Ampersand vs
Bear
Bear is one of the nicest places to write on a Mac or an iPhone. Ampersand runs on Windows and Linux, and keeps your notes as files rather than rows in a database.
Bear is one of the best-made writing apps on Apple’s platforms, and this comparison is not an argument that it is badly built. It is fast, it is beautifully typeset, the iPhone and iPad apps are as good as native Markdown apps get, and a lot of people who have tried everything have settled on it and stopped looking. If you already write in Bear and enjoy it, none of what follows is a reason to be unhappy.
The two apps differ in almost exactly opposite directions, which makes the choice unusually clean. Bear runs on macOS and iPadOS and iOS, and nowhere else — no Windows, no Android, no Linux, and Bear’s own FAQ says none are planned. A browser version, Bear Web, is in public beta as a stopgap, and not every native feature carries over. Ampersand runs natively on macOS, Windows and Linux, on both Intel/AMD and ARM, and has no phone app at all. Between them the two cover every platform; neither covers it alone.
The second difference is where the notes are. Bear keeps them in a SQLite database — on a Mac inside a group container, on iOS in a sandbox you cannot reach — with attachments in an adjacent folder. It syncs beautifully because of that, and it also means opening a note in another app requires exporting it first. Ampersand keeps plain .md files in a folder you picked, which is worse for sync (there is none of our own; you bring iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing or git) and better for everything else you might one day want to do with your own text.
The third is scope. Ampersand tries to be the place a document finishes as well as starts: a vector PDF, an editable Word file, per-note encryption on every platform, a history of every save, AI you bring your own key to, and meeting recording transcribed on your own Mac. Bear deliberately does not attempt most of that, and its restraint is a large part of why it feels the way it does.
Ampersand and Bear, row by row
Every row states what both apps do. A dot marks whichever one leads — including the rows Bear takes.
| Feature | Ampersand | Bear |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Advantage: Ampersand.Free forever with the full editor, search, wiki-links, backlinks and version history. Pro is a one-time $29 (regularly $49), three devices, 14-day money back, never a subscription. | Free on a single device with no sync. Bear Pro is $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year through Apple’s App Store, with a 7-day trial; one subscription covers every device on the same Apple ID. There is no one-time or lifetime option. |
| Where notes live | Advantage: Ampersand.A folder you pick. Plain .md files with optional YAML frontmatter, openable by any text editor on any machine. | A SQLite database — on a Mac at ~/Library/Group Containers, with attachments alongside it; on iOS sandboxed and not reachable at all. Opening a note in another app means exporting it first, as Markdown or as a .bearnote textbundle. |
| Works offline | Everything except cloud AI, and pointing it at a local model through Ollama removes even that. | Everything. Sync happens when it can, and the app never waits for it. |
| Platforms | macOS 14+, Windows 10+ and Linux, on both Intel/AMD and ARM. There is no phone app yet. There is no web app either. | macOS and iOS/iPadOS only. No Windows, no Android, no Linux, and Bear’s FAQ says none are planned. Bear Web is a browser stopgap in public beta and some native features do not carry over. |
| Encryption | Per-note, in the app, using age (X25519 + ChaCha20-Poly1305) under one vault passphrase, with Touch ID on macOS and a recovery kit. An encrypted note becomes a .md.age file that any age implementation can open. Free users can always unlock and decrypt existing notes; only creating new encrypted notes is Pro. | Per-note and opt-in, using AES-GCM-256 with a key-derivation function, unlocked by password or Face ID / Touch ID. It is Pro-only and unavailable on the free tier, and it locks individual notes rather than the database — anything you have not explicitly locked sits in the plain SQLite file. |
| Export | Advantage: Ampersand.Vector PDF from a real layout engine with running headers and controlled page breaks, editable Word with native equations and highlighted code, self-contained HTML, and Markdown — single note or the whole vault. Everything but single-file Markdown is Pro. | The free tier exports Markdown with attachments. Pro adds PDF, HTML, DOCX and JPG — and JPG is a genuinely nice one Ampersand has no equivalent of. |
| AI | Advantage: Ampersand.Built in and bring-your-own-key: Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Apple Intelligence, local models through Ollama, and CLI agents, routed per feature. Rewrite, expand, grammar, translate, summarise and autocomplete are free; agents and ask-your-whole-vault are Pro. | No in-app assistant. Bear 2.8 ships BearCLI, an MCP server and a Claude Connector, so an external AI tool can read and act on your notes — bring your own AI client rather than bring your own key. No local model support inside the app. |
| Search | Full text across the whole vault, with case-sensitive, whole-word and regex toggles, and #tags, wiki-links and backlinks indexed alongside it. It covers encrypted notes too while the vault is unlocked. It does not read text inside images or PDFs. | Full text across notes, titles, tags and attachment names, with operators like @untagged and @attachments. No regex. With Pro it also searches the text inside photos and PDFs attached to a note, which is a real capability Ampersand has no equivalent of at any price. |
