one; 30-day refund
Nueel $139 once Browser, offline after the first load Checks the file against the store before export; 14-day refund
Reedsy Studio Free Browser Few designs, little typographic control
Kindle Create Free Windows, Mac Built for KDP; its EPUB export is unsupported outside Kindle

Prices for Vellum and Atticus as their sites published them on 8 October 2026.

Choosing among them is easier if you know what Vellum is actually good at, because that is the standard you were reaching for:

  • Whole-book designs. A Vellum style sets the chapter openings, the running heads, the ornaments and the spacing as one system. A tool that only restyles chapter titles will look cheaper next to it.
  • Print typography. Justified text with hyphenation, and no single lines stranded at the top of a page. This is where free tools fall short, and it is visible in the printed book: see widows and orphans and why justified text needs hyphenation.
  • Files the stores accept. A PDF/X for the printer and a valid EPUB for the ebook stores.

Test each candidate on those three, with your own manuscript rather than the sample book it ships with. Your manuscript is the one with the long dialogue scenes, the epigraphs and the footnotes.

What we would do

If the plan is a single book and you have your heart set on Vellum’s look, rent the Mac. It is Vellum’s own supported route, and the licence follows you if you buy a Mac later.

If you expect to write more than one book, or you will be fixing typos and adding back matter for years, use a tool that runs on the computer you already own. That is where Nueel comes in, and it is our product, so weigh what follows as a pitch. It runs in the browser on Windows, imports the Word file, and sets the whole book from one design. It also checks the export against the store’s published rules (11 store profiles, KDP and IngramSpark among them) before the file is written. The free preview takes your Word file and shows its first chapter typeset, without an account and without the file leaving your browser. Vellum’s free trial lets Mac owners run the same test on the whole book.

The test that matters is the same for every tool on this page: your own book, at your trim size, read page by page. An hour of that tells you more than any comparison, this one included.

Sources

Common questions

Is there a Windows version of Vellum?
No. Vellum describes itself as Mac-only software and lists macOS 13 or newer as its requirement. There is no Windows download, and no PC licence to buy. The vendor's own suggestion for Windows users is to rent a Mac in the cloud through MacinCloud.
Can I run Vellum on Windows through a cloud Mac?
Yes, and Vellum publishes the steps. You rent a Mac from MacinCloud (pay-as-you-go plans start at about $1 an hour), connect to it with Microsoft Remote Desktop, move your Word file across through Dropbox, OneDrive or Google Drive, and buy the Vellum licence from inside the rented Mac when you are ready to generate files. The licence is separate from the rental.
Can I use Vellum on Windows with a virtual machine?
Not legitimately. Apple's licence allows macOS to run in a virtual machine only on Apple hardware, so a macOS virtual machine on a Windows PC is outside it. The routes that work are a rented Mac, a Mac of your own, or a different tool.
What is the closest thing to Vellum on Windows?
A browser-based formatter, because it runs on any operating system: Atticus ($147 once), Nueel, or Reedsy Studio (free). Kindle Create runs on Windows too, but it is built for KDP, and Amazon calls its EPUB export unsupported outside Kindle. Judge them the way you would judge Vellum: on your own manuscript, before paying, at the trim size you intend to print.
If I buy Vellum on a rented Mac and later buy a Mac, do I pay again?
No. Vellum says a licence bought on a rented Mac can be moved to your own Mac later through a restore request.

Nueel is a web app that turns a finished manuscript into a typeset book, in your browser: import your Word file, choose a design, export a print-ready PDF and an EPUB. See how it works.