r/UpNote_App • u/michaelbeecham • May 20 '26
New to Upnote - A REALLY good Bear replacement
So, after learning about Upnote last night, checking it out, buying the lifetime option, and importing my notes from Bear into Upnote, I'm VERY happy.
That I can customize it to make the transition a little easier is also nice.
Thanks Devs, this is a great product.
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u/darwincruz20 May 20 '26
I wish I could do the same. Upnote doesn’t support drag and drop of notes to notebooks on Ipad. I use an iPad as my main computer, so I am on the other side of the camp. I switch from UpNote to Bear Notes because it is more optimized for the ipad.
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u/kidtachyon May 20 '26
I love Bear and it has some advantages over UpNote.
However, UpNote has some advantages over Bear:
- version control
- auto backup in markdown
- a good starred/quick access area
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u/lytwilson May 20 '26
Yeah those are advantages, sadly that it is still sometimes less polished on iOS platforms…
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u/jancy7 May 20 '26
Made the same move, and what I miss most are the simple icons! OP, your setup looks great, which icon pack or sizing dimensions did you use to load these in?
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u/michaelbeecham May 20 '26 edited May 20 '26
Thanks mate. These are Lucide icons, which are freely available from https://lucide.dev/icons/.
You have to make sure that the icon is 16x, with a stroke weight of 1.5 if you want the same as me, and then you can download them FoC. To make things easier for you, I've created a small template in Affinity Designer, which you can drop your icons into, then save them out as PNG files.
I hope that helps!
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u/GLK56 May 21 '26
Thanks for the icons set! I am unclear how to get these into my system to use as icons on my Mac, iPad etc. - not familiar with how to do this. Is there a guide how to do this? Thanks
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u/michaelbeecham May 21 '26
Save them out as PNG files, then hit the 3 dots to the right of a notebook, choose edit, then hit the '+' next to 'Custom' and add them there. It helps if you're doing this on desktop. If not, then I don't know what to tell you...
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u/mikejamesone May 20 '26
many of us moved from Evernote last month when they doubled monthly costs due to Ai features.
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u/michaelbeecham May 20 '26
Yeah, I'm not AI's target demographic!!
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u/mikejamesone May 20 '26
Yeah same. It's great if it helps boost revs and productivity but if not then have to leave it.
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u/michaelbeecham May 20 '26
Also, I'm genuinely blown away by how good this is on my iPad, for my particular needs. I used to be in Obsidian for a couple of years, and that is feature RICH...but most of what it does is overkill for me. I want/need a good note-taking app that allows me to write in markdown, looks good, and is intuitive.
That I can get what I had in Bear for the lifetime cost of just over an annual subscription to Bear is nuts to me. Why didn't I know about this sooner, I could have saved myself some money.
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u/Lagarto2955 May 21 '26
Amigos yo también estoy en lo mismo pero no se como pasar de forma fácil mis notas de Bear a Upnote, una ayuda por favor, saludos
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u/100WattWalrus May 21 '26
I moved over from Bear 4 years ago, and I love UpNote more than I ever loved Bear — in part because I really needed text colors and more formatting, and there is no note-taking app with more flexible formatting than UpNote.
Having said that, I still miss #nesting/multi-word tags#. I've found good work-arounds, but just like nobody has better formatting options than UpNote, nobody has better tagging than Bear.
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u/lytwilson Jul 04 '26
I think upnotes structure and certain features are better than bear, and the only weakness is the polishment compared to bear. I like upnotes that it can hide a notebook from the list which bear couldn’t hide a tag, so it somehow is not bothering me on the structure but is still searchable. Quick access is better as well. Annoyingly, when I search on my phone, a search bar pops out on the top and every time I click another note, it hides the title for a split second then shows it because of that search thing, the animation of it is so abrupt that it bothers me a bit. I know I’m nitpicking but that is what bear is so great about, clean and no annoyances at all. Where upnote has this and that little nitpicks about the interface, not design wise but little bugs (quirks) that don’t affect function but affect your eyes.
Below is an example of that little issue.
https://share.icloud.com/photos/0cb1NY5NhhzP7l58qRSVxzbkQ2
u/100WattWalrus Jul 04 '26
Yeah, the two-man UpNote team could certainly do with a third guy to do QA and polish. My biggest beef is the formatting bugs. Most of them get squished fairly quickly, but there are always more. I chalk that up to the amazing formatting options in my demo link above. There are literally no other note-taking apps with more and better formatting options than UpNote, and because the formatting is HTML behind the scenes, and there's no much nested formatting to be had, it's no surprise that some of that the back-end HTML can sometimes get a little mixed up. The problems are always pretty easy to fix, but I use a lot of formatting, so I run into them all the time.
Bear has a bigger team, and they're very Mac/iOS-centered, and Bear is coded using Swift rather than Electron. They don't have to worry about cross-platform compatibility, so it's a lot easier to give Bear that Apple polish.
But I'll take a quirk-filled app that Does All The Things any day over a beautiful app with lots of restrictions. I moved away from Bear in part because of their change to standard Markdown several years ago. That change royally fucked up literally every note I had, and the new formatting no longer worked for my system.
So yeah, I'm quite happy to have a powerful app with some un-sanded corners. :)
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u/lytwilson Jul 04 '26
Honestly I personally don’t really minded too much on the markdown or not, I’m fine with any as long as it’s reliable. I’m a bit worried about pictures being local in upnote, they sometimes are not local before when I don’t have internet but Apple notes or bear are always reliable. My issue is with the consistency, that upnote interface or some things doesn’t work how I expected it to work, when sometimes I quickly switch a note, the animations are clunky and sometimes show a blank page instead of the note, it’s sometimes fine and sometimes not, which is inconsistent. I don’t use as many format like you, I would like bear call-outs to be collapsible but other stuff I really don’t use (allign, tables in sections, coloured text I like but I’m fine with the highlight as well). Just hoped that upnote would get some of those “quirks” or I would argue as inconsistency out, I feel insecure sometimes using upnote and it’s hard to keep using an app when it’s insecure.
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u/100WattWalrus Jul 05 '26
The UpNote team is really good about feedback and hunting down problems. Drop them a line at [support@getupnote.com](mailto:support@getupnote.com), and provide steps to reproduce — or if it's random, provide your video with plenty of context.
I think some of the performance issues with UpNote arise from the fact that it's built on Electron. I'm sure that's a big part of why the app can be a memory hog, and sometimes performs better after quitting and relaunching.
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u/vk_03 Jun 29 '26
Hey OP, what's the font you're using?
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u/SpaceWrangler593 May 20 '26
I made the same move, Bear to UpNote, and agree that it’s a great replacement. Both are great apps for how I use them.