A Second Look At The Bear App

I used Bear for a while a few years ago as a tool for clipping web pages for later reading, something it is very good at. But eventually, I decided to go with DEVONthink, mainly because it was already bought and paid for.

Recently, prodded by a post by Jatan Mehta, I decided to have another look at Bear:

I’m impressed by the Bear app’s ability to import and export an exceptionally wide range of file formats compared to the 20+ note-taking apps I looked into. I was on a quest to find an app that can reliably import entire blog archives as well as contents of any individual web pages I throw at it with high fidelity. Bear does both.

There is a lot to like about Bear. It still does an amazing job of converting web pages to Markdown text, it’s fast, and it can import and export your text quickly and easily.

However, there’s one thing that gives me pause. And it’s not the Pro subscription which unlocks additional features — that is, in my opinion, very reasonably priced.

My issue with Bear is that it stores all your text in an SQLite database. While third-party tools can access that storage format, doing so is not a straightforward exercise.

DEVONthink’s databases, by comparison, are file structures that you can open and navigate from Finder. And, crucially, the files you put into DEVONthink are easy to locate and pull out. (DEVONthink can also index and reference external files and folders, allowing for even greater data portability.)

While the Bear team are hard at work on a new version, for now, I’ll be sticking with DEVONthink for the reasons I’ve outlined above. I realise that DEVONthink is going to be overkill for a lot of folks, and I can highly recommend Bear if you’re looking for a good note-taking system.