Bear Is The Best Note-Taking App, Without A Doubt

With the introduction of Craft, Notion, Obsidian, Roam Research, Reflect, and more, the note-taking space has become quite crowded. Among them, Bear, an Apple-exclusive note-taking app, easily stands out due to its aesthetics, customization options, robust note organization, and affordable pricing. It strikes the perfect balance between simplicity and functionality, and doesn’t require a masterclass to get started. Here are the top reasons why Bear remains the best note-taking app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac users.

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6 Bear esthetics are on point

Ever since its introduction, Bear developers have been laser-focused on user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) design. It simply looks beautiful, and uses a straightforward approach to get started. We can’t say the same about other productivity tools like Notion and Obsidian.

Whether it’s a small toolbar and toggle statistics at the bottom, default fonts, or small animations throughout the UI, everything is thoughtfully designed. We have even seen many former Bear users coming back to the platform just because of its polished and minimal interface.

5 Lots of customization options

Bear is jam-packed with lots of customization tweaks to make it truly yours. For starters, it comes with a dedicated theme store (in the Pro plan) to change the entire app look (Duotone Snow being our favorite one) with a single click. You can even replace the app icon to match your applied theme.

Tags receive special attention, and you can replace those boring hashtags (#) with a custom icon of your choice. Bear offers over 250 icons to customize your tags like a pro. Bear is smart enough to insert a relevant icon into your tag. For example, if you create a tag called Idea, the app automatically assigns a Bulb icon to it.

Other customization options include the ability to change font type, size, paragraph spacing, line width, line height, and header fonts. You can even go ahead and set a custom keyboard shortcut for creating a new note and opening main window functions. Overall, you won’t have a hard time finding your preferred theme and style in Bear.

4 Effective notes organization

Unlike other note-taking tools, Bear won’t bore you with notebooks, sections, pages, folders, subfolders, and more. You can simply start drafting notes and use tags (#) to organize your relevant notes.

Bear follows the nested tags concept, where you can place necessary tags under the main tag. For example, you can create an Inspiration tag and add Quotes, Stories, Ted, Commentsand Humour as nested tags. You need to type #Inspiration/Quotes and generate a nested tag under the main tag. When we tried it for the first time, Bear automatically created and added a Bulb and Quotes icon to represent these tags. Neat, isn’t it?

3 Backlinks

Backlinks play an essential role in an effective note-taking system. Bear calls it Wiki Link, which you can insert anywhere in a note by typing [[[[[[[[or using command + D keys. Simply search for your note title, select it from the suggestions menu, and hit the Return key to generate a backlink.

2 Feature-packed

Although Bear scored high on esthetics, its functionality used to be basic at best. However, the tables completely turned with Bear 2.0. The 2.0 development faced multiple delays, as the developers took their sweet time with this release, and finally announced this major update in July 2023.

Now, Bear Notes is packed with all the essentials like tables, an improved editor, nested style notes, a new sketching tool, PDF previews, table of contents, OCR search, iOS Lock Screen widgets, iOS and iPadOS Home Screen widgets, a handy info panel, Quick Open (part of Bear 2.1) and more. Needless to say, the wait was totally worth it.

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1 Sensible pricing

Although Bear offers a solid free plan, you need to upgrade to the Pro pack to unlock its full potential. Thankfully, Bear Pro comes with a digestible price tag of $3 per month or $30 per year. In comparison, Evernote costs $15 per month or $130 per year. Craft’s Plus plan also starts at $10 per month. Simply put, Bear’s paid plan is a bargain.

Give Bear a try

If you are hunting for a new note-taking solution to manage your thoughts, ideas, and even blog posts, Bear should rank high on your shortlist. What are you waiting for? Sign up for a 1-week free trial and try integrating Bear into your workflow. Although Bear plans to launch a web version soon, we would love to see native apps for Windows and Android platforms, too. Bear can also learn a trick or two from rivals and integrate AI chatbot, mind maps, and support for math equations.

If Bear’s lack of cross-platform availability is a deal-breaker for you, check our separate post to find other top note-taking apps.

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