Ask HN: What Pocket alternatives did you move to?
Since mozilla announced the sunsetting of pocket, I started looking for alternatives, including building a light version for my personal use. But nothing came out of my research.
What options are there and how are you transitioning?
I use Obsidian Web Clipper [0] with the Relay Obsidian plugin [1] (I'm the author) for syncing.
Web clipper converts websites to markdown and puts them into your Obsidian vault, and then Relay can sync subfolders in your vault to make sure you have a copy on all of your devices (even between a work and personal vault for example).
Relay is also collaborative, so I frequently clip things, clean them up a bit, and move them into shared folders (like docs pages).
I like the feeling of local-first combined with a malleable UX. Especially for the pocket use-case, offline-capable is a must for me so I can catch up on reading when I'm flying or otherwise off-grid.
[0] https://obsidian.md/clipper
[1] https://relay.md
I use Readwise (and Obsidian).
I’ve been working on my own Pocket replacement for the past few months. I was the head of product at Pocket in 2018/19, and ever since I left, I’ve had this itch to build my own version. Mozilla shutting it down finally gave me the excuse I needed.
https://savewithfolio.com/
Folio lets you save articles from anywhere, has a lovely reading view, lets you listen to articles with some really nice text-to-speech voices, and access all your saves offline across all of your devices. If you enjoyed Pocket, you'll feel right at home! It’s still early days but all the core features are solid and working well.
Pocket imports are available via their API (though it’s been a little flaky lately), and I’m wrapping up file imports from Pocket, Instapaper, Matter, Raindrop, and Readwise so it should be easy to make the switch really soon.
Lots of fun stuff planned ahead. I’d love to have you join us if you’re looking for a new home!
It would help if you posted some UI images for the web app so I could have a look without having to signup
Thanks, good feedback!
Can you bring back the old Pocket recommendation system that had a finite number of articles recommended per day / per refresh window? I loved having an app to discover articles that wasn't an infinity pool, and stopped using it after the redesign.
Yes, that's the plan! We have the beginnings of this today. Excited to make it a lot better over time.
Amazing. I downloaded it. Hope you can find a way to make it sustainable.
Does Folio actually copy the content (i.e. if the original article is removed, Folio still has it) or does it function as a collection of bookmarks that it changes the presentation of?
Yes, we copy the content. We store both the original HTML and a copy of the extracted text as markdown. The text is what is synced to your device.
Great! Is there an export feature? I'd like to read articles on my e-reader, ideally as epub.
Not yet, but it's high on the list! Which e-reader do you use?
Thanks! I use a PocketBook.
Even a markdown export with images would be nice, but epub would be great.
Thank you for answering! I'll be giving this a shot sometime :)
Did you use flutter to write the app. Asking because the UI looks exactly the same on all platforms.
It's React Native which has been great. Still some work to do to make things really nice on large screens but overall a great experience.
nice, i last used react native 3 years ago, been using flutter since, bit will try it with my new project and compare performance.
Do you have an API?
We don't have a public API yet. When things stabilize, we definitely will!
I came to the realization (through another commenter on HN) that I never actually read things I save. It’s just where my good intentions go to die. If it’s not worth reading in the moment, I don’t read it. I’ve been using a little bit of AI summaries to get more context from an article if I’m not actually going to read it, or want to see if it’s worth reading.
Chiming in with a slightly different perspective: I often bookmark things I see in passing that might not be useful now but may in the future based on things I know I want to do.
Case studies in certain engineering/programming tasks, something I read that I found useful and want to have handy to share with others in the future, project ideas or notes for long-running efforts I pursue and sometimes want a "bucket to pull from" for instance.
While it's certainly true that I probably _use_ 10-20% of what I bookmark, I don't think it would be possible to realize the same positive outcomes without the 80% that I don't. (Just last week I was able to braindump a large piles of 'examples/essays I found helpful learning about neural network optimization' to one of my engineers because I'd kept them handy after they helped me.)
