Bear Note App, What's Free And Where It Stops

The bear note app is free to use on a Mac, an iPhone and an iPad for as long as you like, and it stops being free the moment you want the same note on two of them. Sync is a Bear Pro feature. Pro is $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year after a 7 day trial, and one subscription covers every device signed into the same Apple ID.

That's the short version, and it's the answer to the first question people ask. The longer version is more interesting, because Bear publishes a detailed FAQ and the FAQ says several things the home page doesn't. It names the file on disk where your notes live. It warns that restoring a backup deletes everything first. It says, in one sentence, that there are no plans for Windows or Android. And it disagrees with the home page about which export formats you get for free.

Everything below comes from bear.app, its FAQ and blog, and the two App Store listings, all loaded on 15 September 2026. I haven't run Bear for a month and I'm not going to pretend I have. What I've done is read every page the vendor put up and put the fences in one place.

Where It Stops

Ten rows. None of them is hidden, and none of them is on the same page as any other, which is the pattern I keep finding on vendor sites and the reason a post like this exists.

The Export Page Disagrees With The Home Page

Bear's home page has a Free versus Pro grid, and the export row reads "Export to: TXT, Markdown, TextBundle, RTF, PDF, JPG, HTML, DOCX, ePub" with a tick in both columns. Read that and you'd conclude all nine formats are free.

The export FAQ says otherwise. It lists .txt, .md, .textbundle, .bearnote and .rtf under the free app, and puts .html, .docx, .pdf, .jpg and .ePub under Bear Pro. The Pro FAQ page agrees with the export page, describing "advanced export" of PDF, HTML, DOCX and JPG as something Pro adds.

So two of Bear's pages say the paid tier owns PDF export and one says it doesn't. I'd go with the two that agree, partly because they're the more specific pages and partly because a marketing grid is the page most likely to be simplified. But I'd also check it yourself. Install the free app, write one note, and try File then Export notes. If PDF is greyed out, the FAQ is right. That takes a minute and it's the sort of thing worth knowing before you've written three hundred notes.

The practical point survives either way. Markdown and TextBundle are free, and those are the two formats that matter for leaving. PDF is for sending a note to someone, and there are other ways to make a PDF on a Mac. Nobody should pick or reject Bear over that row, but nobody should read the home grid and assume the FAQ is wrong either.

Sync Is Apple's, Not Bear's

Bear doesn't run a sync server. The sync and privacy FAQ says the app "relies on Apple's CloudKit technology to sync your notes," picked because it "performs much faster" than file-based options like iCloud Drive or Dropbox and "doesn't require any registration or login." The same page says the developers "don't have access to users credentials or any sensitive data," which follows naturally from not owning the servers.

What that means for you is specific. Your notes travel over SSL to Apple, sit in CloudKit "encrypted with Apple's private keys," and if you turn on Apple's Advanced Data Protection, the FAQ says "only you, as the possessor of your iCloud credentials, can decrypt your data." Note titles and tag names stay unencrypted even then, which Bear states plainly, and which you'd want to know if a tag name is itself sensitive.

There's an odd consequence hiding here. Bear's sync is free of Bear's infrastructure and you still pay Bear for it, because the Pro subscription is what switches it on. You're not paying for servers. You're paying for the feature flag, plus OCR, themes, icons and encryption, and that's a perfectly reasonable way to fund a small team. It's just worth being clear about what the $29.99 is.

On a single Mac, there's no reason to pay. The Mac note-taking comparison priced Bear against Apple Notes, Obsidian and Craft on exactly that basis, and the conclusion holds. Judge Pro on sync and OCR, because the free app is the whole editor.

Windows, Android, And The Web Beta

"Bear notes for Windows" and "Bear app Android" are both related searches for this query, and the FAQ answers them in one sentence. "As of this writing, we do not have plans for Android or Windows. Shiny Frog is a small team by design, and we prefer to focus on projects we believe we can reasonably tackle and do well."

That's an unusually direct thing for a vendor to say and I'd take it at face value.

The partial answer is Bear Web, at web.bear.app, which the company announced as a public beta on 9 July 2025. The FAQ describes it as "a web app designed to complement the native Bear apps on Mac, iPhone and iPad" for "situations where you cannot access the native Bear apps," and says outright that it "is not intended to be used as a standalone note-taking solution." Export and the sketch tool aren't there, and TagCons and encryption were still in progress as of the pages I read.

Three conditions apply, and they're the ones that decide whether it helps you.

It doesn't need Pro during the beta, but the FAQ says a subscription "will be required to access Bear Web once it's out of beta," and you need Pro anyway to sync the web notes with the native apps. So the realistic cost of using Bear from an office PC is Pro.

It won't work if Advanced Data Protection is on. The FAQ blames Apple's restrictions, and that's plausible, since ADP is designed so nothing outside your devices can decrypt the data. But it puts you in a corner. The most private sync setting and the only non-Apple access route are mutually exclusive.

And it's a beta. The blog post and the FAQ both say so. My concern with building a Windows workflow on it is that a beta can change its terms, and the FAQ has already told you one of those changes in advance.

