Bear is one of the apps that taught me to care about typography and plain text. I actually use Bear every day for notes — it's my favorite notes app by a wide margin and I'm not pretending otherwise. The thing is, I tried journaling in it and it never quite worked. You can't pick a date for a note, you can't go back to a specific day and write into it, and there's no calendar to look at the year as a whole. That's the job a journal does, and Bear was never trying to do it.
The short version
- What it's for. Bear is a notes app. Cozy is a journal, with date, mood, location, tags, and a calendar built in.
- Photos. Both let you add photos. Cozy ties them to a date, a mood, and a place, like a real journal.
- Where your writing lives. Bear keeps notes in its own database. Cozy keeps every entry as a file in a folder on your computer.
- How you pay. Bear Pro is $2.99/month or $29.99/year. Cozy is $35 once for desktop, with Cozy for iPhone included.
Different jobs
Bear is built for notes: quick captures, snippets, longer pieces of writing all sitting together. It rewards organizing with tags, links, and nested notes. You can shape it into a journal, but that's your work, not Bear's.
Cozy is shaped like a journal already. You open it, today is there waiting, and you write. The mood goes in one tap. The photos sit next to the entry they belong to. There's nothing to organize.
Plain files vs. a database
Bear stores notes in its own database and lets you export them. Cozy skips the database entirely. Every entry is a plain text file in a folder you choose. You can open that folder right now and read your journal in any text editor.
That matters more than it sounds. Plain text files are the one format that every app, every operating system, and every backup tool already knows how to open. If you ever want to move your journal into another writing app, you don't need an import script. You just point that app at the folder. With Bear, you have to export first, and the export is the moment things get lost in translation.
If Cozy disappears tomorrow, your journal is still on your computer, in a format that has outlived every app I've ever used.
Pricing
Bear has a free tier and Bear Pro at $2.99/month or $29.99/year. That's the subscription that unlocks themes, sync, and exports.
Cozy is $35, once, for the desktop app, and Cozy for iPhone comes with it. No subscription. A single license covers it on every Mac and Windows you own.
Sync
Bear syncs through its own iCloud service, included in Pro. Cozy doesn't run a sync service. Because your journal is a folder of files, you can put it inside iCloud, Dropbox, or any similar service and it syncs the same way your photos and documents do. One caveat if you use Cozy for iPhone: keep the folder in iCloud Drive, because that's the only place an iOS app is allowed to read from.
So which one is for you?
If you want a beautiful notes app that holds everything from a grocery list to a long essay, Bear is hard to beat. Like I said, I still use it every day for exactly that.
If you want a desktop journal that opens on today, asks how you're feeling, keeps your entries as files you own, and is paid for once, that's Cozy.
Comparing other apps? Read Cozy vs Day One or Cozy vs Obsidian.