Bear vs. Apple Notes
My annual re-evaluation of tech stack, this time my Bear subscription before it re-upped.
Several months ago, I let my Bear subscription lapse. It wasn’t because of any issues with Bear — the app is great, as is the price. But with new versions of macOS Sequoia & iOS on the horizon, I wanted to ensure I wasn’t missing anything compelling before just automatically renewing my lease. So for several weeks, I used Apple Notes as my regular note-taking solution…with subpar results.
The comparisons below were made between:
- Bear 2.2 macOS (I didn’t compare other platforms, since I was no longer syncing between them)
- macOS Sequoia public beta
- iOS 18 public beta
It had been awhile since using Apple Notes, and things I really liked about the experience:
- There’s still something about folder organization over tag trees that speaks better to me
- The mobile editing experience remains more-intuitive than Bear’s mess of custom menu pads
- The new OS features are quite useful, especially the math capabilities (which remind me of Soulver, an all-time favorite application of mine)
- Doing real-time collaboration with other iCloud users (such as my wife) is nice, especially when planning around the household or vacations
- I hadn’t used Apple Note’s tags before, but their implementation of tags as a flat cloud fit the spartan way I use tags myself
However, none of the above were enough to sway me from returning home to Bear. Especially because of continuing deficits in Apple Notes:
- Support for Apple Shortcuts remains lackluster. For example, my daily Shortcut for creating meeting notes in Bear requires a ton of hacks to achieve similar results in Apple Notes, but could break at anytime a new OS is released.
- You cannot get an Apple Note’s link without the help of Apple Shortcuts. I like to link my Things 3 tasks to their related notes; with Bear, getting these links is two clicks away, while in Apple Notes it takes much more work.
- I just can’t get over the urine-soaked URLs. If only they’d let me change the color of the links…. You can kinda / sorta do this in macOS (with system-wide ramifications) but can’t in iOS, so why bother having a bifurcated user experience between devices?
Then as I was writing this, Bear released their 2.3 version which added some new features I expect to take advantage of, such as new highlighting colors, themes, and iOS Control Center widgets. It sounded like a good time to re-up my subscription, and I'm glad I did — once again, I'm all-in on Bear, using it both at work & home. In addition, I've implemented the Forever ✱ Notes system, for which Bear works quite well.
