ScripturePlus

What ScripturePlus is

ScripturePlus is a free mobile scripture study app built by Scripture Central, the nonprofit research organization that absorbed Book of Mormon Central in 2023 and now publishes research, video, and study tools across the entire LDS standard works. The app launched in 2021 on iOS and Android and is positioned explicitly as a companion to the official Gospel Library — not a replacement. You can read the King James Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price in it, but the value isn't the text itself. The value is everything layered around the text.

The reading view shows a chapter the way you'd expect, but the right side (on tablet) or below the chapter (on phone) surfaces what Scripture Central calls Study Helps: KnoWhys for the chapter, related videos, audio, maps, artwork, and verse-by-verse commentary. Tap a verse and you can pull up the commentary specific to that verse. Pull up the Come Follow Me view and the current week's reading is pre-loaded with the relevant helps already attached. The whole app is free, with no ads and no in-app purchase — the parent organization is donor-funded, in the same way Bible Project or Got Questions are.

Why LDS readers install ScripturePlus alongside Gospel Library

The single biggest practical difference between Gospel Library and ScripturePlus is that Gospel Library is designed to be the official Church library — manuals, conference talks, magazines, hymnbook, scriptures, everything — while ScripturePlus is designed to be a study tool for the scriptures themselves. Gospel Library is broader. ScripturePlus is deeper, at least where the Book of Mormon is concerned. Most active LDS readers end up with both installed, and the workflow tends to be: read the chapter in either app, then jump to ScripturePlus when you want to know why something is there, what the geography looked like, or what scholars have noticed about the Hebrew literary structure underneath the English translation.

It's the thoughtful person's Book of Mormon companion. KnoWhys are short — usually 800 to 1,500 words — but they're footnoted and they assume you can handle a citation. The maps aren't decorative; they're tied to verses and let you actually trace Lehi's journey or the Nephite-Lamanite wars by chapter. The artwork is curated, not stock. And because everything is free, there's no friction in just installing it, opening it on a Sunday afternoon, and seeing whether it adds anything to your week's study. For most people, it does.

KnoWhys: research-backed insights, one per chapter

KnoWhys are Scripture Central's flagship content format — short articles, each anchored to a specific chapter (and often a specific verse), each answering one focused question. 'Why did Nephi cite Isaiah so heavily?' 'Why does Alma the Younger's conversion mirror Paul's?' 'Why does the Book of Mormon use the phrase "all manner of" so often?' Each KnoWhy is usually 800 to 1,500 words, footnoted, and written for an educated lay reader rather than a specialist. There are now well over a thousand of them, accumulated since Book of Mormon Central started publishing the format in 2016.

The reason KnoWhys matter is that they change what 'reading the chapter' feels like. Instead of finishing the chapter and closing the app, you finish the chapter, see two or three KnoWhys attached to it, tap one, and learn something — a textual pattern, an ancient-Near-East parallel, a literary structure, a doctrinal connection — that you wouldn't have noticed on your own. They function the way a good study Bible's section notes function, except they're written specifically for the Book of Mormon (with growing coverage of other standard works) and they're the most visible benefit of having the app installed.

Maps, ancient context, and curated artwork

The media layer is the second reason serious students keep ScripturePlus open. Maps include both internal Book of Mormon geography (the standard internal-consistency maps showing the relative positions of Zarahemla, Bountiful, the land of Nephi, etc.) and real-world ancient-Near-East maps relevant to the small plates, Lehi's journey, and the world Joseph Smith encountered in translation. Photography includes Mesoamerican archaeological sites, Old World locations relevant to 1 Nephi, and contextual images that ground abstract narrative in physical place. Artwork ranges from classical paintings of biblical scenes to modern LDS artists like Walter Rane and Minerva Teichert, tied to the verses they depict.

This sounds like a small thing. In practice it's transformative for how a chapter lands. When you read about Lehi's vision of the tree of life and the photograph next to the verse is an actual ancient Near Eastern tree-of-life motif from Egypt or Mesopotamia, the imagery stops being abstract. When you read Alma 43–44's war strategy and the map shows you the relative elevations and river crossings the text describes, the geography starts to behave like real geography. It's the difference between reading about a place and seeing it.

