Bear Pro costs $29.99 a year. Craft's single-user plan lists at $8 a month, which is $96 a year. That gap is the first thing to know. It's also the smaller of the two surprises I hit while checking both vendors' live pages for this comparison.
What each app is actually for
Bear is a markdown notes app for Mac, iPhone and iPad. Tags instead of folders. Fast search, clean typography, no clutter. Bear 2 added tables, footnotes, backlinks, a live table of contents and in-note search, all listed on Bear's own What's new in Bear 2 page. What I couldn't find anywhere on Bear's site is sharing or collaboration. It's a single-player tool, and it doesn't pretend otherwise.
Craft is a document editor built around blocks, nested pages and sharing. You can publish a page to a public URL, and the paid bundles put several people in a shared Space. It's closer to a designed document than a text file with tags on it. If Bear is a notebook, Craft is a notebook you can hand to someone else.
Bear's pricing, from Bear's own help page
Bear's Pro page says $2.99 monthly or $29.99 yearly, both with a 7-day free trial. One subscription covers every device signed into the same Apple ID. Pro unlocks iCloud sync, encrypting individual notes, export to PDF, HTML, DOCX and JPG, themes, app icons, and OCR search inside PDFs and images.
Sync is on that list, so anyone using both a Mac and an iPhone is paying. Bear's help library also still refers to free themes, which suggests a free version of the app exists. The front page pitches the trial-then-subscription path, though, and the static pages don't spell out everything a non-subscriber loses beyond the Pro list. Treat it as a paid app.
Craft's pricing, re-checked
Craft's pricing page matches what I saw two weeks ago. Starter is free, capped at 1,500 blocks and 1 GB of storage, with 15 AI assistant credits. Plus is one account with no caps, 50 AI credits a month and 30 days of version history instead of 7, listed at $8 a month and shown at $6.40 on the page. There's a Yearly/Monthly toggle above it, but the page doesn't say which billing period gets the discount, so check the toggle before you budget. Family is a fixed bundle of 2 to 6 Plus accounts with a shared Space, listed at $15 and shown at $12. Team is a flat $50 a month for up to 10 Plus accounts.
I looked for SSO, SAML or an admin console on that page. Nothing. Craft sells this as a personal and small-group product now, not something IT manages.
The cost math
Solo user: Bear is $29.99 a year. Craft Plus is $76.80 a year at the $6.40 price or $96 at list. Bear is roughly $47 to $66 cheaper.
Four people in a household: four Bear Pro subscriptions come to $119.96 a year, with no shared space between them. Craft Family is $144 a year at the $12 price, $180 at list, and it includes the shared Space.
Ten people: ten Bear subscriptions are $299.90 a year, with no collaboration at all. Craft Team is $600 a year flat, or $5 a head per month when every seat is filled.
Bear wins on price every time. But only Craft does the thing a group actually buys notes software for.
I had Craft's platform support and API wrong
Craft's own footer links to downloads for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Windows (x64 and ARM64 installers), Vision Pro, and Android through Google Play. I checked the Play Store listing and it resolves. Our product database, and my earlier Craft vs Notion post, said Craft had no Android app and no public API. Both were wrong, and I've corrected that post.
It matters here. The old argument was that Craft and Bear were both Apple-only tools, so platform couldn't separate them. It can. Bear runs on Mac, iPhone and iPad, plus a browser version. Craft runs nearly everywhere.
Automation and AI
Craft's homepage advertises MCP connections for Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code and Raycast, plus API integrations, and its pricing table lists API and MCP access at 100 requests a minute on both the free and Plus plans. It also has a built-in AI assistant, with the larger models reserved for Plus. Bear's help library lists Siri Shortcuts support and a CLI for AI and scripting. I didn't test either app's automation, so read that as what's on offer, not what works well. If you want your notes reachable from an AI tool, Craft is the one advertising it loudest.
Security and data handling
Bear syncs through Apple's CloudKit, and Bear's syncing and privacy page says data in CloudKit is encrypted with Apple's keys and that Bear doesn't want access to it. It supports Apple's Advanced Data Protection, so only the holder of your iCloud credentials can decrypt notes. The catch, stated plainly on that page: note titles and tag names stay unencrypted so Pro features keep working.
Bear Web works in any major browser using your iCloud login. The page says notes aren't saved locally and aren't passed to any server other than iCloud, and that with Advanced Data Protection on you must have two-factor authentication to sign in. That's a small trust surface: Apple and Bear's client. The flip side is that IT has no admin layer over any of it.
Craft's security page is more formal. It lists regular third-party penetration tests, continuous vulnerability scanning, encryption at rest and in transit, security reviews across the development lifecycle, and a 72-hour breach notification commitment. It has sections for SOC 2 certification and GDPR compliance, and says more documentation is available on request. Ask for the SOC 2 report before you trust it with anything client-facing. A heading on a web page is not an audit report.
Lock-in and getting your notes out
A notes app is a bet that you'll still want it in five years, so look at the exit before you commit. Bear's Pro page lists export to PDF, HTML, DOCX and JPG, and Bear's help library has separate pages for exporting notes and tags plus import guides for Day One, UpNote and plain files. The dependency is Apple. Sync runs on iCloud, and even Bear Web needs your iCloud login. If you ever leave Apple hardware, your notes come with you as exports, not as a synced library.
I did not verify Craft's export formats on the live site, so I'm not going to quote them. Check before you move a large library in. Do it with both apps: spend your trial week on your real notes, not sample ones, and run an export before you decide. Ten minutes of testing beats two years of regret.
Where each one wins
Bear wins for one person writing on Apple hardware who wants the cheapest, fastest markdown editor with tags. That's a clear win, and $29.99 a year is hard to argue with.
Craft wins the moment a second person is involved, or the moment anyone's phone is Android or their laptop runs Windows. Sharing, published pages and shared Spaces are the point of the product.
The recommendation
If you're one person on Apple devices, buy Bear Pro yearly at $29.99. Nothing Craft adds is worth $47 to $66 more per year unless you share your notes. If you share with even one other person, or your devices aren't all Apple, Craft's Family or Team price is fair.
For work notes that need central access control, I wouldn't pick either. Bear has no admin layer and Craft's pricing page shows no SSO. Personal and family use, fine. Client data, no.
For more on Craft's pricing and how it compares to a database-first tool, read the Craft vs Notion comparison. If local files and plain text matter more to you than either app's design, the Notion vs Obsidian refresh covers that side of the market.