Innerholm vs Bear: Journaling-only vs Notes+Journal hybrid, which is right for you?

The core difference: one app vs two

Bear's strength is flexibility. It handles anything you want to write, meeting notes, project research, recipes, travel logs, and journal entries all in one app. Tags create a lightweight organizational layer. It is an excellent choice if you want one writing home for everything.

Innerholm is intentionally narrower. Every design decision, the warm writing surface, the calendar dot view, On This Day, is made for the journaler who writes about their life, thoughts, and feelings. Innerholm does not try to replace your notes app; it does one thing for a specific kind of person who writes for themselves.

If you currently use Bear mostly for journaling and find yourself wishing it understood the journal context better, Innerholm is worth trying. If you use Bear for everything and journaling is one of many use cases, Innerholm would be a second app rather than a replacement.

Head-to-head comparison

Bear Pro pricing as of May 2026. "Partial" (amber) = feature exists but with caveats.

Who each app is better for

The platform gap: Bear is Apple-only

Bear has no Windows app, no Android app, and no web app outside of iCloud.com sync access. If you write on an Android phone, a Windows laptop, or a Chromebook, Bear is simply not an option.

Innerholm is web-based. It runs in any browser on any operating system. This is a meaningful difference for anyone who does not live exclusively in the Apple ecosystem, and for anyone who wants to write on a device they don't personally own (a work PC, a library computer, a partner's laptop).

Privacy: how they compare

Bear syncs via iCloud, so your notes are processed by Apple's infrastructure. Apple has strong privacy commitments at the platform level, but Bear's own privacy policy does not explicitly rule out scanning note content for service improvement. Bear's local-first storage model means data lives on your devices first, a meaningful privacy advantage for users who are cautious about cloud storage.

Innerholm stores regular journals server-side (required for sync and full-text search), with an explicit commitment: no content scanning, no AI training on your entries, every data-touching feature off by default. For anything you want kept from the server entirely, you can turn on end-to-end encryption for a single journal. Titles and bodies are sealed on your device under a key derived from your passphrase that never reaches us. There is also a Local Journal Mode that keeps a journal fully on-device.

For most journalers both apps are trustworthy and the choice is which trust model you prefer: Apple's platform trust (Bear) or Innerholm's explicit no-scanning commitment. If you want zero-knowledge privacy for one part of your writing, Innerholm's per-journal encryption is the difference. The trade is that search cannot reach inside an encrypted journal.

Read Innerholm's full privacy FAQ →

Importing from Bear to Innerholm

Bear exports notes as Markdown files with YAML frontmatter (title, tags, creation date). Innerholm reads exactly that: zip up your Bear export, upload it, and each .md file becomes one journal entry. You can preview the first entries before anything is saved.

The import maps:

• Note body (Markdown) → Innerholm rich text
• YAML tags → Innerholm tags
• YAML date → entry creation timestamp

ZIPs up to 50 MB. And you can leave the same way you came: Innerholm exports back to a Markdown ZIP, free, so your notes stay yours in a format Bear can read.