Pros & Cons
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- Attractive, streamlined design
- Supports OCR for PDF files and photos
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- Available only for Apple devices
- Syncing is a paid feature that requires iCloud storage
- Web clipper is fairly basic
Bear (for Mac) Specs
| Free Storage | Bring Your Own |
| iOS App | |
| Mac App | |
| Max File Upload | None |
| OCR | |
| Scanning | |
| Sketching Supported | |
| Storage for Price Listed | Bring Your Own |
| Web Clipper |
Note-taking apps come in two flavors. Simple ones, such as Apple Notes and Google Keep, give you a place to jot down your thoughts. More advanced options, such as Evernote, Obsidian, and OneNote, help you organize and get insights from your notes. Bear splits the difference between the two types, combining simple note-taking tools with higher-level features, such as optical character recognition (OCR). The app also has a visually compelling design, but its Apple-only device support and iCloud-dependent syncing both limit its appeal. Our Editors' Choice winners for the category are the open-source Joplin and the feature-packed OneNote, both of which are available on every major platform.
Pricing: A Limited Free Tier
The free version of Bear doesn't sync your notes, so it effectively limits you to using it on just one device. That said, you can export notes to text formats and use Bear's document-scanning feature.
OneNote's free version is much more capable; it doesn't restrict any features and lets you sync across devices. The only limitation is that you get just 5GB of cloud storage via a free Microsoft 365 account. Obsidian and Joplin offer more-or-less complete versions of their applications for free, but you need to bring your own cloud storage if you want to sync notes without paying extra fees.
(Credit: Shiny Frog/PCMag)Bear's Pro tier ($2.99 per month or $29.99 per year) adds more exporting options, encryption, OCR for PDFs and images, and various themes. It also enables syncing via iCloud (5GB for free; 50GB for $0.99 per month).
The Pro tier is reasonably affordable, but assessing its value is difficult because it relies on iCloud for syncing. Evernote's Personal plan ($10.83 per month, billed annually), for comparison, supports 150,000 notes (each can be up to 200MB) and 10GB of monthly uploads. You can sync your notes across an unlimited number of devices with that plan. Joplin's paid syncing service (Joplin Cloud) costs roughly $33 per year as of this writing. It gets you 2GB of total storage space and supports notes of up to 10MB each. But a Microsoft 365 Personal plan ($99.99 per year) is the best value of them all; it gives you 1TB of OneDrive storage to share across OneNote and all of Microsoft's top-notch office suite apps.
Interface and Ease of Use: An Approachable Design
Bear offers apps for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, but none for Android or Windows. A web version is currently in beta testing.
Once you download Bear from the App Store or the Mac App Store, you can start using it immediately without signing up for an account or providing credit card information. The app comes with several notes that teach you how to use it.
(Credit: Shiny Frog/PCMag)The Mac version of Bear uses a minimalist, three-panel layout. The leftmost panel, which is a dark gray box in the default theme, shows a list of note categories and tags. To the right is a list of notes. Finally, in the largest pane is the currently open note. You can double-click a note to open it in a separate window, which is handy for referencing multiple notes at once. This basic layout should be familiar if you use any of the other popular note-taking apps. Bear's design is attractive and modern.
You can create a new note by clicking the pencil-on-paper icon or using the keyboard shortcut Cmd-N. Then, you can start typing immediately. New notes begin with a title. Press Enter after typing the title to dive right into your note. All you need to do to add attachments is drag them in from Finder. Images show up inline, while PDFs display a preview of their first pages.
A few features are easy to miss. A quick open panel, which you can trigger with the keyboard shortcut CMD-O, makes it simple to jump from note to note. Additionally, you can "fold" (hide) any section of a note by clicking the arrow next to its header. Finally, a read-only mode lets you review a document without accidentally marking it up. I appreciate how the app is flexible, without making things overwhelming. If you get stuck, Bear's documentation is clear and detailed.
