Is Bear better than Obsidian?

For calm writing on Apple devices, yes. Bear opens ready to type and hides its Markdown symbols, with apps for Mac, iPhone and iPad. For notes across Windows or Android, or kept as plain files you own, Obsidian is better.

Yes, on one device. The free version keeps notes on that device and exports them to Markdown. Syncing between your Apple devices takes Bear Pro, at US$2.99 a month or US$29.99 a year.

Does Bear work on Windows or Android?

No. Bear makes apps for Mac, iPhone and iPad and says it has no plans for Android or Windows. Bear Web, in public beta, opens your notes in a browser on any computer, as a companion to the Apple apps.

What is the downside of Obsidian?

Setup. A new vault starts as an empty folder, and the extra features come from community plugins you install and update yourself. Syncing a Windows PC also means paying for Obsidian Sync, from US$48 a year.

Does Bear save notes as Markdown files?

No. Bear writes in Markdown but stores notes in its own database. You can export one note or all of them as Markdown files, and the free version does that.

Can I move my notes from Bear to Obsidian?

Yes. Make a Bear backup, a .bear2bk file on a Mac, then open it with Obsidian's Importer plugin and choose Bear as the format. Going the other way, Bear on a Mac imports a vault from File, Import From, Obsidian.

Obsidian vs Bear (2026): which notes app fits, what it costs

Which one to pick

Obsidian vs Bear comes down to the devices you carry and how much setting up you enjoy. Get Bear if every device you own is Apple and you want to open the app and write. A Windows laptop or an Android phone anywhere in your week, or notes you want to keep as files for decades, point to Obsidian.

Linking won't decide it. Both apps link notes with double square brackets, and both list the notes that point back at the one you're reading. Where the notes live is the real split. Bear keeps them in its own database and syncs them through iCloud. Obsidian saves each note as a plain text file in a folder you choose.

Find your row:

If you	Pick	Why
Use only Apple devices	Bear	Apps for Mac, iPhone and iPad
Want a quiet place to write	Bear	Ready to type, symbols hidden
Search photos and scans often	Bear	Pro reads text in images and PDFs
Use Windows, Linux or Android	Obsidian	Apps on all five platforms
Want notes as files you own	Obsidian	One Markdown file per note
Like adding features yourself	Obsidian	Community plugins

How we compared them

We read every fact and price on Bear's and Obsidian's own pages on 30 October 2026. This comparison is built from that documentation, not from weeks of hands-on testing, and it has no star ratings. Prices are US list prices before tax, as of October 2026.

Both apps got the same six questions:

What does a year cost?
Which devices does it run on?
Where do the notes sit, and who else can read them?
How do notes link to each other, and does search reach the words inside photos and PDFs?
What works before you touch a setting?
How do the notes get out if you leave?

Bear: best for calm writing on Apple devices

Bear is a notes app for Mac, iPhone and iPad, made by a small team called Shiny Frog. You format in Markdown, so two hash marks at the start of a line make a heading, and a Hide Markdown setting tucks the symbols away once the formatting shows. Text, photos, tables, to-do lists and sketches share one note, and you can draw inline with an Apple Pencil or a finger.

Bear sorts notes with tags rather than folders. You file a note by typing a tag anywhere in it. #recipes puts it under recipes in the sidebar, and #recipes/soups nests it one level down. Put a hash mark at both ends, like #meal plans#, and the tag can hold spaces.

The free version keeps your notes on one device, scans documents and exports to plain text, Markdown, TextBundle and RTF. Syncing costs extra. Bear Pro is US$2.99 a month or US$29.99 a year after a 7-day free trial, and one subscription covers every device signed in to the same Apple ID. You get iCloud sync, passwords on single notes and search inside photos and PDFs, plus export to PDF, HTML and DOCX and over two dozen themes.

Pick it if all your devices are Apple and you want to start typing with nothing to decide first. Skip it if you use Windows or Android. Bear's FAQ says the team has no plans for either.

Obsidian: best for linked notes on any device

Obsidian saves notes as Markdown text files inside a vault, which is just a folder on your computer or phone. Edit one of those files in another app and Obsidian refreshes to show the change. Type a note's name between double square brackets to link it. The graph view then draws your notes as circles joined by lines, and a circle gets bigger as more notes point at it.

The app is free for any purpose, work included, and the download needs no account. Its download page lists apps for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android. You pay only for extras: Sync from US$4 a month billed yearly, and Publish, which turns notes into a website, from US$8 a month billed yearly.