I should say though, I sense this is a slightly different use case than the "I want to read this article just to read it" bookmarks where I know I never will, which is certainly something I've experienced but is a minority case in my life nowadays, so I wanted to vouch for productive scenarios too.
Same. I used to read a bunch of things offline using Instapaper, but that was when I commuted on the tube (no signal, then), now I hardly commute. I still save things (in a text file) but try to save them with grepable keywords, so I can find them more easily later.
Same
same.
Shhh don’t ruin the hype train ! We need to get the vc money in those startups going ! /s
I'm self hosting Readeck (https://readeck.org/en/) and I really like it. It's nicer than Pocket was, the website extraction seems to work better, and it can't ever be shut down.
For my Kobo, I wrote a mod that lets me redirect Pocket API requests, and a small proxy server that translates Pocket API calls into Readeck calls.
So far it's working flawlessly and my Kobo is using its built in Pocket viewer for Readeck instead. I'm hoping to open source it soon so others can use it.
Self-hosting options are invaluable because it is the only way you truly own all your data.
Interested!
Readwise.io FTW. Saves all kinds of online stuff. The iPhone & iPad apps sync seamlessly and have quite-good text-to-speech recognition for most of it — which is great for listening to longer articles in the car / at the gym. I've got the paid version.
https://readwise.io/
+1 for Readwise. I moved to their Reader app from Pocket long ago and never looked back. The app goes from strength to strength and the Readwise team also does a great job engaging with users.
I ended up on Readwise Reader after trying a few different options. It unapologetically caters to power users and is clearly built by people who actually use and care about the product, so I'm finding it to be a pretty solid improvement over Pocket.
They also have put some effort into making their mobile app work reasonably well on eInk displays, so it's pretty great on a Boox tablet. It has real pagination, which is a feature that I was pretty annoyed about losing in Pocket when Pocket rewrote its mobile app.
Wallabag. I switched from Pocket to Wallabag years ago because I didn't like sponsored content and ads in Pocket. I originally started paying for it as a subscription directly from wallabag.it, but then I started self-hosting it. Wallabag has an option to import all of your articles from Pocket too. It's a fantastic service.
After some researches I ended up with Wallabag as well, hosted on wallabag.it. I've got a lot of things saved, sometimes quite long articles (I read a lot, but I save a lot more) The ePub export was a requirement for me since I moved to Kobo (originally for the Pocket compatibility) after old Pocket app on my 1st gen iPad Mini stopped working. I made some test to self host it but the epub export and the images caching was to much for my Synology NAS. I had some good results with a more powerful machine but I didn't want to keep it running 24/7. And finally the export works well on wallabag.it so I though the hosted version worth its price!
Wallabag "self-hosted" in Oracle Cloud Free Tier. Works like a charm from Android, Chrome, koreader
I also switched to their hosted/paid offering and currently have no plans to self-host. I also aftee that the import tool from Pocket just worked and did a great job.
I also switched to self-hosted Wallabag. I won’t have to worry about the service deciding to shutdown again.
also use Wallabag (wallabag.it), but it's android app is so basic and feels outdated
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I also use wallabag
I moved to https://raindrop.io/.
Imported all the Pocket stuff with no issues, free plan is enough for me.
Yup. Same. I hope they're making enough money to keep the lights on and don't over expand or sellout.
I depended heavily on Pocket for over a decade as a free user. It started to get bogged down with about 20k bookmarks. I used to spend hours manually tagging saves and the search function never seemed to actually return results. This time around I wanted a self hosted solution.
I looked at Walabag and Shiori before I decided on Karakeep. I just didn't like the UI of the first two. I already have an Ollama server and the AI tagging feature of Karakeep is far better than Walabag's, in fact the tag management feature in general is. And Meilisearch adds a really fast search engine to Karakeep that has allowed me to discover new value to the 16k bookmarks from Pocket after cleaning down from the 20k I exported, it's super impressive.