| Version history | Advantage: Ampersand.Every save, snapshotted into a git repository kept outside the vault, with a timeline and a line-by-line diff. Browsing and diffing are free; one-click restore is Pro. You set how long it keeps. | None built in. Bear’s team confirmed on its own community forum in July 2026 that it is wanted and not yet shipped. What exists is a manual whole-library backup to a single .bear2bk file, which restores all or nothing rather than a note at a time. |
| Sync | None of our own. You bring iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing or a git repo and set it up yourself — a vault is just a folder. | Advantage: Bear.First-party iCloud sync, included with Pro, across every Apple device on your Apple ID with nothing to configure. iCloud is the only backend; there is no Dropbox or git option. |
| Mobile | None. There is no iPhone app, no iPad app and no Android app. | Advantage: Bear.Mature, polished iOS and iPadOS apps, widely regarded as among the best-designed native Markdown apps on Apple’s platforms. No Android app. |
| Structured content | Advantage: Ampersand.Notion-style blocks over plain Markdown: tables whose cells take spreadsheet formulas, Mermaid diagrams, Vega charts, KaTeX maths, live calculation blocks with units and currency, callouts and highlighted code — all round-tripping as ordinary .md. | More than you might expect: Mermaid diagrams live-rendered and free for everyone since July 2026, LaTeX maths through MathJax inline and block, callouts in five types, and code highlighting across more than 250 languages. Tables are native but take no formulas, and there are no charts and no live calculation. |
| Themes and appearance | Light and dark, per-document font and width, and focus, typewriter and Zen writing modes. No user-authored themes. | Advantage: Bear.Around thirty themes, Pro-only, and typography that a lot of people choose Bear for on its own. This is a real part of the product rather than a settings page. |
| Extensibility | None. No plugins, no scripting API. What ships is what you get. | Advantage: Bear.No plugin or scripting API either, but x-callback-urls and Apple Shortcuts support mean Bear slots into automations across the rest of an Apple setup in a way Ampersand does not. |
| Meeting recording | Advantage: Ampersand.Records a meeting in a room or on a call and transcribes it on your own Mac with a local Whisper model, then writes a note with a summary, the decisions and the action items as checkboxes. No bot joins, nothing is uploaded. macOS only, and part of Pro. | Nothing built in. |
| Sharing and collaboration | Advantage: Ampersand.No real-time editing. A share link you control: expiry of 7, 30 or 90 days or never; an optional password, or an email allowlist that can cover a whole domain; and a choice of how much a chat app may preview. Never indexed, no scripts, and changing the password signs every existing reader out. Pro; taking a note down never is. | Nothing shipped. No real-time editing and no publish-as-a-webpage feature; publishing is still an open request on Bear’s own forum. |
| Open source | No. The notes are plain Markdown and the encryption is the standard age format, so the files outlive the app either way. | No. |
Across these 17 rows, Ampersand leads 8, Bear leads 4, and 5 are a draw. The dot marks the leader. Where Bear leads, the dot is on its side of the table.
Ampersand is desktop-only today. An app for iPhone and iPad is in development and not yet released. The roadmap is where that gets announced.
Bear details checked against its own pricing and documentation pages on . If something here has gone out of date, tell us and we will fix it.
Where Ampersand pulls ahead
It runs on Windows and Linux
Native builds for macOS, Windows and Linux on both Intel/AMD and ARM, with the same features on each. Bear is macOS and iOS/iPadOS only and its own FAQ says no other platforms are planned, so a Windows machine at work or a Linux laptop at home is not something Bear has an answer to.
Your notes are files, not rows in a database
Plain .md in a folder you chose, which any text editor, script or backup tool can read without asking Ampersand’s permission. Bear’s SQLite database syncs well precisely because it is a database, but it means the notes exist in one app’s format until you export them, and on iOS you cannot reach the file at all.
The document finishes here as well as starting here
Vector PDFs with running headers and controlled page breaks, Word files that are genuinely editable with native equations and syntax-highlighted code, self-contained HTML, and a whole-vault Markdown export. Bear covers Markdown free and adds PDF, HTML, DOCX and JPG with Pro; the fidelity of the two most-used formats is where the gap sits.
AI you bring your own key to
Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, Apple Intelligence, a local Ollama model or a CLI agent, configured once and routed per feature, with rewriting, grammar, translation and summarising free. Bear has no in-app assistant — its 2.8 release added a CLI and an MCP server so an external tool can reach your notes, which is a different and more manual thing.
Meetings recorded and transcribed on your own Mac
Record a call or a room and a local Whisper model turns it into a note with a summary, the decisions and the action items as checkboxes, plus the full transcript. No bot joins the call, nothing is uploaded, and the audio is deleted once the transcript exists unless you ask to keep it. Bear has nothing comparable.
