Bear

a beautiful, simple Markdown note-taking app

4.8•71 reviews•

1K followers

a beautiful, simple Markdown note-taking app

4.8•71 reviews•

1K followers

Visit website

Note and writing apps

•

Writing assistants

Bear is a beautiful, powerfully simple Markdown note taking 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.

This is the 4th launch from Bear. View more

Bear 2

Simple, powerful, private Markdown notes

Bear 2 is our largest update ever to your beautiful, personal space to write naturally. Our advanced Markdown support and refreshed, minimal UI empower you to capture and create notes even easier with 20+ all-new features like tables, Backlinks, ToC, and more.

Free Options

Launch tags:

Productivity•Notes•Text Editors

Launch Team

Danilo Bonardi

Bear

Maker

📌

Hello everyone! I’m Danilo, one of the co-founders and lead developers at Shiny Frog. After our incredibly successful launch of the original Bear notes app on Product Hunt years ago, we are overjoyed to be back with Bear 2! 🐻‍❄️ What is Bear? Bear is a beautiful, powerfully simple Markdown notes app to capture, write, and organize your life. It has quick organization, editing tools, and export options to help you write and share anywhere, and it preserves your privacy with encryption. Getting started couldn’t be faster—no signup and no account. Just open a note and write naturally. ★ 2016 App Store App of the Year ★ 2017 Apple Design Award ★ App Store “Editors Choice” for 7 consecutive years 🐻‍❄️ What makes Bear unique? Say goodbye to chaotic note organizing, feature-bloated interfaces, and cluttered notes apps. Bear is designed for a seamless writing experience. Bear's four main values are: ✨ BEAUTIFUL: Elegant, clean and modern UX/UI design. The original Bear won an Apple Design Award in 2017! 🏷️ FLEXIBLE: A flexible tag system to organize notes. Friendly working with other apps. A wide range of export options 💪 POWERFUL: Native app. Blazing fast even with long text note. Fast sync using CloudKit. 100% Markdown support 🔏 SAFE: We have no servers and collect no data on your notes (only anonymous crashlog). End-to-end encryption for notes available with Bear Pro 🐻‍❄️ What’s new in Bear 2? Bear 2 is our largest update ever including 20+ all-new features like tables, Backlinks, ToC, and more. The journey to Bear 2 has been long, but we’re thrilled with how it turned out. Make sure to check it out on our iOS and macOS App Store pages! 🐻‍❄️ Thank you for your support! We sincerely want to thank everyone for all your support, and a huge thank you to our amazing hunter @chrismessina for all the help along the way. We are all ears for any feedback or thoughts the Product Hunt community has on Bear 2. Thanks again! Danilo Bonardi 🐻❤️🚀

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2yr ago

Danilo Bonardi

Bear

Maker

@chrismessina @ianwdj Everything about the editor is so heavily interconnected that it's hard for me to be very specific. I can tell some CommonMark edge cases are particularly tricky and time-consuming, but most of our focus was on parsing performances of a document and while writing.

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2yr ago

Tatiana Stronskaya

Drope.me

@trix180 seems like a great product, congrats on the Bear 2 launch!

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2yr ago

Danilo Bonardi

Bear

Maker

@tatiana_stronskaya Thank You Tatiana

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2yr ago

Hui Shu

Me.bot

Long time Bear fan. Just tried the new Bear 2 update today. I love the new features (hidden markdown, table support). My notes are looking even better now! As a productivity geek myself, I try out many note-taking apps: Notion, Obsidian, etc. Bear is my daily driver. It's simple, reliable, fast and beautiful. Forget every other note-taking app and just use Bear.

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2yr ago

Dane Brodke

This app is as close to perfection as any app I've ever used. Elegant, super fast, polished, just an absolute joy to use. I've used this since I graduated from medical school 5 years ago. 1629 notes later and all my work and life is catalogued in Bear -- using it right now to study for my final boards exam in two days. The v2 update is spectacular --- tables, image resizing, backlinks, everything you could want. The developers are true craftspeople who have created something remarkable.

