Different jobs, not a replacement
Bear is one of the most beautiful note apps ever made. Apple-only, Markdown, tag-based, and obsessed with writing experience. If your goal is to enjoy the act of taking a note, very few apps come close.
Hjarni is a different job. It is built so that your notes are useful to ChatGPT and Claude, available across devices, and shareable with a team. The writing experience is plain. The point is what your AI can do with what you've written.
Personal capture versus AI-readable memory
Bear lives on your devices. It is private, polished, and personal. As of Bear 2.8, AI can read your Bear notes too: BearCLI ships a local MCP server, plus a one-click Claude connector. MCP clients like Claude Code and Cursor can search, create, and edit notes on a Mac. The catch is in the architecture. The MCP server runs locally through the macOS app, with no hosted endpoint, so remote clients cannot reach it. You cannot read your Bear notes from Claude on your phone, from ChatGPT, or from a Windows machine.
Hjarni makes the opposite tradeoff. Notes are stored where AI can read them through a hosted MCP server, so any client on any device connects to the same notes. Folder-level AI instructions shape behavior, and teams can share knowledge bases.
Bear is where the writing feels good. Hjarni is where the writing keeps working for you, with your AI.
A concrete workflow difference
You take meeting notes for a year. In Bear, you tag, organize, and revisit them in a lovely editor. The notes stay personal.
In Hjarni, the same notes feed Claude when you ask "what did we decide about pricing last quarter?" or ChatGPT when you ask it to draft a follow-up email using the same history. The notes do more work because something else is reading them.
When Bear is the better fit
If you live in the Apple ecosystem, write a lot of personal notes, and care about the writing experience above all else, Bear is excellent. It is especially strong for journals, drafts, and short-form thinking that does not need to leave your devices.
Why some Bear users add Hjarni
Most people who add Hjarni do not delete Bear. They keep Bear for personal writing and use Hjarni for the notes that need to be read by AI assistants or shared with a team. Customer interviews. Architecture decisions. Style guides. Anything you'd rather not paste into a chat five times.
The wall is Apple, not the writing
Ask why people leave Bear and the answer is rarely the editor. It is that Bear never leaves Apple's walls. No Android, no Windows, no real web. When your work laptop is a PC, when you want a note on an Android phone, or when you want to open something from a browser on a machine that is not yours, Bear simply is not there. It is the single most-cited reason long-time users move on, and no amount of polish in the editor changes it. The same boundary shapes Bear's AI: its team keeps the MCP server local and Mac-bound by design, so the only assistants that can reach your notes are the ones running on that one Mac.
Hjarni takes the other path. The same notes open in any browser, and a hosted read-and-write MCP server lets ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, or Copilot both read and update them from any device. That is the pairing: use your notes wherever you happen to be, and let your assistant change them when the facts change, not just read them back. Edits land as named, visible notes you can review and revert, so a wrong write is easy to spot and undo. The case is not that Bear is closed to AI. It is that Bear's AI, like Bear itself, stops at the edge of your Apple devices.
Practical questions
Bear exports as Markdown. Hjarni's ZIP importer takes that export and preserves your structure. Tags map to Hjarni tags; folders are created from your tag hierarchy if you use one.