Apple / productivity / BEAR - MARKDOWN NOTES
REVIEW
Bear stayed great by refusing to become an everything app.
The 2023 rebuild added tables, footnotes, and offline files without losing the singular focus that made the original feel like a real writing app.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 7, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Bear - Markdown Notes
SHINY FROG LTD.
OUR SCORE
8.4
APPLE
★ 4.7
PRICE
Free
For five years, Bear’s biggest feature was what it didn’t do. While Notion absorbed databases and Obsidian became a graph, while Apple Notes kept absorbing every adjacent thing, Bear sat on its tag system and waited. Bear 2 — the 2023 rebuild — kept that singular focus while quietly fixing every plumbing complaint anyone had about the original.
The result is the rare notes app that reads like a writing tool first and a system second. If you’ve bounced off heavier note apps because the system itself started to feel like the work, Bear is what you wanted.
While Notion absorbed databases and Obsidian became a graph, Bear sat on its tag system and waited.
FEATURES
Notes now live as real files with offline access, tables and footnotes finally render, and search is fast enough to use as your primary navigation. The new note-linking syntax — [[note-title]] — is borrowed from Roam and Obsidian, but Bear handles it the Apple way: tap a backlink and you're somewhere new. No graph view to learn, no plugin to install, no configuration screen.
The tag system is still the most opinionated thing in any notes app. Type #projects/q4 and you've got a folder; type #book/draft and you've got a second folder the same note belongs to. It scales further than Notes' folders or Notion's databases — until, fairly, it doesn't.
Markdown rendering is live with hideable syntax. Document scanning, image resizing, and rich-media link previews are all built in. Export covers DOCX, ePub, PDF, plain Markdown, RTF, and TextBundle.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The 2023 rebuild was worth the wait. Search is fast, sync is reliable, and end-to-end encryption with Advanced Data Protection is on the moment you sign in to iCloud.
The pricing is the part nobody else gets right. Pro at $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year covers iCloud sync across iPhone, iPad, and Mac, more than two dozen themes, OCR search inside scanned documents, and every export format worth wanting. The free tier is genuinely usable on a single device, which most "freemium" notes apps no longer bother to pretend.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The caveat is Apple, full stop. There is no web version, no Android client, no Windows desktop, and Shiny Frog has said for years that none are coming.
Once you cross a few thousand notes the tag system starts to feel like a spreadsheet you can't sort, and saved searches still aren't here. There's no collaboration of any kind — no shared notebooks, no realtime editing, not even a "send this to a teammate" workflow that doesn't end in a PDF.
CONCLUSION
If you write more than you organize, and your computer has an Apple logo on it, Bear is still the single best notes app you can install. If you want a knowledge system that compounds across years of structured notes, get Obsidian. If you want to share a note with anyone outside your own iCloud account, you'll need something else entirely.