Open source alternatives to Bear Notes

By GitHub stars it is Standard Notes, with 6,717 stars and a commit on 13 Nov. Choose Standard Notes when you need encrypted notes on Windows, Linux and Android as well as on Apple devices. Next come Beaver Notes (1,369 stars) and Zen (1,197 stars).

Yes. The code of all 5 is public under AGPL 3.0, MIT or GPL 2.0, so you can use them with no licence fee. Running one yourself costs the server and your time to look after it, and some makers also sell a hosted plan.

Start from the job you use Bear Notes for. Choose Beaver Notes when you need a private Markdown notes app on Windows or Linux as well as on a Mac. Choose Darkwrite when you want a quiet writing app with custom themes and fonts on Windows or Linux, where Bear has no app.

4 of the 5: Standard Notes, Beaver Notes, Zen and Darkwrite. Each tool's page says what it needs to run.

3 of the 5 we track had a commit in the last 30 days, among them Standard Notes, Beaver Notes and Zen. The quietest is Justnote, last changed on 3 Feb. A recent commit shows the project is kept up, not that it will stay that way.

AGPL 3.0 (3), MIT (1), GPL 2.0 (1). MIT, BSD and Apache let you change and reuse the code freely. GPL and AGPL ask you to share your changes under the same licence when you give the software to others, and AGPL also counts letting people use it over a network.

The hosting. Bear Notes's maker runs the servers for you; with an open source tool the updates, backups, security fixes and support are yours, unless you take the maker's hosted plan. Features differ too, so check what each one imports and exports before you move your data.