WordCraft download: official files and other sites
The official files are on the project's GitHub releases page: the README sends people there, and the buttons at the top of this page link straight to those files. The WordCraft page on getartcraft.com, the ArtCraft team's own site, links to the same GitHub files.
Several download sites list WordCraft as well, but neither the README nor getartcraft.com links to any of them. This is what we found when we checked them on 17 October 2026:
| Site | What it is | Where the download goes |
|---|
| SourceForge (wordcraft.mirror) | Describes itself as an exact mirror of the GitHub repository and says SourceForge is not affiliated with WordCraft; the page doesn't say who set it up | Files with the same names as the GitHub release, SHA256SUMS.txt included, hosted on SourceForge |
| free-codecs.com | A download site that listed version 0.7.0 | Its own redirect links; the Windows, macOS and Linux links we checked led to the official GitHub files |
| TechSpot | A download site that listed version 0.5.0, last updated 12 October 2026, as freeware | TechSpot's own download page; we did not follow it through to a file |
| wordcraft.run | An independent site that says it is not affiliated with or endorsed by ArtCraft | Its download page links to the official GitHub files; its online editor runs a modified community build, not the official web version |
A copy from another site may well be identical to the official file, but you can only be sure after checking it against the checksums in the GitHub release.
How to check the file you downloaded
Every WordCraft release on GitHub includes SHA256SUMS.txt, which lists a SHA-256 checksum for each file. Download it from the same release as your file, then compute your file's checksum:
- Windows, in PowerShell:
Get-FileHash .\wordcraft-<version>-windows-x64.msi (Get-FileHash uses SHA-256 unless you name another algorithm)
- macOS, in Terminal:
shasum -a 256 wordcraft-<version>-macos-universal.dmg
- Linux, in a terminal:
sha256sum wordcraft-<version>-linux-x86_64.AppImage
The result must match the line for that file name in SHA256SUMS.txt; PowerShell prints it in capital letters, which makes no difference. If it doesn't match, delete the file and download it again from GitHub. According to the README, the Windows installers and the macOS app are also signed.
What works today
WordCraft follows Word's ribbon, tabs and keyboard shortcuts, so Enter continues a list, Tab demotes it and F7 checks spelling. According to its README, it covers writing and formatting, styles and themes, lists, tables with formulas and header rows that repeat across pages, headers and footers, page numbers, watermarks, drop caps and automatic hyphenation. The References tab builds tables of contents, footnotes, citations in APA, MLA, Chicago or IEEE style, indexes and captions. The Review tab has track changes, comments in margin balloons, document comparison and spelling and grammar checking. Mailings does mail merge from CSV, envelopes and labels.
WordCraft reads and writes .docx, and also .odt, .rtf, .html, Markdown, LaTeX and plain text. It opens Word 97-2003 .doc files and exports PDF with selectable text, links and bookmarks. The interface comes in 21 languages, including Simplified and Traditional Chinese, and the README says spelling, grammar and everything else work offline.
For automation, every action is a command with an id. The same commands drive the ribbon, keyboard shortcuts, a command-line tool and an MCP server, so an AI agent can create, edit and inspect documents.
How it compares with Microsoft Word
The project calls WordCraft alpha software. Its team estimates it is about 60% of the way to replacing all of Word for real work, about 55% for a typical professional's weekly work and about 63% for everyday essentials. Before beta, the team wants testing against real-world .docx files, charts and SmartArt that survive a round trip, pagination closer to Word's, a stability sweep and native printing.
The project's own list of shortfalls adds detail. No corpus of real .docx files has been round-tripped yet, page breaks can differ from Word, charts made in Word stay read-only, macros are kept but not run, and there is no cloud storage or real-time co-authoring. Spelling and grammar cover a handful of languages, and Chinese is not one of them.
WordCraft is a clean-room project, built from public specifications and observation. It is independent and not affiliated with Microsoft; Word's name is used only to describe the workflow it is compatible with.
About the Craft Apps
WordCraft is one of the Crafting Apps from the ArtCraft team: free, open-source creative tools, each written from scratch in Rust and each able to stand on its own. The family includes PhotoCraft for image editing, FilmCraft for video and PdfCraft for PDFs. WordCraft itself uses no Electron or Tauri; its interface is native egui drawn on the GPU.
WordCraft is dual-licensed under MIT or Apache-2.0. Its builds come from the project's GitHub releases: signed installers for Windows and macOS, several Linux package formats, a FreeBSD tarball and a web version you can host yourself.