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2yr ago

4.8

Based on 71 reviews

Review Bear?

Bear is praised for its beautiful design, simplicity, and effective Markdown integration, making it a favorite among users for daily note-taking and writing tasks. Users appreciate its ease of use and the ability to quickly jot down notes, with many highlighting its seamless integration within the Apple ecosystem. However, some users express disappointment over the lack of multi-platform support. Feedback from the makers of Listy and OpenNotas echoes these sentiments, emphasizing Bear's aesthetic appeal and ease of use, while noting the limitation of platform exclusivity.

+68

Summarized with AI

Pros

beautiful design (20)

simple interface (20)

markdown support (10)

fast performance (5)

ios compatibility (5)

apple ecosystem integration (4)

backlinks (4)

export options (3)

reasonable subscription cost (3)

icloud sync (2)

Cons

limited cross-platform support (3)

no web version (3)

wysiwyg editor issues (2)

Pros

Cons

Reviews

Helpful

Dayna Martin

•1 review

Before I begin my review, I advise potential users to avoid the whiny reviews. Bear's creators directly interact with their users and are unusually transparent. They are always upfront that they are a small team, so it takes them longer to create an impeccable product. Their high standards are actually admirable; I've never had any type of glitches with Bear 1. I am excited about Bear 2's upcoming release. I'll be a Bear subscriber until I die or the company disappears. This has been the only app I've been subscribed to since my first iPhone. It's been the only app that has helped me tremendously with my severe ADHD. So if I may, I'd like to go a bit more into detail at just how much I love this app, and how it's become a daily Perhaps because Bear creators are so approachable, some users become impatient and self-entitled like Jack Perry's review below mine. I believe those reviews show just how amazing the Bear app is because people want more and more uses out of it, more than what it was created to be. And that is what I love about this app: its versatility. Bear is a note-taking app or writing app, a beautiful one at that. It has been the only app where I have been able to keep my notes organized. Their system of hashtags is brilliantly simple. Even better? You can use more than 1 hashtag, and your note will show up in both searches. Their Apple Watch app is perfect for quickly dictating ideas that bounce around in my head; it'll even transcribe my hashtags, so my notes are already organized in my IOS app. It also flawlessly syncs in all of my Apple products. I write everything in it. Email drafts, notes, assignment notes, musings, etc. Like I earlier stated, their hashtag system allows a note to be organized under 2 topics. For my graduate class, I just wrapped up taking [#literarytheory] All assignments, ideas, and notes for this class had this hashtag. I then used a secondary hashtag to organize them more. Throughout various chapters I took a lot of notes on Sigmund Freud, so those notes had the [#freud]. One search of [#freud], and I am able to easily see all of my notes in the search. Being able to quickly type the hashtags is awesome; the quickest way I've ever found to organize notes, even as you type! Their website has more effective ways of organizing notes, but the versatility is key. Those more complex #hashtag hierarchies wouldn't work for me, but the aforementioned one does. It's adjustable to the user. Anyways, it's rare to find a company who stands so firmly behind their product and who refuses to rush and release an inferior product just for monetary gain. I've seen that happen too much. That's why I was fine waiting for Bear 2 and am super excited about its upcoming launch! Bear app is exactly what it advertises itself to be, and I recommend it. :)

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2yr ago

Jack Perry

•1 review

Historically I have liked Bear, but I've been waiting for a web version for almost five years as my work is split between Mac and Windows. The fact that Bear 2 is launching still with no web version or even an update in the blog post on if it's still coming feels like such a slap in the face. Some of us have been waiting half a decade for a web version, being told in December 2019 "it's coming along well" and then another update six months later on Reddit saying that an editor update is needed before they can give an ETA. It's 2023, if the web version isn't coming then please just let us know so I can officially abandon this app and commit to Obsidian for good. If cross-platform is important or integral to you I cannot in good conscience recommend Bear anymore.

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2yr ago