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!! 👏👏👏👏

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.

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.

Let me start off by saying I love bear and have been using it for maybe half a decade now. I have tons of notes in there, and even with the free version it does exactly what I need it to do. So then here comes the issue: I recently got a new iPad and wanted to copy the notes from my old iPad onto the new one (I have the app on all my devices, but because I have the free version, I just copy and transfer whatever I need to). I hadn’t had the chance to do that until today, so I had time to start new notes on this new device (including notes I take for my classes). I was under the assumption that restoring a backup would import all of the files that I saved a backup of on my old device. There was NO WARNING that my current notes would be deleted if I restored this data. I did not have a backup of the notes in my new device either. Again, this is a great app, but I can’t forgive the lack of warning that caused me to lose all those incredibly important notes, even if in hindsight “restoring” data implies overwriting it. Even your average video game does this kind of warning. To the developers, please add clearer warnings and descriptions for what restoring a backup entails WITHIN THE APP, rather than just on your website. And to other app users, don’t be stupid like me and accidentally overwrite all your local files!

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!

I downloaded this as a replacement for the iOS notes app because it's somewhat glitchy and the writing tools are VERY barebones, whereas Bear looked much nicer. The writing function itself is much nicer, I especially like that you can have a dark theme and change text size, but the one thing preventing me from switching over is the drawing. I greatly enjoy the iOS notes app's drawing features. Bear's are lacking in comparison. See, iOS notes has distinct tools, the important ones to me are pencil, pen, and highlighter. Bear has the pen and highlighter, only they are much different from the way they function on iOS notes. iOS Highlighter is somewhat transparent but you can basically lay down multiple layers to make it darker and more opaque (therefore having a much larger range of possible colors, allowing for coloring and shading), and iOS pencil has the texture of a pencil, thus effective for sketching. And because highlighter is not opaque in the iOS notes, it can be used effectively for coloring, with the sketch lines from the pencil tool under it being visible, and then finally I can go over the lines with the pen tool.What I do, what I need an app like this for, is I like to write out stories and then illustrate them (I am also an artist), which is why I cannot switch to Bear despite the writing aspect being much more powerful and functional - the drawing tools just aren't good enough for my needs. If you improved the drawing feature to work like how it does in the iOS notes app, Bear would be absolutely perfect. I don't know if an app dev would read this but know this is a wonderful app with a wonderful name (I love bears) but just that prevents me from switching over.

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.

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.

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

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.