Now the less great news, Karakeep is much newer and less mature than the other options and currently only supports a SQLite backend and I really hope that changes. The only API for Karakeep goes through its web interface and so I don't think I even could export all my bookmarks. If the data was stored in a standalone real database like MySQL or PostgreSQL other options would be possible.
The AI tagging is AMAZING but it generates a LOT of tags and that makes the tag management screens in Karakeep difficult or impossible to use because they are overwhelmed. I am looking forward to the next and future releases which aim to help with this.
I use the Android app which works really well.
Karakeep does make your server into a web crawler and because of the little war on AI LLMs we're experiencing these days an unfortunate number of websites have started to fight all crawling. Karakeep uses a SingleFile browser extension which allows you to prove you are a human or log in to a website and then capture a page and submit it to Karakeep. This is a little awkward because you may end up bookmarking something once using the regular Karakeep extension and then see that you didn't get what you want and have to do it again via SingleFile. I'm hoping that at least a config list will be added so that the regular Karakaap browser extension will automatically invoke SingleFile for websites known to block bots.
https://github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep
Instapaper. It's simple and sleek. Provides direct import from Pocket.
Me too. Direct import helped, I don't have time to play around looking for alternatives at the moment.
Same here (although from Omnivore, not Pocket).
I still miss Omnivore, but Instapaper is absurdly far ahead of Pocket. For example, Pocket could never figure out how to store paywalled content (for which I have a subscription to), despite having deep Firefox integration (although an extension with page access should be enough) and iOS having an API for the share sheet that allows injecting JavaScript into the page being shared.
Hey, this is Pao, the guy building https://fika.bar.
Fika is a place to save, discover and share content built upon 3 products:
- A local-first bookmark manager (Works 100% offline) - A feed reader: With feed discovery from your bookmarks. - A blog/newsletter platform
The only thing it currently does not have is e-reader integration yet. But you get the other 2 products bundled together which make a lot of sense.
You should add a public leaderboard called the Fika score (a play on fico score)
Also, I don't seem to be able to login - stuck at "Syncing to this device."
Checking!
The link to your blog doesn't seem to work
Good catch!
I was very interested in this project, but I can't login using Einkbro on my e-reader. Otherwise it seems perfect.
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Throwing another answer in for Instapaper. It’s not as new and flashy as something like Readwise or Matter, but also doesn’t try to do too much.
Killer features of Instapaper for me include the kindle digest and IFTTT integration (which I use to mirror my archived articles to Raindrop.io)
I don’t use Instapaper as much as I used to when I had an iPod touch on the subway, but I’m a subscriber. Happy to support the indie effort.
Yup this is where I ended up too
Nothing but bookmarks and archive.org and PDFs. Every time I update the browser, I make sure to take a manual backup of the bookmarks.
I’m using Linkwarden, it’s running on my TrueNAS and I connect their iOS app via Tailscale. Pure joy to use.
Edit to add Links: https://linkwarden.app for the self-hostable app and https://apps.apple.com/de/app/my-links-for-linkwarden/id6504... for the mobile app
I stopped using Pocket, Instapaper, and the likes in my ongoing effort to be able to walk out[1] whenever I want/need to. I tried out and still wanted to have something that keeps archives of the content I like to read. That is also largely resolved with Archive.org.
So, I end up with just a plain-text of some of the links I want as bookmarks. If they shut down or go away; its fine.
I have tested a few similar app. I'm currently happy with a minimal foot-print of Shiori.[2] I tried and liked the UI/UX of Readeck[3] better but it has its own convoluted saving and sharing (public) style and way of working. I didn't want to deal with that.
Shiori saves a local copy (my default), and I can read it later. I also default it to public share so I can share with people asking for similar topic and such. It is a single Go binary with support for sqlite3, PostgreSQL, MariaDB and MySQL as its database.
