Pocket Alternatives

wallabag has many of the features that Pocket has and is a great and totally free alternative. The reading experience is clean and free from distractions. What makes it even more attractive is the fact that it’s open source and can be self-hosted, which makes it a good solution if you value privacy. If you need hosting, wallabag offers a competitive price for only €9 per year. With migration tools for Pocket, Instapaper, and more, existing users of those services can switch quickly to wallabag. There are apps and plugins for many operating systems, RSS readers, and browsers, but their quality is not always equal. There’s an API so developers can build their own apps or get involved in the open source project.

Raindrop.io is a solution that is very similar to Pocket when it comes to features, ease of use, and organization. The user interface is modern, clean, and customizable with themes. Unlike Pocket, you can collaborate with your friends or coworkers to edit and read the same content saved from the web. There is a free version that has all the basic features most people need, but the Pro plan offers a lot of additional pro features like full-text search, Dropbox backup, permanent library, priority support, and a duplicate links finder tool. It has clients for most browsers, iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, and a web version. Unfortunately, like Pocket and most alternatives to it, there is no Linux version.

Instapaper has been around longer than most read-it-later services and bookmarking apps, and it is still a relevant and powerful Pocket alternative. In fact, the two apps share most features and both offer a free and premium plan. Instapaper's free plan offers saving unlimited blog posts, articles, videos, etc. and syncing them across the iOS app, Android app, and the web service. The Premium version costs $2.99 per month and lets you use full-text search, save unlimited notes, get an ad free experience, and more. If you use a Mac, then the lack of an Instapaper Mac app is a con compared to Pocket, which offers one via the Mac App Store.

If privacy and open source are your priorities, then Memex is a powerful bookmarking service that could replace Pocket for you if you don’t need all its features. The free plan has powerful features that lets you save links, find them later, organize them with tags and collections and share them with the world. The paid version is €3 per month and offers syncing between mobile and desktop and backups to cloud services. Existing users of Pocket, Raindrop.io, etc. can easily import existing bookmarks and links.

Tagpacker is more of a bookmarking platform than a fully-featured solution to save and consume content on the web. If you prefer to save links and read them in their original format on the website it was first published, then Tagpacker could be a good and free alternative to Pocket. The lack of apps for Android and other systems is a con for some, but the features for collecting, organizing, and searching for your content is considered extensive.

If you’re an Evernote user already, then you might want to use the Evernote Web Clipper feature as a replacement for Pocket. The free plan of Evernote allows users to save web content to their Evernote account, but in order to read them offline you need to pay for a Premium or Business plan. You can save the entire web page (or just a selection of it) and read it in a clean format later. Evernote also offers great tagging and organization into different categories or notebooks.

Polar only has apps for Windows, Mac, and Linux, but if you prefer to do your reading on a computer, then this is a powerful reading platform. It acts as a knowledge base and lets you save web pages, articles, PDFs, EPUB books, and more. Polar keeps track of your reading progress and motivates you to read consistently with detailed statistics. Polar has support for flashcards to help you learn by spaced repetition, and it even syncs with other flashcard tools like Anki.