Ask HN: What Pocket alternatives did you move to?
88 comments
·July 17, 2025dctoedt
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.
polo
+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.
nchapman
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.
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!
sdrothrock
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?
nchapman
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.
sdrothrock
Thank you for answering! I'll be giving this a shot sometime :)
tony-allan
It would help if you posted some UI images for the web app so I could have a look without having to signup
al_borland
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.
existencebox
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.
dgl
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.
AbstractH24
Same
Geste
Shhh don’t ruin the hype train ! We need to get the vc money in those startups going ! /s
dtkav
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
chrisweekly
I use Readwise (and Obsidian).
pentagrama
I moved to https://raindrop.io/.
Imported all the Pocket stuff with no issues, free plan is enough for me.
ashishb
I wrote my own https://reading.ashishb.net
- it produces readable pages
- it produces an RSS feed that one can add to any feed reader as well
segphault
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.
sprior
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.
crazylogger
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.
extr0pian
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.
MattTheRealOne
I also switched to self-hosted Wallabag. I won’t have to worry about the service deciding to shutdown again.
abawany
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.
hamburglar
I also use wallabag
astrorho
Raindrop.io. Made by a Kazakhstan based dev.
imgabe
I have a bookmarks folder called "check later" for all the things I'll never get around to reading.
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?