Bamboo vs MDReader
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Bamboo
This app is a Markdown note-taking tool for organizing knowledge and utilizing AI features. It allows users to capture ideas, write long-form content, and connect notes with wiki links. AI assistance is available for drafting, summarizing, and brainstorming, with users controlling their AI provider.
- Markdown editor with syntax highlighting
- Wiki link creation for connecting notes
- AI assistance for drafting and summarizing
- Organize notes into collections
- Cross-device synchronization
- Import and export content
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Bamboo is a Markdown notes app for writing, organizing knowledge, and using AI on your own terms. Available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac, with Web Clipper support, Bamboo helps you capture ideas anywhere and continue working across devices. Capture quick notes, long-form documents, tasks, reminders, research, meeting notes, reading highlights, and personal knowledge. Bamboo keeps your notes in Markdown so they stay portable, readable, and easy to manage. WRITE AND CAPTURE Use a focused Markdown editor with syntax highlighting, task lists, tables, wiki links, footnotes, highlights, math, images, and attachments. Keep ideas, notes, reminders, and tasks together so writing, thinking, and planning stay in one place. ORGANIZE AND CONNECT Organize notes into collections for projects, areas, archives, or research spaces. Connect ideas with wiki links, pin important notes, star favorites, and build a knowledge base that stays easy to navigate as it grows. AI ASSISTANCE, UNDER YOUR CONTROL Bamboo Pro lets you connect supported AI providers and use assistant features directly in your notes. Draft, rewrite, summarize, brainstorm ideas, and work with selected content without leaving your workspace. You stay in control of the provider and model you use. KEEP YOUR NOTES YOURS Your notes stay in Markdown, making them easy to move, back up, and keep for the long term. Search across notes, revisit recent work, import and export your content, create backups, and keep your work available across devices with optional Bamboo Pro features such as iCloud Sync, HTML export, and PDF export. Bamboo includes optional auto-renewable monthly and yearly Pro subscriptions. Payment will be charged to your Apple ID account at confirmation of purchase. Subscriptions automatically renew unless canceled at least 24 hours before the end of the current billing period. You can manage subscriptions in your App Store account settings. Privacy Policy: https://zhigui.github.io/app-docs/bamboo/privacy_policy.html Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
MDReader
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MDReader opens your Markdown files and folders and renders them properly. There is no library to import into, no account to create and no sync service in the middle. Your .md files stay exactly where you put them, and MDReader reads and writes them in place. FAST, EVEN ON BIG FILES A two-tier parser scans a document in a single pass and only fully parses the blocks you can actually see. A 10 MB file opens before other editors have finished showing a spinner, and scrolling stays smooth all the way down. RENDERS THE WHOLE OF MARKDOWN GitHub-flavoured Markdown with tables, task lists you can tick straight from reading mode, footnotes that jump both ways, YAML front matter shown as a card, LaTeX math inline and display, fenced code with syntax highlighting, and Mermaid diagrams rendered offline. AN EDITOR THAT STAYS OUT OF THE WAY Live syntax highlighting, lists that continue and renumber themselves, bold/italic/link shortcuts, find and replace, table and formula inserters, and paste an image to save it next to the document. Autosave goes through the system file coordinator, so editing alongside Obsidian, git or iCloud is safe. PICKS UP WHERE YOU LEFT OFF Reading position is restored to the pixel, per document, across relaunches, rotation and window resizes. FOLDER WORKSPACES (PRO) Open a whole folder: a repository's docs, an Obsidian vault, a Zettelkasten. Fuzzy quick-open, full-text search across every file in the folder, [[wiki-links]] with a backlinks panel, a front-matter tag browser, and read-only git status per file. Changes made by other apps are picked up in place, without losing your position. MORE IN PRO PDF export and print, publishing to GitHub Gist and Telegraph, presentation mode for slides, a custom theme editor with imported fonts, focus and typewriter modes, word-count goals, reading statistics, text-to-speech with follow-along highlighting, local version history with diffs, snippets, Vim keybindings, and an AI pack that summarises and rewrites entirely on device. BUILT FOR APPLE PLATFORMS One purchase covers iPhone, iPad and Mac. Keyboard shortcuts throughout, multiple windows, menu bar commands, a Share extension, Shortcuts actions, widgets, a URL scheme, Spotlight indexing, VoiceOver labels and Dynamic Type. PRIVACY MDReader collects nothing. No analytics SDK, no account, no server of ours to talk to. The only network traffic is what your own documents ask for, such as remote images, plus the publishing integrations you set up yourself. FREE AND PRO The reader and the single-file editor are free forever: all rendering including math and syntax highlighting, the base themes, table of contents, in-file search, HTML, Markdown and plain-text export, and position restore. Pro unlocks folder workspaces and the power features above, as a one-time purchase or as a yearly subscription with a free trial. SUBSCRIPTION AND PURCHASE DETAILS MDReader Pro (Yearly) - auto-renewable subscription, 1 year, USD 9.99 per year, including a 7-day free trial for new subscribers. MDReader Pro (Lifetime) - one-time purchase, USD 24.99, not a subscription. Payment is charged to your Apple Account at confirmation of purchase. A yearly subscription renews automatically unless auto-renew is turned off at least 24 hours before the end of the current period, and your account is charged for renewal within 24 hours before the period ends. You can manage or cancel the subscription in your Apple Account settings after purchase. Any unused portion of a free trial is forfeited when a subscription is purchased. Terms of Use (EULA): https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/ App Terms of Service: https://gelfand.dev/mdreader/terms Privacy Policy: https://gelfand.dev/mdreader/privacy
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is update cadence: MDReader at every 2 weeks against Bamboo's every 2 months. On price, ads, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Bamboo sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $2.99 per month and MDReader sells 2 in-app purchases, starting at $9.99 per year. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
Bamboo ships an update every 2 months, MDReader every 2 weeks. The most recent releases landed on October 1, 2026 and September 28, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Bamboo | MDReader |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 5.0 (1 ratings) — better | — |
| Number of ratings | 1 — better | — |
| Update frequency | Every 2 months | Every 2 weeks — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Freemium | — |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, Mac | iPhone, iPad, Mac |
| Requires iOS | 26.0 | 26.0 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 56 MB | 22 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | 志贵 陈 | Daniil Nuzhdin |
In-app purchases
Bamboo
- Monthly Pro7 Days trial$2.991 Month
- Annual Pro7 Days trial$29.991 Year
MDReader
- MDReader Pro Yearly7 Days trial$9.991 Year
- MDReader Pro$24.99