Where Bear is the better tool
Every page here names at least two, because Bear genuinely has them and a comparison that pretended otherwise would not be worth reading.
The iPhone and iPad apps, which we do not have at all
Bear’s mobile apps are mature, fast and among the best-designed native Markdown apps on Apple’s platforms — not a companion to the Mac app but a full place to write. Ampersand has no phone app of any kind today, so if you capture and read on a phone as much as you type on a laptop, this alone decides it.
iCloud sync that is simply on
One Pro subscription syncs every Mac, iPhone and iPad on your Apple ID with nothing to configure and no second service to pay for. Ampersand has no sync of its own at all — you point iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Syncthing or git at the folder and own the setup and any conflicts yourself.
It is a nicer window to write in
Around thirty themes and typography that people choose Bear for on its own merits, in an app that has kept its scope small deliberately. Ampersand does more, and doing more costs a certain amount of calm; if what you want is the least friction between a thought and a paragraph, Bear is very hard to beat.
Shortcuts and x-callback-url automation
Bear slots into Apple Shortcuts and responds to x-callback-urls, so it can be driven by the rest of an Apple setup — a Shortcut on a phone, an automation on a Mac, a link from another app. Ampersand has no scripting surface at all, so nothing outside it can ask it to do anything.
Which one should you use?
Choose Bear if
you live entirely inside macOS, iOS and iPadOS, you want sync that works the moment you sign in, and you want the most refined, lowest-friction writing surface on Apple’s platforms. Bear is excellent at exactly that, and the phone app is a genuine reason on its own.
Choose Ampersand if
you use a Windows or Linux machine as well as a Mac, you want your notes to be ordinary files rather than rows in an app’s database, or you want the heavy tools — real PDF and Word export, encryption, version history, AI, meeting transcription — in the same window you write in.
Moving from Bear
Asked plainly
Can I use Bear on Windows?
No. Bear runs on macOS and iOS/iPadOS only — there is no Windows app, no Android app and no Linux app, and Bear’s own FAQ says none are planned. A browser version called Bear Web is in public beta as a stopgap, but some native features do not carry over to it. Ampersand ships native builds for macOS, Windows and Linux on both Intel/AMD and ARM, though it has no phone app at all, so the two apps cover opposite halves of the platform problem.
Is Ampersand a good Bear alternative?
It is a good alternative if you need Windows or Linux, or if you want your notes stored as ordinary Markdown files rather than inside Bear’s SQLite database. Ampersand also adds PDF and Word export, per-note encryption, bring-your-own-key AI and meeting transcription. It is a poor alternative if you write on an iPhone or iPad, because Ampersand has no phone app, and if you rely on Bear’s iCloud sync, because Ampersand has no sync service of its own.
How do I export my notes out of Bear?
Bear exports Markdown along with your attachments, and that option is available on the free tier as well as on Pro, so you do not need a subscription to take your notes with you. Pro adds PDF, HTML, DOCX and JPG export. Notes you have locked need to be unlocked in Bear before they will export. Ampersand imports a folder of Markdown directly and shows a dry run of everything it is about to do before it writes a single file.
Where does Bear store my notes?
In a SQLite database rather than as individual files — on a Mac inside a group container at ~/Library/Group Containers, with attachments in a folder beside it, and on iOS inside an app sandbox you cannot browse. That is part of why sync is so smooth, and it also means another app cannot open a Bear note without you exporting it first. Ampersand stores every note as a plain .md file in a folder you chose, so any editor, script or backup tool can read it directly.
Does Ampersand have an iPhone app like Bear?
No. Ampersand is desktop-only today — macOS 14 or later, Windows 10 or later, and Linux — with no iPhone app, no iPad app, no Android app and no web app. Bear’s iOS and iPadOS apps are mature and among the best-designed native Markdown apps on Apple’s platforms. If a phone is where a meaningful share of your writing and capture happens, that difference matters more than anything else on this page.
Is Bear’s note locking the same as Ampersand’s encryption?
They are similar in shape and differ in the details. Both encrypt individual notes you choose rather than the whole library, and both unlock with biometrics. Bear uses AES-GCM-256 with a key-derivation function, opened by password or Face ID / Touch ID, and it is a Pro-only feature unavailable on the free tier. Ampersand uses age — X25519 with ChaCha20-Poly1305 — under one vault passphrase with Touch ID on macOS and a printable recovery kit, and writes the result as a .md.age file any age implementation can open. Unlocking and decrypting existing notes in Ampersand is never gated behind a licence.
Other alternatives
Stop reading tables.
Open the app.
Ampersand is free to start and there is no account to make. Point it at the folder your notes are already in — including the one Bear keeps them in — and see for yourself.
Free to start · Mac, Windows & Linux · No account required