Most of the online services such as archivebox.io, raindrop.io, readwise.io, and the plethora of other replacements are cheap enough but I've been long enough on the Internet to know that I have to deal with the loss yet again.
Here is an example of Shiori Saved and Shareable article https://read.oinam.com/bookmark/39/content
1. https://brajeshwar.com/2025/can-i-walk-out/
2. https://github.com/go-shiori/shiori
3. https://readeck.org/en/
Raindrop.io. Made by a Kazakhstan based dev.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-file/ and a "well-organized filesystem". I'm just kidding, "they're everywhere!". Still, it's what I use.
I have a bookmarks folder called "check later" for all the things I'll never get around to reading.
I use Zotero and https://pinboard.in.
I tried Readwise, Raindrop, Instapaper, etc - but I like CouchReader the best. Feature and UX wise it really stands out, however its iOS / MacOS only
I replaced it two years ago with a small something I built for myself and serves me well [0], haven’t looked back since.
[0]: https://aldur.blog/micros/2025/07/07/pocket/
I also self host a small app for syncing bookmarks and a miniflux instance. Having the bookmark service publish an RSS feed for miniflux to consume is brilliant. Thanks for sharing.
https://ln.ht/ isn't bad
Nice, I really liked delicious back in the day.
I have been building https://mozaic.link with a friend for a while. It's a bookmark manager with a funny UI. We wanted to make a product with it and get rich but we have no time and we suck at marketing. I use it everyday though.
BTW Pocket was nice because it saved articles so that you can read them offline with a distraction free experience (we don't do that).
I realized that all I needed was basically a way of syncing bookmarks across a bunch of different platforms (linux, mac, iOS, android) and browsers, and I didn't really need any of the fancier features like offline access. I had claude code one-shot a simple python web app that saves links to sqlite. I stuffed it in a docker container and hosted it on my home server. I set up a public portal using cloudflare tunnels to access it when I'm not on my LAN. I wrote a little bookmarklet that saves a page and is compatible with the various browsers I use.
If all you need is to save bookmarks, could you not simply sign into your browser and use the built in sync feature?
I'd love to do that, but I'm split between different browsers on different platforms. I'd also love to consolidate browsers so this isn't an issue, but iOS hobbles anything that's not Safari. Idk part of me thinks maybe I should just save links to obsidian or email them to myself, but I'd really like saving a link to be a single click.
I use Obsidian with the ReadItLater extension[1]. Works great for my purposes.
[1]https://github.com/DominikPieper/obsidian-ReadItLater
From Pocket, I went to Readwise/Reader, but got frustrated by how ugly it is and by the fact that it hasn't changed one bit over the years I've been using it. Went super basic - now I use email. I send all my bookmarks to myemail+bookmarks@gmail.com!
Wallabag is not so bad. The only grievance I have is that it scrapes from server in Firefox. Sometimes it won't work. In chrome, it can scrape directly from the browser, which allows for logged in articles.
I moved from Pocket to DEVONthink a few years ago. It can save proper web archives and have quite a few sync options. It’s a little unconventional use for Dr but I love the experience.
I have a little side project I started a couple years ago for this: https://linksort.com/
I work on it when I can. I'd like to add an import from Pocket feature but I haven't had a free weekend in a while.
The project is fully open source: https://github.com/linksort/linksort
https://cubox.cc
The greatest feature is that it limits you to 200 items saved on free tier.
I also use https://github.com/yfzhou0904/go-to-kindle to email articles to kindle for reading on the go.
Ages ago I made a PWA (cras) that install on my phones and it's a share-target, so I've been adding to that.
Self hosted, like four PHP scripts and Sqlite.
I wrote my own https://reading.ashishb.net
It is not the most polished product and hence not for everyoneFor me Kobo support is the most important feature. But haven't found a substitute.
Also no word from Kobo (Rakuten) about this. Very disappointing.
