Bear vs Ulysses: Notes app or writing desk (2026)
Bear wins if you write many short things and want them all in one beautiful place. Ulysses wins if you write few long things and need them finished. That is the entire comparison and everything else follows from it. Bear has tags, wikilinks, and backlinks, and it is a notes app. Ulysses has goals, deadlines, a sheet library, and direct publishing to WordPress, Ghost, and Medium, and it has no wikilinks, no backlinks, and no graph. Both are native Apple apps on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. Bear is $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year; Ulysses is $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year.
Quick verdict
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You are 40,000 words into a book with a deadline in March
Pick Ulysses
Word goals, deadlines, and the export pipeline exist for exactly this.
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You write a few hundred words a day across dozens of tagged notes
Pick Bear
Tags, wikilinks, and backlinks fit small linked notes; Ulysses has none of them.
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The notes have piled into thousands and you want them as files with a graph
Pick Valutorio
Neither app stores plain .md files you own, and neither has a graph view.
| Bear | Ulysses | Valutorio | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Platforms | macOS, iOS, iPadOS | macOS, iOS, iPadOS | macOS 14+ |
| Engine | native | native | native Swift + Rust |
| Data format | markdown-style notes stored in a SQLite database (not individual files) | proprietary markdown-based library (iCloud); can open external plain-text folders | plain markdown folder |
| Pricing | free (single device); Bear Pro $2.99/mo or $29.99/yr (new customers since Bear 2) | subscription $5.99/mo or $39.99/yr | paid app, Mac App Store (pricing at launch) |
| Sync | iCloud only (requires Pro); no alternative cloud providers | iCloud sync across Apple devices | Valutorio Sync (subscription): automatic, encrypted, conflict-free; personal MCP endpoint for AI assistants included |
| Offline | yes | yes | yes |
| Wikilinks | yes | no | yes |
| Backlinks | yes | no | yes |
| Graph view | no | no | yes |
| Open source | no | no | no |
Competitor rows come from public vendor documentation and pricing pages, checked August 2026. Valutorio rows describe the shipping macOS app.
What each app thinks a document is
In Bear a note is a note. It has tags, it can link to other notes with wikilinks, backlinks show what pointed at it, and it sits in a list you scroll. The model assumes you will have a lot of them and that most will be short.
In Ulysses a document is a sheet, and sheets combine. You write chapter three as its own sheet, group it with the rest of the book, and glue the group together at export. The library is built for assembly, which is what a manuscript needs and what a shopping list does not.
Winner either Many small notes or few large manuscripts. The right answer is whichever describes your actual output.
Finishing things
Ulysses is the strongest long-form writing environment on the Mac and the surrounding machinery is why. Word-count goals with deadlines attached, a distraction-free editor that gets out of the way, and publishing straight to WordPress, Ghost, or Medium without an intermediate file.
Bear does not compete here. Bear Pro exports to Markdown, PDF, DOCX, and HTML, which is enough to hand a draft to somebody, and there are no goals, no deadlines, and no publishing destinations. If your writing has an editor waiting at the end of it, Ulysses saves you steps every single week.
Winner Ulysses Goals, deadlines, and direct publishing are Ulysses' whole reason to exist, and Bear has none of them.
Linking, and where Bear pulls ahead
Bear has wikilinks and backlinks. Type a link, and the target note shows you what points at it. Tags do the filing, nesting included. For a set of notes that reference each other, that is a working system, and it is more than most writing apps offer. Bear has no graph view, so there is no overview of the whole set.
Ulysses has no wikilinks, no backlinks, and no graph at all. That is a deliberate decision for a writing app and it becomes a problem the moment the Ulysses library turns into the place you keep what you know. Groups and filters tell you where a sheet is filed. Nothing tells you which other sheet mentioned the same idea last year.
Winner Bear Bear has wikilinks and backlinks; Ulysses has neither, and no graph either.
Where the words are actually stored
Bear keeps its markdown-style notes inside a SQLite database that lives in the app, so there is no document on disk to open. Search is fast and tags are tidy as a result, and no other program can open note number 812, because on your filesystem it is not a document. Sync is iCloud and only iCloud, with no Dropbox, no Drive, and no self-hosted option, and the community request thread for other providers has been open a long time.
Ulysses keeps sheets in a proprietary markdown-based library synced through iCloud, and portability worries about that format come up regularly. It has one feature Bear lacks entirely, which is external folders: point Ulysses at a folder of plain markdown on disk and it edits those files directly. That single feature is the escape hatch for anyone who wants their text to exist outside an app.
