Bear vs Evernote

A word about us before anything else. We make Harbor, a notes app. We compete with both apps on this page, and we’ve put Harbor in the tables on the same terms so you can see where it loses. It loses to Bear on price. Every Bear figure below comes from Bear’s own help pages and blog, read on the date at the top, against Bear 3.0.2. The Evernote figures come from Evernote’s plan page and help center, read the same day.

Bear Pro is $29.99 a year. Evernote is $99 a year to keep 1,000 notes, or $249.99 to keep all of them.

The short answer: Bear is a writing app and Evernote is a filing cabinet. If every device you own is made by Apple and you mostly write, Bear is better and costs a third as much. If you clip, scan and file, or if a Windows PC or an Android phone is anywhere in your day, it isn’t.

What each one costs

Neither free version is a real home for an Evernote library. Bear Free never leaves the device you installed it on. Evernote Free is 50 notes on one device, which is a trial.

So compare the paid plans. Bear Pro documents no note limit, and one subscription covers every device on your Apple Account, for $29.99 a year. Evernote Starter is three times that and stops at 1,000 notes. What Evernote costs now, and how it got there is its own story.

Where each one runs

For a lot of people this table is the whole decision.

Bear is native on Mac, iPhone and iPad, and it has an Apple Watch app for dictating a quick note. There’s no Windows or Android app. Bear’s own FAQ says it has no plans for either: “Shiny Frog is a small team by design.”

What Bear offers instead is Bear Web, a public beta since July 2025 that opens your notes in any browser. It’s free during the beta, but syncing it with the Mac and iPhone apps needs Pro, and Bear says Pro will be required once the beta ends. Encryption isn’t there yet. And if you’ve turned on Apple’s Advanced Data Protection, it doesn’t work at all.

Evernote has apps for Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad and Android, plus a web app. If you’re leaving Evernote because it worked on every machine you own, Bear is a step down however good it is. We checked twelve apps device by device in which notes apps actually run everywhere.

Getting your Evernote notes in

Bear imports Evernote files on a Mac and on an iPhone or iPad. Export your notebooks from Evernote as .enex files, then:

• Mac: File > Import From > Evernote.
• iPhone and iPad: open the … menu in the sidebar and choose Import.

Three things to know first, all from Bear’s own guide:

• Your notebooks don’t come across. The .enex format doesn’t carry them. Bear suggests adding a tag for each notebook in Evernote before you export, or exporting one notebook at a time and tagging each batch as it lands.
• Your trash comes too. An .enex file includes the notes you deleted in Evernote. Empty Evernote’s trash first.
• Dates are a choice. Bear’s importers have an option to keep each note’s original dates. Turn it on.

Bear doesn’t document what happens to attachments, checklists or tags along the way. Import a small notebook first and look.

Getting the files out of Evernote is the harder half. The desktop app quietly limits how many notes you can select at once, among other things. The complete Evernote export guide walks through it.

Writing

This is why people love Bear, and they’re right to.

Bear’s editor is Markdown that formats as you type. Headings, bold, links and code blocks render in place, without a toolbar in the way. It has tables, to-do lists, code blocks with syntax highlighting, Mermaid diagrams, and sketching with an Apple Pencil on iPad and iPhone. It won a 2017 Apple Design Award, and it still feels like it.

Evernote’s editor is rich text with a toolbar, tables, checklists, and a lot of everything else. It’s capable, and it’s built for collecting more than for writing.

If you write long notes, drafts or journals, Bear wins this section, and it isn’t close.

Folders, tags and links

Evernote organizes with notebooks, stacks and tags. Starter caps you at 20 notebooks.

Bear has no folders at all. It has tags you type into a note, and tags nest inside other tags as deep as you like, which is how Bear does folders. A note can carry as many tags as you want. Since Bear 2.9, any tag can become a Workspace, its own focused writing space.

Bear also links notes to each other: type [[ and pick a note, and the other note shows the link back.

If your Evernote system is notebooks inside stacks, expect to rebuild it as nested tags. It’s a different shape, not a weaker one, but it’s work.

Search, scans and handwriting

With Pro, Bear searches the text inside photos and PDFs on Mac, iPhone and iPad. Scanning paper into a note is free.

Bear’s help pages say handwriting in its own sketches isn’t searchable. They don’t say either way about handwriting in a photo, so we won’t claim it.

Evernote searches text in images on every plan, Free included, and it reads handwriting. If your library is mostly scanned paper and receipts, Evernote is the stronger of the two here.

Clipping the web

Both have a real web clipper, which is rarer than it should be.

