Polar
Polar is a powerful desktop app for managing all your web content, books, and notes. Polar keeps all your content in one place, supports tagging, annotation, highlighting and keeps track of your reading progress.
Cost / License
- Freemium (Subscription)
- Proprietary
Application type
Alerts
- Discontinued
Platforms
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Chrome OS
- Electron / Atom Shell
The website and GitHub repository are unavailable, and the last update on Snapcraft is from March 2020.
Features
- PDF annotation
- Built-in viewer
- Cloud Sync
- Offline Reading
- Save web page for offline use
- Document Annotations
- Document Repository
- Capture web pages
- Book Manager
- Web-Based
- Website annotation
- Export to PDF
- Text Highlighting
- Technical paper notes
- Tagging
- Learn with Flashcards
Tags
- Google Chrome Extension
- notes-manager
- ebook-management
- EPUB Reader
- web-page-annotation
- electron
Polar News & Activities
Recent News
Recent activities
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What is Polar?
Polar is a powerful desktop app for managing all your web content, books, and notes. Polar keeps all your content in one place, supports tagging, annotation, highlighting and keeps track of your reading progress.
POLAR allows you to keep all your documents, annotations, and flashcards in once place. Never lose track of what you're reading again. Annotate documents directly while reading them and sync with spaced repetition systems like Anki so you never forget an important fact ever again.
Polar information
Developed by
Kevin BurtonLicensing
Proprietary (GPL-3.0) and Freemium product.Pricing
Subscription ranging between $5 and $15 per month + free version with limited functionality.Written in
Rating
Average rating of 3.7Alternatives
51 alternatives listedSupported Languages
- English
AlternativeTo Categories
News & Books, Office & Productivity, Education & Reference, Web BrowsersGitHub repository
- 4,445 Stars
- 272 Forks
- 966 Open Issues
- Updated
Comments and Reviews
This has become my go-to software for reading on my laptop. Absolutely love the AI flashcard feature.
The initial acceptance terms upon installing this made me uninstall it immediately without bothering to try it. Too much tracking for my liking. Felt like I was about to use one of those nasty intrusive Google apps! I don't care how much organisations promise not to use identifiable information etc. They are, at least, very open about tracking you, but I don't want any snooping whatsoever. Particularly for a database application in which I'm like to be storing sensitive information. What I do on my computer is private.
Reference T&C screenshot https://imgur.com/fUeXRsR
I was rather excited about it when it initially came out and have used it for a while.
But as it stands, there's a major privacy issue that the owner is not looking to address (as others have reported), it changed from an open source app to a closed source one, the technical support is not great, and the abrupt way that they decided to monetise the app really alienated their user base.
One can only hope that this will sometime return to its former approach, but there's very little hope in that sense. Overall, it feels like a botched solution which I cannot recommend at all.
Its so sad to read all the features. This is like the exact thing i wish i was using for the last few years (instead of scattering notes all over), but its like notion and one note, can't touch it without feeling like with every thought I'm feeding a machine.
I would be desperately happy to pay a subscription if all these features were open source, independently audited, and did everything to empower the users freedom and privacy. Its not even paranoia its just irresponsible to give more power to those who have abused it at every turn.
Polar is not an open source solution. The developer only initially claimed to be open source to get initial traction. Initially only the client was partially open source but now they are fully closed source. The repo has been archived. See https://github.com/burtonator/polar-bookshelf Also got it confirmed in Discord.
Dont trust these folks for the bait and switch. Who knows what they will do next.
There's no button to delete your account.
It isn't free if "free" means that less than half of its features are usable, and at the same time, it fully tracks you in the use of the application, plus bugs like not connecting to internet for syncing neither in the desktop application nor in the browser extension.
[Edited by Maalo, November 23]