Blog·14 August 2026

Skein vs Bear

Both write Markdown. Only one of them gives you the files. Here is the difference that makes, and the several places Bear is the better answer.

Bear is the best-looking note app on the Mac and has been for years. If you have used it you already know the feeling: you type, it gets out of the way, and the result looks like something rather than like a form. I am not going to pretend that is a small thing, because it is most of why people love it.

This comparison turns on one row of the table, and everything else follows from it.

Where your notes actually are

Bear writes Markdown syntax. Bear does not store Markdown files. Its own documentation is unusually clear about this: notes live in a SQLite database inside a private container, at a path you can find but are told to open read-only, with a warning that editing it can leave Bear unable to migrate your data at the next update.

Skein’s notes are .md files in a folder you picked. Delete Skein and they are still there. Open one in TextEdit and it makes sense. Put the folder in git and a diff is a diff. Point another Mac app at the same folder and it just works, because there is nothing to import.

That distinction sounds pedantic until the day it is not. “Markdown app” is used for both of these things and the difference is the whole question of whether you own your notes or hold a licence to read them through one particular window.

A Markdown note open in Skein, with its YAML properties shown as a table and the vault listed on the left — A note in Skein. The file behind it is the file on your disk, with nothing translating between the two.

The rest of the table

	Skein	Bear
Your notes live in	A folder you chose, as .md files	A SQLite database inside a private container
Price	Free	Free tier. Pro $2.99/month or $29.99/year
Sync	None. Put the folder in iCloud Drive yourself	iCloud, and it is what Pro buys
Platforms	macOS 14+	macOS, iOS, iPadOS. Web in beta. No Windows or Android, stated
Download	11.1 MB	38 MB
Organised by	Folders, links, tags and a graph	Tags, nested several levels deep
Graph view	Yes, local to the note you are reading	Not documented
Canvas	Yes, in the open JSON Canvas format	No
Templates	Built in	No built-in feature. Bear’s own guide suggests workarounds

What Bear does better, and it is not a short list

It is on your phone. Mac, iPhone and iPad, syncing over iCloud. Skein is Mac only. For a lot of people that ends the comparison and it should.
Tags, done properly.Bear’s nested tags are the best implementation of the idea on the Mac, and since 2.9 any tag can become a workspace of its own. Skein has tags and does not have that.
It is beautiful.Themes, typography, the way a heading settles onto the line. Skein follows your system light and dark and offers you no themes at all, on purpose, and that is a smaller answer than Bear’s.
Encryption and app lock. Per-note encryption, in the app. Skein has neither; your files are as protected as your disk is.
OCR search inside images and PDFs. Skein searches your Markdown and nothing else.
Its privacy story is genuinely clean.Bear runs no servers of its own: sync goes through Apple’s CloudKit and nowhere else. That is a real answer, not a marketing one.

What Skein does that Bear does not

Gives you the files. The whole argument, in four words.
Links between notes as a first-class idea. Bear has wikilinks and backlinks and they work well. Skein adds the local graph, unlinked mentions, an outline and outgoing links in one inspector, because connecting notes is the point of the app rather than a feature in it.
A canvas. An infinite board in the open JSON Canvas format, which means the same file opens in Obsidian too.
Live queries. A fenced block that asks a question of your vault and renders the answer as a list, table, board or calendar.
Templates, in core, with dates, prompts and a cursor position.
It is free, with no tier. Not free-with-an-upsell: there is nothing to buy.

Who should use which

Use Bear if you want your notes on your phone, if you organise by tag rather than by folder, if you want the app to be lovely to look at, or if you need per-note encryption. Twenty-nine dollars a year for what Bear does is not a hard sell, and I would not argue with anyone who pays it.

Use Skeinif the sentence “my notes are files in a folder” matters to you, or if you want the connections between notes to be the thing the app is about. If you have a Bear library and you are curious, export it to Markdown first, put the result in a folder, and open that folder in Skein. Nothing is imported and nothing is converted, because there is nothing to convert.

Skein is free, macOS 14 and later. Your Bear library is untouched either way.

Figures checked 14 August 2026, from bear.app and Bear’s Mac App Store listing (version 2.9.3). Bear’s prices vary by region. Where I have written “not documented” it means I could not find the feature in Bear’s own documentation, not that Bear has said it will never exist. If any of this is wrong, tell me and I will fix it.