Bear is a beautiful, powerfully simple Markdown app to capture, write, and organize your life.
Take notes, plan your day, journal thoughts, organize tables, create lists and tasks, sketch ideas, link notes together, write a book, and much more. Bear is used by writers, lawyers, chefs, CEOs, teachers, doctors, engineers, students, parents.. you get the picture. Getting started couldn’t be faster—no signup and no account. Just open a note and write naturally.
"My journaling app of choice is Bear" - Kit Eaton, New York Times
* 2017 Apple Design Award
* 2016 App Store App of the Year
* Editors' choice for 7 consecutive years
* Most of our parents love it
## BEAUTIFUL. SIMPLE. POWERFUL. PRIVATE
- Tools stay out of your way so you can just write
- Sketch ideas on iPad with an extendable canvas and Apple Pencil (and other styli)
- Clip web pages and other content with Bear’s app extension
- The redesigned Info Panel now with Table of Contents and Backlinks
- Use Apple Watch to dictate and append to recent notes
- Support for all the scripts including RTL languages like Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian
- Easily create notes with Siri and Shortcuts
- Your notes, not ours - Bear is private at its core: We cannot see your notes, tags, or anything else
## FLEXIBLE MARKDOWN
- Work in plain text - easy to move between apps
- Still use formatting like bold, italics, strikethrough, links, tables, and more with Markdown
- Combine text styles like bold and underline, even in headings
- Markdown hides for a clean reading experience
- Use WikiLinks to connect notes and build a personal wiki or knowledge management tool
## GET ORGANIZED with #tags, tasks, and more
- Add #tags, #multi-word tags# and even #multiple/nested/tags anywhere in a note for quick organization
- Pin important tags to the top of the Sidebar
- Make important tags stand out in the Sidebar with TagCons
- Add tasks to notes and easily view all notes that include tasks
- Fold sections to get them out of the way
## SHARING MADE EASY
- Export notes to plain text, Markdown, TextBundle, Bear note, and rich text
- Export notes to HTML, DocX, PDF, JPG, and ePub (Bear Pro required)
- Easily share your notes to any third-party app with the Share Sheet
## SEARCH FAR AND WIDE
- Use Spotlight to search your notes from anywhere
- Search for text inside photos and PDFs (Bear Pro required)
- Focus on specific types of notes with powerful Special Searches like @todo, @images, and @yesterday
## CREATE YOUR COZY SPACE
* Pick from nearly 30 themes for the perfect writing space in both Light and Dark Mode (Bear Pro required)
* Choose an app icon that speaks to your personality (Bear Pro required)
* Set your own fonts for plain text, headings, and code
* Set line height and width, paragraph spacing, and more
## GET MORE WITH BEAR PRO
One subscription enables a variety of features on all your devices and keeps the Bear hugs coming.
- Sync notes between your iPhone, iPad, and Mac via iCloud
- Encrypt individual notes with a password that is entirely private to you
- Lock Bear with Face/Touch ID
- Export to more formats including HTML, DocX, PDF, JPG, and ePub
- Search for text inside images and PDFs in Bear notes
- Over 30 beautiful app themes & app icons
$2.99 monthly
$29.99 yearly
14-day free trial
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Price may vary by location. Subscriptions will be charged to your credit card through your App Store account. Your subscription will automatically renew unless canceled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. You will not be able to cancel the subscription once activated. After purchase, manage your subscriptions in App Store Account Settings. Any unused portion of a free trial period will be forfeited when the user purchases a subscription.
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bear@shinyfrog.net
Twitter: BearNotesApp
Reddit: reddit.com/r/BearApp
Facebook: BearNotes
Instagram: BearNotesApp
Privacy Policy: http://www.bear.app/privacy/
Terms of Service: http://www.bear.app/terms/
Steinbeck liked pencils, and Orwell had his trusty Remington typewriter. But us? We like Bear. It’s a writing app that’s as capable as the best of them—but doesn’t bury us in technical intricacies and toolbars. Linking notes is as easy as dropping a hashtag, and formatting your work is a total breeze. We especially love this Apple Design Award winner on iPad.