Note-Taking Experience: Markdown, But Streamlined
Bear continues to make it easy to work with Markdown language. Markdown is a simplified way of adding formatting to text, such as putting asterisks or underscores around a word to make it bold or italic. Bear hides the formatting characters (that is, the asterisks and underscores) from any word you're not currently editing, so you never have to look at an ugly mess of special characters, which is a relief. Obsidian also uses this approach, but Bear goes a step further by offering a toolbar with buttons that can apply the formatting so you don't have to think about Markdown at all.
The app also handles tables well. Instead of forcing you to rely on Markdown's clumsy table system, which involves keeping track of the | character, Bear gives you tools similar to those in Apple Pages and Microsoft Word. As a result, it's much easier to work with tables in Bear than in Obsidian. Bear also supports formatting for mathematical formulas.
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(Credit: Shiny Frog/PCMag)The crux of all these changes is that you can theoretically use Bear even if you have no idea what Markdown is. Bear's built-in documentation reflects this attitude—it barely mentions Markdown. You might hit a snag occasionally if you are truly new to Markdown, but Bear helps minimize such instances.
Note Organization: Tags or Nothing
Most note-taking applications let you organize notes using folders or some other structure. Not Bear. It relies entirely on tags. To add a tag, simply include a hashtag in a note, meaning a pound sign followed by any word (such as #general). After you do so, that tag (general) shows up in the left sidebar. Whenever you click that tag in the sidebar, every note that includes #general appears.
You can add as many tags to a note as you like. This approach has its advantages because some notes are relevant to more than one topic or project. It's worth noting that some other note-taking apps, including Apple Notes and Evernote, support both folders and tags, which gives you even more flexibility.
(Credit: Shiny Frog/PCMag)Bear doesn't have much else in terms of ways to organize your notes, except for internal linking. It's possible to link to one note from another, similar to the way you can in Obsidian. Bear calls this feature a Wiki Link, and the idea is for you to reference one note in another. Bear doesn't build its structure around these linked notes like Obsidian, but I still like having this option.
OCR: Works Well for Single-Page Documents
Bear's OCR tool can analyze any text in PDFs or photos you upload and make it searchable. Evernote and OneNote both have OCR features, too, but the former requires a much pricier paid plan to access it. Other, simpler note-taking applications, such as Joplin and SimpleNote, don't offer similar features natively.
Bear's OCR feature works perfectly for single-page documents—search for text in the image, and it shows up roughly highlighted. The feature also works for longer PDF files, with the caveat that the app can't show multiple pages of a PDF like Evernote and OneNote. In testing, I was able to search for text throughout a PDF and see the result. However, to read it, I had to open the file and redo the search in my default PDF reader.
Web Clipping: Not Many Options
Bear offers a web clipper for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Opera on macOS. The tool grabs whatever you're currently reading on a web page and converts it into a Bear note, allowing you to read and mark it up anytime.
The tool works well overall, but I don't like how it immediately saves a stripped-down version of the current web page without giving you any options. You can't clip only a section of the page or the whole page with ads and all, for example. The web clippers for Evernote and OneNote let you review and customize what you want to clip from the page and select a few other options before they actually grab the content. Even Obsidian lets you decide what to clip instead of just dumping everything into a note.
Bear's web clipper lets you add a default tag to anything you clip in the extension settings, but you can't choose a tag for each page you clip. This experience could use improvement.
Importing and Exporting: Good Support
Getting existing notes into Bear is simple. You can import HTML, MD, RTF, and TXT files, which most other applications support. Bear also lets you import entire notebooks in Evernote's ENEX format. Dedicated import tools for getting notes from Day One, Drafts, Evernote, and Obsidian are also available, as is a tool for importing an entire folder of Markdown documents.
Free users can export to the TXT, MD, Textbundle, and RTF formats. Paid subscribers get far more format choices, including DOCX, EPUB, HTML, JPG, and PDF. Either way, it's fairly easy to get your notes out of Bear, and using the app doesn't limit your options later, which is commendable.