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, highlightin...
- Freemium • Proprietary
- Read It Later Tool
- Document Manager
- Mac
- Windows
- Linux
- Electron / Atom Shell
- Chrome OS
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 Screenshots
Polar Features
Polar information
- Developed byKevin Burton
- LicensingProprietary (GPL-3.0) and Freemium product.
- PricingSubscription that costs between $5 and $15.
- Written in
- RatingAverage rating of 3.8
- Alternatives70 alternatives listed
Supported Languages
- English
GitHub repository
- 4,445 Stars
- 272 Forks
- 966 Open Issues
- Updated
Comments and Reviews
Tags
- web-page-annotation
- electron
- notes-manager
- Read It Later
- ebook-management
- EPUB Reader
- Google Chrome Extension
This has become my go-to software for reading on my laptop. Absolutely love the AI flashcard feature.
It solves the web archiving and note problem efficiently and wothout all the crud from soultions like evernote.
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.