Yes! Bear is the GOAT 😅😻🤗🥳
Chaotic_rebelkat
I hated the notes app, even tho on iOS it did get a lot better. It still wasn’t enough for me. So I downloaded about 10 note-taking apps, tried them each for a day or two, kept fiddling around, but it was a Goldilocks problem for me. I can’t handle too many options in my organization- I end up creating these ridiculous systems I will never use. But I need a fair amount of functionality, and all the apps I tried where one or the other. Bear was one of the last I tried and I fell in love so fast.It’s minimalistic but, for me, it does everything I need and it does it well. The UI is elegant and cozy and enjoyable to work in. There were a few things I didn’t know how to do right when I started but it wasn’t much a learning curve. I had the basics down once I read through the welcome pages, and then specific questions I had were always in the Support Library or in the community pages. It took me less than a day before I started to feel intuitive using it. I just think it is great, I was gearing up to start using Obsidian but tbh when I watched the first video it linked to it seemed kind of cult-y. I use Bear for all my notes, and since I am trying to write a book, I did decide to use Ulysses for that. But I like to keep my notes and research over here until I have them pared down, then I move them into the project over there. Bear is great- be like Bear, get Bear, and the subscription is a no-brainer. Thank you Bear!! 👏👏👏👏
Clean and Powerful
rock1001
This app shines in the little details: it’s crazy fast, compare it to Apple notes and you will see a night and day difference, especially for long notes. It has table of contents, which makes it easy to navigate long notes. The tag system is miles better than folders. You can manage your todos by following a thin line under each of your notes that shows the progress of your todos in the note. It supports latex! So you can write math formulas now. It has web access. It has a nice menu of themes. It shows you unmentioned backlinks: you can reference other notes that mention the title of your current note. You can lock notes with attachments. You can copy links to each note. You can export to multiple formats. You can draw (although here it’s a bit basic) and have Bear detect words in your images. It gives you useful stats about your notes. And I could keep going.You would not tell half of these when you first open the app, and that’s the point. Its power is modest. It enables you and gets out of the way so you can work. Their dev team is small and slow, but they deliver. Late sometimes, but they deliver. This app is a powerhouse.
Interesting
Media-amp
Bear is ok but the lack of folders is annoying. In fact it’s a deal breaker. In no way does the tag system give more freedom or make things easier, in fact the opposite is true. Just because something is better for you personally doesn’t mean as a business owner you don’t try and accommodate everyone who might possibly be using your product. And answers like “we have determined this is better” don't help. Better for you maybe but not everyone. The hashtag system is ok but a lot of us use folders and without them it makes organization difficult. We can’t nest hashtags into hashtags so the left column is just a jumbled mess, that can never be organized. Every time I open bear It’s like walking into a messy room that I can’t do anything with. Also the reading time estimation is way off. This is an important feature for us in fact one of the only reasons we considered bear so we don't have to take notes from Apple notes into pages, just to find out word count, and then paste into a website to find reading time But bears estimation calculation is severely off by a lot. I did a test and used three different online calculators to determine reading length for some text I wrote, and all came back between 9 and 9:30 minutes. Bear however said 4:45 for the same text. This may not seem like a big deal but is extremely important for what we do.
Developer Response
Yes, we agree on your reasoning, folders are better for you but not everyone.
- Redesigned all 260 TagCons
- TagCons now appear in the editor when typing a #tag
- Added a General setting to place tags at the top or bottom of a note
- Fixed some French localization issues
Version 2.7.1
The developer, Shiny Frog Ltd., indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Linked to You
The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:
Diagnostics
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
Seller
Shiny Frog Ltd.
Size
184.4 MB
Category
Productivity
Compatibility
Requires iOS 15.6 or later.
iPhone Requires iOS 15.6 or later.
iPad Requires iPadOS 15.6 or later.
iPod touch Requires iOS 15.6 or later.
Apple Vision Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
Apple Watch Requires watchOS 4.0 or later.
Languages
English and 10 more
English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Traditional Chinese