List of some useful free online apps to write your journal article or paper

Here is a list of some apps I found useful:

1. Authorea, is my favourite editor for its simplicity, you can use Word, LaTeX, Markdown, format into several journal and thesis styles. For theses, you will need to create individual Authorea chapters and then “stitch” them. They even have their own bibliography editor. Five of us used Authorea to write our Book Chapter on our upcoming book on Telehealth using Authorea. So it works excellently. They have free version, and
2. ANY LaTeX installation will give you seamless integration with formatting to ANY journal and thesis format. Mac and Linux users can use and you can download MikTeX from our software repository and pair it with TeXstudio (entirely free, thousands of journals), nothing to pay and no restrictions whatsoever.
3. If you want to use LyX, even better. But you cannot install LyX in a university provided computer because they do not give you administration rights. Hence a no go.
4. Overleaf is excellent. I have used it with my Master and PhD students and they love it once they get the hang of it. Free, plenty of space to work with. You can also get an annual rate (although I do not use the annual rate for myself, unless I get a grant that I can build in, but you can pay for it and claim expense from your thesis budget). I have tried to get a University licence and perhaps they will buy it.
5. A little more work but works excellently. Any Jupyter Notebook instance with R/Python installed in it. Again, plenty of free text to work with. Use Microsoft Azure notebooks, or Google Colab notebooks will serve anyone’s purpose to write and format texts and analyses at the same time. But has a learning curve. I use it all the time.
6. Rstudio paired with R software is excellent for writing theses and journal articles and push it everywhere. Use markdown to format things. Again a bit of learning curve but worth it.
7. Stencila, , an excellent little suite (our Kiwi home grown, built in Kaikoura by Nokome Bentley) and Alexandra Pawlik, formerly from NeSI champions it and has hosted workshops at UC. Excellent for seamlessly integrating text that can be exported and formatted as you like, bibliography in-built, analyses. It is getting popular. Happy to hold hands if anyone needs it, I have used it.
8. Madoko is an excellent alternative for those scared of LaTeX writing, here: madoko.net; you can export documents from Madoko and add your formatting and style file to the documents, but you will probably do not need to.

Verdict: if you are looking for free and great alternatives:

1. If you are willing to learn and negotiate a learning curve, MikTeX and TexStudio is the BEST bet. You can download from software repositories, and work with it. If you pair it with Pandoc (https://pandoc.org/), you can write everything in Word and convert to LaTeX without writing a word of LaTeX but you will need to know how to convert to various formats.
2. If you want a web based solutions with all bells and whistles, still free, use Overleaf or Authorea. Both of them are excellent writing tools. Again pair up with Pandoc to convert from Word (only for Overleaf). For authorea, import directly into Authorea and work directly with it.