Check out marklar423's comment above - they wrote a mod that redirects Kobo's Pocket API requests to their self-hosted Readeck instance, which might solve your Kobo integration problem.
surprised to see only one mention of https://linkding.link/. spiritual successor to pinboard and del.icio.us. really nice integration with single file for full archiving of bookmarks. super easy to spin up and self-host.
I wish del.icio.us was still a thing.
It more or less is. It was purchased[0] by the one man operation Pinboard.in (by https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=idlewords), which has most of the same functionality.
I was a Pinboard user and fan for many years, although I now have some concerns over the current health of the project, and have since moved away in favor of self-hosting Linkding.
I wrote a plugin for Obsidian called Slurp which cleans a web page's html and converts it to markdown.
bookmarking is such a lightweight task (like vpn), compute and storage wise, there is no reason to not self host it. many nice solutions out there, i personally use wallabag. its gets many things right.
The reason is universal - usability isn't a function of the weight of compute.
For example, wallabag on iOS fails at such basics as... syncing
https://github.com/wallabag/ios-app/issues/185#issuecomment-...
I use https://fabric.so
Is there a way to simply browse your workspace or do you always have to use their search?
pinboard.in
I like the privacy first approach and the web 1.0 look. The tag cloud is pretty neat too
If you have an iPhone, just use reader view, then print it but don’t select a printer and then share it. A PDF pops out. Then shove that in iCloud Drive or on your phone and read it later.
No services or set up involved, works reliably and you can keep the PDF forever.
PDF is almost a non-digital format, so awful reading experience on devices with different screen sizes, no good content search or even basic copy&paste. And you get no tagging in this scheme. So a major downgrade.
Apart from the device size issue this is untrue.
Of course it is, these form just a tiny subset of well known issues of PDF.
Here is a simple illustration of a copy & paste fail from this very page:
From html: a single sentence
> Since mozilla announced the sunsetting of pocket, I started looking for alternatives, including building a light version for my personal use. But nothing came out of my research.
From PDF: a newline split of a single sentence after light because PDF is generally too dumb to use sentences for text
> Since mozilla announced the sunsetting of pocket, I started looking for alternatives, including building a light > version for my personal use. But nothing came out of my research.
Literally works fine here.
"volume needs to be the lowest possible. A minimisation problem needs two variables only and we have four in this case. However the volume and area formulas can be substituted into each other to give volume in terms of width."
Cut and pasted from three lines of a PDF I am authoring right now.
> Cut and pasted from three lines of a PDF I am authoring right now.
Literally a different use case. Do the steps from your actual workflow that I commented on instead of trying to find a variant where it works!
Maybe the app you use adds special PDF clutches to make a paragraph a paragraph.
if you have an iPhone just use Safari's Reading List. It syncs with iCloud
https://support.apple.com/en-us/108970
As much as I like Reading List, I think the key benefit of the PDF approach is...
> works reliably and you can keep the PDF forever
I have a ton of Apple devices and maybe my Reading List is just messed up, but it doesn't seem to keep an offline cache that is reliable in any way and would be hard to search or organize (unlike the PDFs)
I’ve been using Matter as a replacement. So far it’s pretty nice, and they have a 50% off deal for pocket users.
I've been assembling a list here:
https://github.com/ArchiveBox/pocket-exporter#-pocket-altern...
wallabag. Actually been using it for years, with a short detour to the now-gone Omnivore.
Selhosted Wallabag + ReadKit app on iOS synchronized with Wallabag instance.
I replaced it with a tiny app that I built for myself, that just has the features of Pocket that I was using.
https://bukmark.me/
Bookmarks and Reader Mode.
Never used Pocket, but I moved to Raindrop.io (from Pinboard) for my bookmarks. I believe it can import Pocket.
I've been using Instapaper for many years to collect things to read later, and I use Pinboard to archive things that I've read and want to save.