Winner Ulysses External folders let Ulysses edit plain files on disk; Bear's notes never leave its database.
The bill, every year, forever
Bear is free on a single device, and Pro costs $2.99 monthly or $29.99 annually for anyone who arrived with Bear 2 or later. Sync across devices needs Pro, and so do the good export formats. Ulysses is subscription-only at $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year, with no free tier at all, and it shows up constantly in subscription-fatigue complaints.
Five years on Bear's annual plan is around $150 and five years of Ulysses is around $200. Neither figure is outrageous for software you open daily, and both are recurring costs on text you wrote yourself. The awkward case is paying both, which plenty of Apple writers do because the apps genuinely do different jobs.
Winner Bear $29.99 a year against $39.99, and Bear has a free single-device tier while Ulysses has none.
A third option
The option both sides overlook
Both apps here keep your text inside their own container: Bear in a SQLite database, Ulysses in an iCloud library. Valutorio inverts that. The vault is a folder and each note is a .md file you can open in Finder, edit in another editor while Valutorio runs, and read on a machine that has never heard of it. Wikilinks autocomplete in under 0.5 ms, backlinks arrive with the sentence around them at 0.65 µs a lookup, and the force-directed graph draws 2,000 files from a 10 ms snapshot. Every save commits and pushes to a git remote you own in 111 ms, with nothing billed monthly. Because Ulysses reads external folders, a Valutorio vault can be a Ulysses external folder, and you can draft there and index here.
It is macOS 14 or later. No iPhone app, no iPad app, no writing goals, no publishing.
What each one costs
Bear is free on one device and $2.99 a month or $29.99 a year for Pro, which is where sync and the MD, PDF, DOCX, and HTML export set sit. Ulysses is $5.99 a month or $39.99 a year with no free tier whatsoever. Over five years that is roughly $150 against $200, close enough that price should not decide this. What should decide it is whether you are producing notes or manuscripts, because paying $29.99 a year for a writing app with no goals or paying $39.99 a year for a notes app with no backlinks are both bad trades in the wrong direction.
Who should choose which
Choose Bear if
- Your output is many short notes instead of a few long documents.
- You want wikilinks, backlinks, and nested tags across everything you write.
- $29.99 a year and a usable free single-device tier suit you better.
Choose Ulysses if
- You write long-form and need word goals with deadlines attached.
- You publish to WordPress, Ghost, or Medium straight from the editor.
- You want external folders so your text can live as plain files on disk.
Choose Valutorio if
- You want every note as a .md file in a folder you own, not rows in an app database.
- You want a filterable graph over a few thousand notes, which neither app has.
- You want git sync you control with no annual subscription behind it.
Questions people ask
Can I use Bear and Ulysses together?
Yes, and quite a few Apple writers do. Bear collects notes, research, and daily jotting; Ulysses is where a piece gets drafted and finished. The two do not share storage, so moving text between them means copy and paste or a Markdown export from Bear Pro. Untidy, and less work than forcing either app to do the other's job.
Which one is better for research notes?
Bear, without much argument. It has wikilinks, backlinks, and nested tags, and Ulysses has none of those. Bear has no graph view either, so an overview of how a few thousand notes connect is beyond both of them. That is the point where a markdown vault becomes the better tool for the research half of your work.
Do either of these keep my writing as plain files?
Ulysses can, through external folders, which let it edit plain markdown that lives outside its library. Bear cannot: notes sit in a SQLite database inside the app and no other editor can open them directly. If files on disk are what you want, that difference is the most important sentence on this page.
Is Bear Pro enough to replace Ulysses for a long article?
For a 2,000-word post, probably. Bear Pro exports to Markdown, PDF, DOCX, and HTML and the editor is a pleasure. For a book, no. There are no word goals, no deadlines, no sheet assembly, and no publishing integrations, and those absences compound over a manuscript in a way they never do over a blog post.
Do both apps work on iPhone?
Yes. Bear runs on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS, and Ulysses covers the same three platforms. Neither has a Windows or Android app. Bear's cross-device sync requires the Pro subscription, and Ulysses has no free tier for it to be behind.
Related comparisons
This comparison is published by the Valutorio team. Competitor details verified August 2026 from public sources; corrections welcome. All comparisons · What Valutorio is