Nought vs Apple Numbers

Numbers is the closest comparison to Nought, because both are native Mac apps that care about looking right. I build Nought, so weigh what follows accordingly, but the core difference here is not taste, it is what happens to your file.

What Numbers does beautifully

Numbers is free, already installed, and a genuine pleasure to use. Its free-form canvas, its typography, its charts, its templates: for building a document from scratch that will live its whole life as a Numbers file, it is excellent, and in visual polish it often beats Excel. If you are inside the Apple world and never hand files to Excel users, Numbers is a fine choice and it costs you nothing.

The .xlsx problem

Numbers is not really a spreadsheet that edits .xlsx. It is a spreadsheet with its own format that imports and exports .xlsx by converting. Open an Excel file and Numbers translates it into a Numbers document. Export back to .xlsx and it translates again. Each translation can shift formatting, move or resize things, and drop the occasional formula or chart detail. For a simple sheet you may never notice. For anything with structure, the file that comes out is not the file that went in.

Nought treats .xlsx as its native format. It opens the actual file, edits it, and saves it back as the same format. There is no second format in the middle and no import or export step, and where something in your file goes beyond what Nought writes, it tells you before you save rather than losing it quietly. If a colleague sends you an Excel file and expects Excel back, that difference is the whole point.

Where Nought is behind

Numbers has years of polish, a free-form layout Nought does not offer, richer built-in chart styling, iCloud sync across Apple devices, and iPhone and iPad apps. Nought is Mac-only and younger, with no free-form canvas and no iOS app. What it does have is depth in the spreadsheet itself: 200+ functions, 23 chart types, pivot tables, and .xlsx that stays .xlsx. If you want a beautiful canvas for a self-contained document, Numbers is ahead.

Which to use

Use Numbers for documents that begin and end in Numbers, where the look matters and the file never has to be Excel. Use Nought when the file is .xlsx, needs to stay .xlsx, and you want a native Mac app that opens it directly without a conversion round trip.

They can happily coexist. Get Nought on the App Store for the Excel files; keep Numbers for the rest.