In my opinion, Typora's advantages are:
1. WYSIWYG markdown. I don't believe iAWriter is WYSIWYG. While that's ok for developers, Typora is more widely usable.
2. Extensions: from Mermaid, LateX, sequence diagrams to code highlighting, to export to ePub (via Pandoc), Typora is a lot more versatile
3. Saves files as text (.md) and assets, easily searchable via OS. Highly portable
4. Cross platform (Mac, Windows, Linux)
From the site:
"Typora provides both file tree panel and articles (file list) panel, allows you to manage your files easily."
I've also recently started using iA Writer, on Win 10 and Android. The program is solid to a fault and extremely well designed, with the flexibility of saving .md files that you can save and export everywhere. Highly recommended!
For my every day writings and academic pursuits IA Writer does work really well.
Typora was interesting but it was very buggy, and doesn't handle tags which are important for notes.
My main criteria were an open file format, ideally editing plain text files on disk using Markdown as the formatting. This ruled out apps like OneNote, InkDrop, Standard Notes and others.
If you don't mind about having a proprietary database so long as the data can be exported to Markdown, https://bear.app is my favourite so long as you're on an Apple device.
I will also be interested in https://nvultra.com/ once it comes out of private beta.
I published my full writeup today at https://davidmytton.blog/the-best-note-taking-apps-for-mac-m...