Bear - Markdown Notes Ratings and Reviews

Best Notes App Ever!!

TLDR: Bear is an impressive notes app that functions very well on all Apple devices, and has everything you’d want in a notes app without the issues seen across it’s competitors.

This is hands down the best notes app I’ve ever used. I’ve tried them all; OneNote, Evernote, Apple Notes, you name it. None are as clean and minimal as Bear. No intrusive UI; No head-scratching organization structure; Bear allows you to jump into your notes quickly and organize them with ease using an extremely flexible tagging system. The text editor is of such good quality, it almost feels like the Notes app merged with Microsoft Word to create a perfectly balanced app for both simple and sophisticated use cases. It’s easy to import pictures, create checklists, and export to other formats as well. It comes with plenty of themes to customize to your liking, and the app is available on all Apple devices. The Apple Watch app is icing on the cake! You can craft and view entire notes from the app, and it even retains it’s structure and readability. It’s so good that I could be fine studying lecture notes on my watch if I wanted to!

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your support, and for leaving such a nice review! Stay awesome ❤️ 🐻

Most Transformative App

I have been using Evernote heavily since 2009. In recent years, as it has become incrementally more bloated and more expensive, I’ve been looking for a replacement, but everything I found was missing some particular feature that I needed. Bear, while much simpler, and ostensibly less powerful, does absolutely everything I REALLY need for organization, writing, business tracking, and creative thought. It does it in a visually beautiful way, with a markup language that really makes the tool fade into subconscious and lets me record thoughts without distraction of too many buttons and gimmicks. Tagging, note linking, formatting, and organization are completely intuitive. The cost is far less than Evernote Premium, and there are not restrictions with using on all of my Apple devices.

I hope they can implement note sharing without messing with their formula, and I hope they expand to other platforms so I can share with friends, coworkers, and family, but if it stays just as it is today, Bear will continue to be the foundational piece of my workflow and creative and business processes.

Great app, but lack of search is increasingly frustrating

I switched from evernote earlier this year and on every level besides one, bear is an almost perfect note app. The markup, the speed, the tagging, and the search for notes is all exactly what i was looking for in a note app. However, the long-requested feature of searching within notes is still not present. I am seriously considering going back to evernote, as i use these apps at work for finding quick information, and in-note searching is a nearly critical feature. If not for bear’s exemplary performance (and i strongly prefer its interface to other apps), i would probably have bitten the bullet and gone back to evernote, but i might have no choice if they don’t prioritise the in-note search feature. It’s frustrating because on all other areas it’s such a fantastic app, but that one feature is remarkably necessary. Imagine being unable to search for words in a word processing app!? It significantly reduces the usability of this product, even though the rest of it works so flawlessly. Please add this feature! I know it’s been requested for years at this point

Been using for years, still no basic search functionality

Title says it all. I’ve been patiently waiting for years for an update that would finally allows us to have some basic search functionalities to no avail. I admire bear for it’s simplicity (that’s what prevented me from deleting it altogether despite competitors like evernote and onenote offering search and so many more features) but when even the most rudimentary tasks such as being able to find and jump to a phrase in a long note is not possible, I consider that just too simple to allow for any serious use cases. Having been a developer myself, I simply cannot understand why it is so hard for these devs to create a simple search function which has been requested over and over by hundreds of bear users. It certainly wouldn’t take lot of coding knowledge to add this basic feature so again I cannot understand why they still can’t seem to figure it out after years have come and went. That being said, I regret to say that my patience has worn thin and I can longer just hope that the issue will eventually be resolved. So I am officially deleting the app and would end by recommending Evernote, onenote, or heck even the already included apple notes app over Bear if anyone reading this cares about basic search functionality.

Intuitive and powerful!

I've been using Bear Pro for a few years now and am never going back to Evernote! I love the simple and intuitive UI that has some serious features underneath. I use it for my work, freelance, and personal notes. I'm always running in a million different directions, and the ability to rapidly jot down a note or idea and file it with the hashtag system in seconds is a game-changer.

If you're a user with multiple Apple devices, I would definitely recommend going for the Pro. Being able to sync notes between my devices instantly is awesome. The ability to make urls to your notes is also great because I can drop them into my project management software to quickly access relevant notes outside of Bear. Lastly, I know some people complain about lack of collaboration but I think that the current simple but powerful philosophy is the way to go. Otherwise, I fear they would go the way of Evernote and become an overcomplicated experience.

Keep up the great work Shiny Frog!