Bear’s Web Clipper saves a whole page with its images, or just the part you selected. It works in Safari, Chrome and Firefox, the Chrome version works in other Chromium browsers, and it runs entirely on your device. It needs the Bear app installed on the same device, and the Safari version works on iPhone and iPad too.

Evernote’s Web Clipper saves the article, a simplified page or a screenshot, in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera and Edge on Windows. It’s still one of the best things Evernote makes.

Call this one even. We compared every replacement in Evernote Web Clipper alternatives.

Privacy and encryption

Bear Pro can encrypt individual notes with a password, unlocked with Face ID or Touch ID where your device has it. Each note gets its own key. If you forget the password, Bear can’t reset it or recover the notes. Encrypted notes show only their titles in the note list, and they don’t sync to Apple Watch.

Everything else syncs through Apple’s iCloud. Apple holds the keys by default. Turn on Advanced Data Protection and only you can decrypt your notes, except for one thing Bear states plainly: note titles and tag names stay unencrypted.

Evernote has no end-to-end encryption. Its in-note encryption hides selected text inside a note, on Mac and Windows only, and not on the Free plan.

Bear wins this one. One trade to know about: encryption and search pull against each other. We have the same trade in Harbor, and we wrote about when encrypting your notes is worth it.

AI, and getting your notes into it

Bear has no built-in AI assistant. Bear 2.10 added Siri support, so Siri knows which note you’re looking at.

What Bear does have is better than most of this category. Since Bear 2.8, it ships a command-line tool, an MCP server and a one-click Claude connector, so Claude, Cursor and other assistants can read and write your notes. Bear doesn’t list them as Pro features. Encrypted notes can be listed but never read. The catch: all three are macOS only. They’re no help from your phone or from ChatGPT’s connectors.

Evernote includes its AI Assistant, semantic search and AI Transcribe on every plan, Free included, with monthly limits by plan. Its MCP server is hosted, so it isn’t tied to one Mac, but it needs a paid plan. Evernote gives away its own AI and charges for yours. We compared every notes app with an MCP server if that’s the row you care about.

If you leave later

Bear is easy to leave. Free exports Markdown, plain text, TextBundle and RTF. Pro adds PDF, HTML, Word, JPG and ePub. On a Mac, select every note and choose File > Export Notes. Markdown is the most portable format there is, and most notes apps can read it.

Evernote exports ENEX from its desktop app, and most notes apps can read that too.

So which one

Pick Bear if everything you own is Apple and you mostly write. It’s the nicest editor in the category, it’s $29.99 a year, its encrypted notes are properly private, and its Mac MCP server is the most complete local one we’ve found. For an all-Apple writer leaving Evernote over the price, it’s the obvious first try. We’d tell a friend the same.

Stay on Evernote if you need Windows or Android, if your library is scanned paper and handwriting, or if notebooks are how your head works. Bear can’t give you the first, charges for the second, and replaces the third with tags. You pay for Evernote’s reach, and in 2026 you pay a lot more than you used to.

Where does Harbor land? We’re $99 a year, more than three times Bear Pro, and Bear is the better place to write long drafts in Markdown. We won’t pretend otherwise. What we do is Evernote’s half without Evernote’s ceilings: native apps on Mac, Windows, iPhone and iPad, and Android, plus a web app; a web clipper for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari; OCR on every plan, handwriting included; a hosted MCP server and a CLI on the one plan; and a written price promise — no increase for three years, then capped at 10% a year.

If that’s your kind of library, our one-step Evernote import keeps your notebooks and tags. Harbor vs Evernote gives us the same treatment as this page, Evernote vs Apple Notes covers the other Apple-only option, and the full alternatives roundup covers the rest.

Sources

Read on October 14, 2026:

• Bear Pro price, trial and features — Features and price of Bear Pro and bear.app
• Bear Web, Windows and Android — What about Bear for Web, Android and Windows? and Bear Web public beta
• Bear for Apple Watch — Bear for Apple Watch
• Evernote import — Migrate from Evernote and Import your notes
• Tags, links and Workspaces — How to use tags, Link notes together, Bear 2.9
• Search and sketches — Search text inside notes and How to sketch
• Web Clipper — Browser extensions
• Encryption and sync — Encrypt and lock notes, How encryption works, Syncing and privacy
• CLI, MCP server and Claude connector — Command-line interface and Bear 2.8
• Export — Export your notes
• Version history — Bear on the App Store
• Evernote plans, limits, AI and MCP — evernote.com/compare-plans and the Evernote MCP server
• Evernote search, clipper and platforms — Search text in images, Web Clipper browsers, Supported platforms

Prices change and features move. If something here is out of date, tell us and we’ll fix it — the date above is the promise.