The short answer
Mac and more than one book: Vellum. Windows, or one book: Jutoh.
It is a five-fold price difference and a platform wall, and those two facts settle it more often than any feature does.
| Jutoh 3 | Vellum | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | £35 Standard, £70 Plus (ex VAT) | £159.99 Ebooks, £199.99 Press (ex VAT) |
| Billed in | Pounds | Pounds |
| Platform | Windows, Mac, Linux | macOS only |
| Output quality | Good with effort | Excellent with almost none |
| Print PDF | Limited, manual | Genuinely print-ready |
| Unusual EPUB structures | Handles them | Fights you |
| Learning curve | Real | Almost none |
From jutoh.com/buy.htm and store.vellum.pub, read 23 September 2026.
The pound pricing, because it is genuinely unusual
Almost everything in this market is priced in dollars. Atticus is $147, Dabble is $19 a month, NovelPad is $15. A UK buyer pays the mid-market rate on the day plus whatever their card adds, which is typically another 2% to 3%.
Jutoh and Vellum both list in pounds on their own stores. £35 is £35. That is worth about £4 against a dollar-priced equivalent, and it removes the irritating uncertainty of not knowing what will actually leave your account.
Both prices exclude VAT, so budget 20% on top if you are not VAT-registered.
What Vellum is actually for
Vellum’s case has never been features. It is that the output looks right the first time, and you get there in about twenty minutes without learning anything.
You import a manuscript, choose a style, and the chapter openers, drop caps, ornamental breaks, running heads and page numbers are all done, in proportion, to a standard that would take a competent designer an afternoon. Then it exports the ebook and a print-ready PDF together.
That is the whole product, and it is why people buy Macs for it.
The constraints are real and unmoving: macOS only, and £159.99 for ebooks or £199.99 if you want print too.
What Jutoh is actually for
Jutoh is the opposite trade. It is cheap, it runs everywhere, and it will do difficult things that prettier tools refuse — but you drive.
Where it earns its place:
- Complex EPUB structures. Jutoh gives you access to the guts of the file. If you need a specific navigation structure, unusual metadata, or a fixed-layout arrangement that a consumer tool will not expose, Jutoh is one of very few affordable options that lets you.
- Windows and Linux. No borrowed Mac required.
- £35. For an author testing whether they will publish a second book, that is a rounding error.
The honest costs: the interface looks like software from a different decade, the defaults are plain rather than beautiful, and the print side is weaker. You will do more work, and the result will look competent rather than lovely unless you put the hours in.
The arithmetic across books
| One book | Three books | Six books | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jutoh Standard £35 | £35 | £11.67 each | £5.83 each |
| Vellum Ebooks £159.99 | £159.99 | £53.33 each | £26.67 each |
| Vellum Press £199.99 | £199.99 | £66.66 each | £33.33 each |
At a £9.99 paperback earning roughly £2.14 after print, Jutoh pays for itself in 17 copies and Vellum Press in 94. Both are achievable. The question is whether you will publish enough to make the second number look small.
The thing neither of them does
Neither is the answer for an illustrated book. Vellum is built for text and says so; Jutoh can be forced into fixed-layout but the effort is considerable and the result depends entirely on your patience.
Picture books need fixed-layout EPUB for Kindle Kids, two-page-spread metadata so a spread is not served as cropped halves, and soft-proofed colour. Cookbooks need two-column ingredient layouts and photography pre-flighted at 300 DPI. That is a different job.
Illustrated book?
Picture books £219, cookbooks £179 — fixed-layout EPUB, spread metadata and colour soft-proofed so the print matches your screen.
Format my book →Buy Jutoh if
- You are on Windows or Linux and borrowing a Mac is not realistic
- You are publishing your first book and do not yet know if there will be a second
- You need control over the EPUB itself, not just the look of it
- £35 against £159.99 is the whole argument
Buy Vellum if
- You own a Mac, or can borrow one for an afternoon
- You will publish several books, and the time saved compounds
- You want the output to look right without learning a tool
- You need a print-ready PDF as well as an ebook, without a second process
Related
- How much does Vellum cost — with the store screenshot
- Vellum alternatives for Windows — the full Windows list
- Vellum vs Atticus — the comparison most people actually mean
- Best book formatting software — all nine, priced