Back It Up, But Read The Restore Warning First

Bear's notes on a Mac live in a single SQLite file, and the FAQ gives the path. It's ~/Library/Group Containers/9K33E3U3T4.net.shinyfrog.bear/Application Data/database.sqlite. The same page says it's "safe to access the database for reading only," suggests quitting Bear before touching it, and warns that schema changes can stop a later version of the app from migrating your data. I'd treat that path as something to include in whatever backs up your home folder, and nothing more.

The app's own backup is a .bear2bk file. On a Mac it's File then Backup Notes, and on iPhone or iPad it's the more menu at the top of the sidebar, then Backup all notes. Attachments are included. Encrypted notes go in encrypted. There's no automatic schedule described on the page, so a backup only exists if you made one.

Now the warning, quoted in full because it's the one line on Bear's site that can cost you notes. "When you restore a backup, all notes currently in Bear, including trashed notes, will be permanently deleted. The imported notes will take their place."

Restore doesn't merge. It replaces. If you restore last month's backup to recover one note you deleted, you lose every note you wrote since. The routine I'd use is boring. Before any restore, make a fresh backup first, so the thing you're about to wipe exists as its own .bear2bk. Then restore the old one, export the note you wanted as Markdown, and restore the fresh backup to get back to where you were. Three steps, none of them clever, and the alternative is discovering the warning afterwards.

Coming From Apple Notes

This got easier recently, and Bear's own migration page states the change plainly.

"Beginning with macOS and iOS 26, Apple Notes includes a native option to export notes as Markdown files, including any attachments and images." On the Mac, you select a folder in Notes, select all, choose File then Export As then Markdown, and in Bear choose File then Import From then Markdown Folder. On iOS the same export exists but "is limited to exporting one note at a time," so do it on the Mac.

If you're on macOS 15 or older, the route is Bear's Automator workflow, which exports HTML and loses things. "Task lists convert into bulleted lists." "Non-photo attachments like PDFs or other files are not supported." Photos only come through from Catalina onward. Those losses are the reason people used to say moving out of Apple Notes was painful, and on the current OS the losses are gone, at least according to the page.

One thing to plan for either way. Bear organises by tags, not folders, and a tag is text inside the note, written as #tag, or #vacation plans# for more than one word, or #recipes/italian for nesting. Your Notes folders won't become tags on their own. You'll be adding them, and the good news is that a tag can be renamed into a nested one later from the sidebar without touching the notes.

Free Or Pro, By Your Setup

The row I'd argue with is the fourth. If the note is that sensitive, I'd also ask whether it belongs in a synced notes app at all, and that's a question no tier answers.

Questions People Ask

How much does the Bear notes app cost? Nothing to download and use on one device. Bear Pro is $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year, both with a 7 day trial, bought through the App Store, and one subscription covers all your devices on the same Apple ID.

Is Bear better than Apple Notes? Bear wins on Markdown, tags and export, and the notebook app Apple ships wins on price, because Notes syncs for free with the storage you already have. As of macOS 26 the two can exchange Markdown, which makes the choice less permanent than it used to be. I'd start in Notes and move if the tag system turns out to be the thing you miss.

Which is better, Bear or Notion? They're different kinds of product. Bear is a local SQLite database on your device synced through Apple's CloudKit. Notion is a hosted workspace on Notion's servers. Notion's free plan caps file uploads at 5 MB and keeps page history for 7 days, and its Plus plan is $10 per member a month billed monthly. If you want databases and shared pages, Notion. If you want fast private notes on Apple hardware, Bear. The Obsidian versus Notion breakdown covers Notion's tiers properly.

Is the Bear app safe? The App Store listing declares one data category, Diagnostics, as collected but not linked to you. Sync goes over SSL to CloudKit, sits there encrypted with Apple's keys, and can be moved to end-to-end encryption with Advanced Data Protection. The database on your Mac is readable by anything running as your user account, which is true of most note apps and worth knowing.

Which is better for taking notes, Evernote or Bear? Evernote's free plan is 50 notes, 1 notebook and sync to 1 device, per its compare-plans page. Bear's free tier has no note cap and no sync. If you're going to pay anyway, Evernote runs on Windows and Android and Bear doesn't. If you won't pay and you're on Apple hardware, Bear's free tier is the more usable one by some distance.

Can hackers get into my notes app? Bear's exposure is your Apple ID, because CloudKit is where the synced copy lives, so a strong password and two-factor on the Apple ID are the real defence. Advanced Data Protection removes Apple's ability to decrypt. Per-note encryption in Pro covers the file on disk. What none of that covers is someone already logged into your Mac as you, and no app fixes that.

What I'd Do

Install the free app and use it for a week on one device, because the editor, the tags and the Markdown export are the product and they cost nothing.

Before the trial, decide which row of the table you're in. If it's sync, the $29.99 is honest money for a feature that's cleanly fenced. If it's Windows or Android, read the Bear Web FAQ again and notice that it says "not intended to be used as a standalone note-taking solution" about the only route you'd have.

And make one backup on day one, then read the restore warning while there's nothing to lose. The note app judged on leaving piece makes the same argument for every app on the site. Bear passes that test, with Markdown export free and a documented file on disk, as long as you never restore over notes you haven't backed up.