Its pull is what you add to it. Other users write community plugins for it. One adds a file format the app can't open by itself, another links your notes to a service you already use.

Pick it if you carry an iPhone and a Windows laptop, or your notes should outlast any one app. Skip it if you want polish on day one. A new vault opens as an empty folder, and every setup choice is yours.

Side by side

	Bear	Obsidian
Price	Free on one device	Free for any use
Sync	Pro, US$29.99 a year	iCloud Drive free, or Sync
Apps	Mac, iPhone, iPad	Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android
Notes stored as	A database in the app	Markdown files in a folder
Links	[[ ]] with backlinks	[[ ]], backlinks and a graph
Organising	Nested tags	Folders and subfolders
Search reaches	Text, plus photos and PDFs on Pro	Text in notes and canvases
Add-ons	Themes and app icons	Community plugins and themes
Encryption	Note passwords, on Pro	End to end, with Sync

If you write on an iPhone and a Windows work laptop, the apps row settles the question before price comes up.

Bear reaches past Apple devices in one way. Bear Web, in public beta, opens your notes in any major browser with your iCloud login, for a borrowed laptop or an office PC rather than as your only notes app. Pro isn't needed during the beta, but syncing with the native apps already takes it, and Bear says the web app will need it once the beta ends.

What a year costs

List prices for one person over 12 months:

Setup	A year
Bear, free, one device	US$0
Bear Pro, paid yearly	US$29.99
Same plan, paid monthly	US$35.88
Obsidian in iCloud Drive	US$0
Obsidian Sync Standard, yearly	US$48
Sync Plus, yearly	US$96

On Apple devices alone, Obsidian is the cheaper of the two. Its free app syncs through iCloud Drive, and Bear needs Pro to sync at all. Obsidian's sync guide lists macOS, iOS and iPadOS as iCloud's recommended systems, and warns that iCloud Drive on Windows can duplicate or corrupt files.

So the sums change the day a Windows PC joins. Budget US$48 a year for Obsidian Sync Standard, which holds one vault of up to 1 GB with a month of version history. Single files top out at 5 MB on that plan. Plus, at US$96, takes 10 vaults and 10 GB, with 12 months of history.

Bear's education program takes 30% off the first year of yearly Pro for students and scholars who apply. Obsidian's pricing page takes 40% off Sync and Publish for students, faculty and nonprofit employees. Obsidian refunds Sync within 7 days of purchase. Bear's payments run through the App Store, so a Bear refund is a request to Apple.

Writing in each app

Bear's selling point is the feel, and its homepage lists an Apple Design Award from 2017. On a Mac you get a formatting bar, and on an iPhone or iPad a custom keyboard that shows all the main formatting options at once. Press a button or type the symbols, and both give the same result. Two equals signs on each side of a phrase highlight it, and a long note folds under its headings so you only see the section you're on.

Bear's Markdown guide says it follows CommonMark, a common Markdown standard. It also warns that notes mixing styles, like bold and underlined text, can look different in other apps after export.

Obsidian writes the same Markdown, but into files you can open in any text editor. Out of the box it's plainer to look at. What you get for that is a format nobody owns: a journal you start today is a folder of text files that any plain text app opens, with or without Obsidian.

Picture the longest thing you'll write this year, a family history or a novel draft. Bear wins if you care most about how the page looks while you write it, and Obsidian wins if you care more about where that file sits in 2045.

Links, tags and search

Linking works almost the same in both. In Bear, type [ and a few letters of a title, then pick the note. Add a slash to point at one heading inside it, or a vertical bar to show different words for the link. Bear's [info panel has a Backlinks tab with two lists: notes that link to this one, and notes that mention its title without a link.

Obsidian's backlinks pane splits things the same way, into linked and unlinked mentions. It adds the graph, and you can link to a note that doesn't exist yet and write it later. If your notes are a web of people and places, like research for a family tree, the graph is worth having, and Bear's help lists no graph view.

Organising is where they part. Bear runs on tags, nested as deep as you like. Obsidian runs on the vault's folders and subfolders, so a note sits in one place on your disk.

Search splits them too. With Pro, Bear finds words inside photos and PDFs attached to a note, so a photo of a whiteboard or a scanned warranty turns up when you search for a word on it. Obsidian's search help says it searches only the contents of notes and canvases. A photographed page stays invisible to it unless you type the words out.