Needs some more work

Very impressive in so many ways but has some major problems for note taking. 1. It has some irritating multi minute delay when using the share to bear notes 2. It does not have the ability to search within a note, so if you have long notes and are looking for a phrase it will get you to the note but not to the actual place where the phrase is in the note. Apple note, Evernote, simple note and nearly all other note taking apps can do these two things well. I really want to use bear notes as my main note taking app but these issues must be resolved. The sync issue is so slow I can not continue working with the shared note until is “shows” up in bear notes. I have tested this with iPhone and iPad and both are multiple minutes slow, adding a sync button might help this but what is strange is that all the other note apps can do instantly without fanfare or help from me. The search feature within long notes is a must, I just don’t know why this has been so long in coming with Bear, naturally I am assuming it is coming to Bear? I am using the premium features and it was the same with basic free as well. Please fix, this would be an instant 5 star app.

A rock-solid note-taking app for those who find the “notebook” construct limiting

What stands out the most to me about Bear is how rock solid its fundamentals are: it’s clean, fast, reliable, and equally powerful on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. The watchOS app is also nice, supporting dictation. Every feature the app supports is apparently done to a high standard of quality.

Where I feel Bear could improve is on two fronts. First, I do feel that they “gate” smaller improvements behind huge ones (like their editor overall, currently in Alpha, and their web app workstream). Making some small feature-level improvements would go a lot toward making the app feel tended-to rather than being maintenance, especially with the super stiff competition in the note-taking market these days.

Second, a big feature that to me is lacking is the ability to separate workspaces/profiles/repositories within your notes. As it stands, there is no good way to separate work and personal notes inside of Bear. This really limits how I can interact with Bear from my work machine. Another feature that I would love to see in an option to completely hide Markdown control characters once they are typed, because I think they really make the note look visually cluttered/noisy.

Overall a very solid “alternative” note-taking app that can be trusted with your notes, even if it evolves *very* slowly relative to its competitors. I still recommend Bear over many others.

Developer Response ,

Hi there,

Thank you for the review, and for the feedback. I'll pass the suggestions onto the development team to Bear in mind moving forward.

Regarding the option to hide markdown, this is currently testable in Panda and will be implemented into Bear ❤️ 🐻

Makes Note-Taking Like Moving Through Water

I’ve moved through every writing and notes app there is and at last I’ve found my stopping point.
1. The usefulness of tagging is completely realized by this app. Instead of having a hundred individual tags, you can nest them, almost like folders. Unlike a folder system though, a single note can exist in several “tag folders” at the same time. This means that instead of having to make arbitrary decisions about where to place a note (always with the danger of “losing” the note somewhere in your system) you can put important notes everywhere they need to be.
2. The linking feature between notes is perfect. Unlike Roam, this app is not constantly forcing you to make connections that may or may not really be there. Instead, it’s easy to make connections where *you* want them, and easy to forget about the links when you don’t need them.
3. This hidden markdown idea works perfectly. You get the best of both world: when your reading, the annoying markdown symbols are invisible, but when you want to edit them, they’re there.
4. I actually use the charts feature, and it works well!
5. You can make text fold up under headings when you don’t need to see it. Also, it’s very easy to jump around your note using the automatically generated table of contents.

All of these things are realized so well here! Using the app is like moving through water.

SO glad I found this app!!

Oh my gosh- coming from the apple notes app, this is like a dream come true. I was getting so frustrated with the apple notes app once portions of my notes just started DISSAPEARING- yes, that’s right- paragraphs and paragraphs of text just started not being there. So frustrating!! So I went on google to research best notes app for ipad/iPhone and came across Bear- it’s FANTASTIC!!! The hashtag that makes folders? Brilliant. The check mark boxes for to do lists- that I can actually check off and have a strike through go through that to-do line item? Brilliant. I LOVE this app. So glad the other one started losing my data so I could find something WAY better- the Bear app. Everyone should use this it’s awesome. I upgraded to the $15 plan per year which is nothing for what it achieves for me with the cross syncing with my devices- I’m constantly switching between my pad and phone so that’s a must for me. Thank you guys you really thought about things intuitively for your users. You guys rocks.

It’s like gravity

I think bear is the perfect level of robust, and simplicity as far as note apps go. I have been obsessed with trying to find the perfect writing and notes app and I just keep coming back to Bear. The main drawback for me is that I have a windows PC as a gaming computer that I can’t run it on being an iOS/macOS exclusive but they supposedly have a web interface in the works. I switched back to Evernote for a while just because of the cross platform issue but I just felt myself missing Bear and the syntax highlighting and simple tag and search system and I decided to stop fighting it and just enjoy it. Because it’s so great and the team is very transparent about their plans and care about their users.

When I was spending time switching apps from bear to Evernote or OneNote, bear was always the easy one to work with when exporting and importing as well. It’s just a pleasure to use all around for me.

Minor complaint that I have is when sharing on IOS to the app, it’s very difficult for me to put the new note in a specific place. I can just tag it in a location so I can find it later but I think little pop up share window could have some more navigation options.

Thanks devs and designers for the steady quality updates and this wonderful simple app! Maybe one day you’ll find some way to make this cross platform or have a good web interface but I like it enough to stay.