I of course use https://histre.com/ (I made it)
I just use my RSS reader's feature that works similar (Inoreader)
How about Karakeep if you want to run it locally. You can also have it tag your bookmarks automatically if you connect it to a LLM.
Just started using Curio - https://curi.ooo/
TIL about .ooo TLD
It seems to be linked to an Indian E-commerce SAAS platform company. And most of the registrations are with Dynadot Inc, which is also a very big registrar so such trustworthy TLDs as .xyz and .top ..
https://icannwiki.org/.ooo https://ntldstats.com/tld/ooo
Readwise Reader and Obsidian Web Clipper.
“Add to Reading List” on iOS Safari
Raindrop
Instapaper
Instapaper
Some time ago I went to Vivaldi and since then I use its Reading List.
> But nothing came out of my research.
Seriously? I call bullshit. Type "pocket alternative" into your favorite search engine and you'll find a bunch of sites that recommend a few good alternatives. This is a pretty good question for reddit.com/r/selfhosted as opposed to hn, and it's well covered there.
https://openalternative.co/alternatives/pocket has a good list
https://github.com/search?q=bookmark+&type=repositories&s=st... is a good search as well that surfaces several good options (Karakeep, LinkWarden, Shiori, etc.
Personally, I went with Karakeep hosted as a docker container on my NAS, mostly because my pocket list is pretty much dump and forget and the UI and backend language looked the nicer of the top options.
> Type "pocket alternative" into your favorite search engine and you'll find a bunch of sites that recommend a few good alternatives.
Now our turn to call bs. There is no single result at the first few pages of your "favorite search engine" results that would give you a comprehensive comparison to Pocket, so you'll have to waste time with a few services to uncover how they fail at something basic Pocket has.
And all these "alternatives" lists you cite are very primitive that won't help you uncover such issues
> mostly because my pocket list is pretty much dump and forget
Ok, but you know that some people actually want to use the service to, you know, read later instead of forgetting?
I’m an Apple user and switched to GoodLinks at first but later migrated to AnyBox because the latter one can create PDF and WebArchive snapshots of the webpages.
I also use AnyBox & thoroughly enjoy it. I like that it runs on my devices & isn't tied to a service that might change or decline (like Pinboard), plus the features are excellent.
I use fika.bar. it's really nice!
Buku
Raindrop.io
Personal setup: 1. Notion web clipper and Instapaper
Work: 1. raindrop.io 2. eagle.cool
I switched to Wallabag. 14 day free trial (an actual free trial that doesn't require CC info). There's a Pocket import function. I found it useful to filter the .csv that Pocket downloaded me into two .csv's, one for unread articles and one for archived articles, that I respectively imported into Wallabag as the import feature allowed for "mark as read" on imports.
About 10% of the articles I had didn't download due to Captcha requirements or paywalls that had been added since I had archived the article in Pocket. Once my articles imported to Wallabag, I filtered the unread list from 0 to 3 minutes which showed me all the ones that were paywalled or only saved snippets. I fixed them with the Wallabag browser extension, which has an option to save content direct from browser.
I now have Wallabag on my Android phone, Boox ereader (runs Android), and Kobo ereader (via KOReader). No issues and I'm liking it better than Pocket.
How does the import to kobo happen?
I installed KOReader following these instructions: https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/Installation-on-Ko...
Wallabag plugin is built into KOReader. Launch KOReader by clicking the icon it puts in your Kobo library, then in the menus you will find Wallabag config. I added a "Wallabag Articles" folder for it to sync to.
Note if you use a password manager, my password had a double quote which I believe messed with the .lua config password string, so I was getting connection errors.
It took 80-90 mins to download 1200 unread articles to my Kobo. I haven't played with the auto sync function yet, so far I just manual sync before/after a reading session.
I've really got to be brave and try KOReader one of these days. I used Pocket because it was the one service supported on my Kobo. I don't want to replace the hardware, but I am mildly annoyed by the locked down and slow software.
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