Come Follow Me integration — the weekly hook

Come Follow Me — the Church's home-centered curriculum that takes members through the standard works on a four-year rotation — is what keeps most active LDS households in scripture every week. ScripturePlus integrates directly with the current week's reading. Open the Come Follow Me tab and the current week is queued up with the relevant chapters, the KnoWhys curated for those chapters, the videos and audio, and the commentary, all pre-attached. You don't have to hunt for what's relevant — the app already knows what the Church is studying this week and surfaces the matching helps.

For families, this is the single feature that makes ScripturePlus stick. The official Gospel Library has the manual itself; ScripturePlus has the supplements. A parent prepping a Sunday dinner discussion can pull up the week's Come Follow Me view, skim two KnoWhys, watch a four-minute video, and have something fresh to bring to the table — without spending an hour preparing. For institute and seminary teachers the same workflow scales to lesson prep. The integration is the practical reason the app earns weekly use rather than monthly use.

Pricing

Where ScripturePlus falls behind

Old Testament and New Testament depth. The app's center of gravity is the Book of Mormon, and the gap between Book of Mormon coverage and Old/New Testament coverage is still visible. KnoWhys exist for the Bible — Scripture Central has been steadily expanding into them, especially around Come Follow Me years — but the density of insight per chapter is lower than what you'll find for, say, 2 Nephi or Alma. If your study is currently in Genesis or Romans, you'll still get something useful, but you won't get the same wall-to-wall scholarship that Book of Mormon study delivers.

No sync with Gospel Library. This is the single biggest workflow complaint long-time users raise. Your highlights, notes, and bookmarks in ScripturePlus do not appear in your official Church Gospel Library account, and vice versa. The two apps are completely separate stores. For a reader who's been building marginalia in Gospel Library since 2014, starting fresh in a second app is a real friction point — and the only fix is to pick one as your primary annotation home and use the other as a read-only reference.

Search and original-language tools. Search inside ScripturePlus is fine for finding a phrase, but it's not powerful — no Boolean operators, no proximity search, no original-language search (Hebrew, Greek, or the reformed Egyptian script the Book of Mormon describes). Logos, Olive Tree, and Blue Letter Bible all blow past it on this dimension. ScripturePlus isn't trying to be a research-grade software platform, but readers who want lemma search or syntax search will need to keep one of those other tools open alongside.

Personal-study infrastructure. No journaling, no custom reading plans, no tagging system, no study-plan builder. The app is built around the Come Follow Me rhythm and the chapter-by-chapter browse, and that covers most users — but if you've used Dwell or YouVersion's plan engine and want to build your own 90-day study, ScripturePlus doesn't have the scaffolding for it yet.

Social and community. There's no friends layer, no shared highlights, no community plans, no streaks. For a tradition where ward and family study are central, this is a defensible design choice — community happens in person, on Sunday, not in the app — but it's worth knowing if you're coming from YouVersion's community-heavy model.

ScripturePlus vs. Gospel Library vs. YouVersion

These three apps occupy overlapping but distinct positions in an LDS reader's workflow. Gospel Library is the official Church app and the canonical home of the standard works, lesson manuals, conference talks, magazines, hymnbook, and the personal annotation account that syncs across devices. It's the app everyone has installed by default. ScripturePlus is the research-and-context companion built by Scripture Central, focused on KnoWhys, media, and verse-by-verse commentary, especially for the Book of Mormon. YouVersion is the dominant cross-tradition Bible app, with hundreds of Bible translations, thousands of reading plans, and a strong social/community layer — but no Book of Mormon, no Doctrine and Covenants, no Pearl of Great Price, and no LDS-specific helps.

Different strengths. Gospel Library is the system of record — your annotations, your manuals, your sync. ScripturePlus is the depth tool — what does this chapter mean, what did the world it describes look like, what have scholars noticed. YouVersion is the breadth tool for the Bible — every translation you could want, plans for any topic, a friends feed if you want one. None of these replace each other. The realistic answer for most LDS readers in 2026 is Gospel Library plus ScripturePlus, with YouVersion installed if you also want a strong Bible-only reading experience with community features.

On Book of Mormon study specifically, ScripturePlus is the deepest free resource available, full stop. There's nothing in Gospel Library or YouVersion that competes with the KnoWhys, the integrated maps, and the curated artwork. On Bible study specifically, YouVersion's translation library and plan engine pull ahead, and Olive Tree or Logos pull ahead further if you want commentary and original languages. The honest workflow recommendation is to use each app for what it does best rather than asking any one of them to do everything.

Alternatives to ScripturePlus