Where your notes live, and who can read them

Bear keeps every note in a SQLite database. On an iPhone you can't reach that file at all. On a Mac you can, but Bear's own page says to open it for reading only, because changes can crash the app or lose notes. Your way out is export, which the free version covers in Markdown.

Bear syncs through Apple's CloudKit, and Bear says it can't see your notes. It supports Advanced Data Protection, Apple's setting that leaves only you able to decrypt your data, with one gap its sync page names: note titles and tag names stay unencrypted. Pro adds a password on single notes. Only you know it and Bear can't reset it, so keep a copy in a password manager.

Obsidian starts on your own device. Its pricing page says the notes stay local, out of Obsidian's reach, and the apps collect no telemetry. Sync encrypts notes end to end with AES-256 before they leave your device.

Picture editing the same note on two devices, one of them offline. Bear's conflict guide says both versions move to the top of your note list, and you pick the one to keep. Obsidian Sync merges the changes once you're back online. Without Sync, a vault is only as safe as your own backups.

Bear's backup has a sharp edge. Restoring a .bear2bk file permanently deletes every note in Bear, the trash included, before the backup takes their place. Rename the file to .zip instead, unzip it, and you get each note as its own file without restoring anything.

Plugins and upkeep

Bear's help lists no plugin store. You get the features Shiny Frog ships, and the app reaches further through Apple's Shortcuts app and a command line tool. There's nothing extra to install or keep updated.

Obsidian gives you a store of community plugins, and the upkeep that comes with them. Its plugin help warns that plugins run third-party code on your behalf, which is why they stay off until you turn off Restricted Mode. Plugins also skip automatic updates, so you open Settings, choose Check for updates and install the new versions yourself.

A good rule: run a month with no plugins, then add one only when you hit the same wall three times.

Moving between Bear and Obsidian

From Bear to Obsidian, Obsidian's Bear import guide uses a backup file:

On a Mac, open Bear and choose File, then Backup notes. You get one .bear2bk file.
On an iPhone, go to Settings, Advanced, Share Application Data. You get an ApplicationData.zip file.
In Obsidian, open Settings, then Community plugins, and install and enable Importer.
Open Importer, pick Bear (.bear2bk, .zip) as the file format and choose your file.
Select Import to preview how the notes will look, then Import again to finish.

From Obsidian to Bear is a Mac job. Bear's migration page says to choose File, Import From, Obsidian, and select the vault's main folder. Bear suggests keeping the original dates and using file names as titles. Attachments come across too, and that covers files you linked with double brackets. Images linked by a web address stay behind. Tags typed in notes and tags in a note's YAML block both arrive, while tags a plugin made are left out.

Leaving Bear or Obsidian? ActivityTracker's notes take a folder of Markdown files or a .zip export. Folders become notebooks, and links between notes become real links.

See how notes work

Try both for one week

You don't have to choose from a table. A week of real use answers it faster:

Monday, install both on the phone you carry and the computer you use most. Start Bear's 7-day Pro trial so sync and photo search are on.
Write the same three real notes in each, say a recipe you cook often or a trip you're planning.
Link two of them in each app with [[, then open the backlinks.
Wednesday, photograph a receipt into each and search for a word printed on it.
Friday, count which app you opened without thinking. A weekly reflection template gives that review a shape.

Cancel Bear Pro before the trial ends if you don't keep it, and Bear's FAQ says you won't be charged. Keep your to-dos on one list outside both apps while you test, so a task never ends up in the app you drop.

Made-up example: Ravi is learning Spanish before a trip to Mexico in March. He studies on an iPad at home, reviews on his iPhone on the bus, and has 30 minutes at lunch on a Windows laptop at work.

In Bear, his notes look the way he likes. Each lesson gets a note tagged #spanish/verbs or #spanish/food, and with Pro his photo of the teacher's whiteboard turns up when he searches for a verb on it. At lunch he signs in to Bear Web on the work laptop and his notes load. Bear's FAQ calls the web app a beta for when the native apps aren't at hand.

In Obsidian, the same notes run on all three machines. Each verb links to the lessons that use it, so the backlinks on "ser" list every lesson where it came up. The whiteboard photo is invisible to search, so he types the new verbs out instead.

iCloud Drive is out because of the Windows laptop, which makes his choice US$48 a year for Obsidian Sync or US$29.99 for Bear Pro. He picks Obsidian, because the lunch half-hour is where most of his reviewing happens.

Still torn between Obsidian and a different app? Read Obsidian vs Apple Notes if Apple Notes is already on your phone, or Obsidian vs Notion if Notion is.