Pocket alternatives
Pocket Alternatives in 2026: 9 Apps, Honestly Compared
Pocket is gone, and unlike most shutdowns it took the data with it. Nine apps are still standing. Which one is right depends less on features than on which kind of Pocket user you were — so this starts there.
What happened, and why it matters for the choice
Mozilla announced Pocket’s shutdown in May 2025. The service stopped working on 8 July 2025. An export window stayed open until 12 November 2025, and after that the remaining data was deleted.
The detail worth carrying into this decision is the last one. Most services that shut down leave the data sitting somewhere. Pocket did not. Somewhere north of a decade of saved reading — for many people thousands of articles — is simply gone, and no amount of choosing the right replacement now recovers it.
That changes what to optimise for. The usual advice is to pick the app with the smoothest import. If you have nothing to import, the better question is which of these will still be here in 2031, and how much of your library you could walk out with if it is not.
First: which kind of Pocket user were you?
Pocket was three products wearing one icon, and the people leaving it want three different things.
- The reader. You saved long articles and you read them, usually on a commute or in bed. You want typography, offline copies and a queue that ends. Go to Instapaper or Matter.
- The collector. You saved references — documentation, recipes, things to buy, articles you might cite. You do not need a reader; you need to find a thing again in eight months. Go to Raindrop.io or Pinboard.
- The saver. You saved constantly and read almost none of it. The count only went up. You are the largest group and the worst served, because every app in this category is built to make saving easier — which is not the part you were struggling with.
If you recognised yourself in the third one, be honest about it before you pick. Migrating a backlog you were never going to read into a prettier app reproduces the problem with better fonts. It is worth considering deleting the whole thing and starting at zero, whichever app you land on.
The nine, at a glance
Prices checked on 14 August 2026 and rounded. They move; the shape of each product moves more slowly.
| App | Free tier | Reader quality | Organisation | AI | Own your data | Platforms |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Raindrop.io | Unlimited | Decent | Excellent | Light | Full export | Everything |
| Instapaper | Unlimited saves | Best in class | Basic folders | None | Full export | iOS, Android, web |
| Readwise Reader | Trial only | Excellent | Excellent | Built in | Full export | Everything |
| Matter | Unlimited saves | Excellent | Basic | Audio, summaries | Export | iOS first |
| GoodLinks | Paid once | Very good | Tags | None | Local + iCloud | Apple only |
| Wallabag | Free self-hosted | Good | Tags | None | You host it | Everything |
| SnackBack | 30 items | Good | Automatic | Core of the product | Export | iOS, Android |
| Pinboard | Paid | None | Tags | None | Full export | Web |
| Notion / Obsidian | Workable | Varies | Whatever you build | Add-on | Files or export | Everything |
The nine, in order
Ranked for the general case. The ordering is arguable and the “best for” line matters more than the number next to it.
- Best for
- Most people. The closest thing to a drop-in replacement.
- Price
- Free tier is genuinely unlimited. Pro is roughly $3/month.
Raindrop is the only app on this list whose free tier does not quietly push you toward paying. Unlimited bookmarks, nested collections, highlights, browser extensions on every browser, apps on every platform. If Pocket was your bookmark drawer, this is the same drawer with better joinery.
Where it falls short — It is a bookmark manager first and a reader second. The reading view works, but it does not feel like a place you settle in with a long article. Heavy visual collections can get slow.
- Best for
- People who actually read long articles start to finish.
- Price
- Free tier covers saving and reading. Premium is about $6/month.
Instapaper predates Pocket and outlived it. The reader view is still the best typography on this list, the free tier has no article cap, and Send to Kindle survives. There are no upsell panels wedged into the middle of an article, which is rarer than it should be.
Where it falls short — Development is slow and deliberate — you will not find AI features, and organisation is thin (folders and a flat highlight list). If you save 100 things a week, it will not help you triage them.
- Best for
- Highlighters, researchers, and people who already use Readwise.
- Price
- About $10/month billed annually, with a 30-day trial. No free tier.
The most complete tool here by a wide margin: articles, RSS, PDFs, EPUBs, YouTube transcripts, Twitter threads, email newsletters, all in one inbox with an AI assistant on top. Highlights sync back into Readwise for spaced repetition. If reading is part of your job, this is the one that pays for itself.
Where it falls short — There is no free tier, and the price is three times everything else on this list. It also assumes you want a workflow. If your problem is that you never open the app, a more powerful inbox is not the fix.
Matter
- Best for
- Listening. Commutes, walks, dishes.
- Price
- Free tier with unlimited saves and basic audio. Premium about $5/month.
Matter's text-to-speech is not the robot voice you are bracing for — it is close enough to a podcast that a backlog of long reads becomes something you can get through while doing something else. The reading UI is the prettiest here.
Where it falls short — The good voices sit behind Premium, and the social layer (following other readers) is dead weight if you just want a queue. Android support has historically lagged iOS.
- Best for
- Apple users who are done paying monthly for anything.
- Price
- One-time purchase. No subscription.
You buy it once and it is yours. Everything is stored locally and synced through your own iCloud, so there is no company in the middle that can shut down and take your library with it — which, after 2025, is not a hypothetical concern.
Where it falls short — Apple platforms only. No Android, no web app, no browser extension outside Safari. If you use a Windows machine at work, half your saving happens somewhere else.
Wallabag
- Best for
- People who want to own the data outright.
- Price
- Free if you self-host. Hosted plan is roughly €11/year.
Open source, self-hostable, with real iOS and Android apps and importers for almost every service that has ever died. The strongest answer to the question Pocket left everyone with: what happens when the company loses interest?
Where it falls short — Self-hosting is real work — a server, updates, backups, occasional breakage. Article parsing is less reliable than the commercial options on awkward sites. The hosted tier removes the work but also most of the point.
SnackBack
our app- Best for
- People whose Pocket had 3,000 saved articles and 40 read ones.
- Price
- Free up to 30 saved items. Pro subscription lifts the cap.
This is our app, so read it with that in mind. SnackBack is built on a different premise from everything above: the problem was never saving, and a nicer reader will not fix a backlog. You share a link, video or image and AI files it, tags it and summarises it — you never choose a folder. Then a few items come back to you every day, in small servings, so the library gets read down instead of up.
Where it falls short — It is not a better Instapaper and does not try to be. There is no RSS, no PDF or EPUB library, no highlight export, and the free tier stops at 30 items — the tightest cap on this list. The interface is designed around Korean first; English is supported but you may find the occasional rough edge.
Pinboard
- Best for
- Archivists who want plain text and no surprises.
- Price
- Paid, a low flat annual fee. Archiving costs extra.
One person, no funding round, no redesign in a decade, and still running. Tag-based, fast, deliberately ugly. Pay for the archival tier and it keeps a copy of every page you save, which is the only real defence against link rot.
Where it falls short — There is no reading experience to speak of, no official mobile app, and the interface will feel like 2009 because it is. This is a filing cabinet, not a reader.
Notion or Obsidian
- Best for
- People who already live in one of them.
- Price
- Free tiers on both are workable.
Both have web clippers and both can hold saved articles alongside everything else you keep. If your notes already live there, adding a Reading inbox costs you nothing and removes one app from your life.
Where it falls short — You are building the tool as well as using it. Every save asks where does this go, and that question is exactly what kills reading queues. Expect to spend a weekend on a system you abandon in six weeks.
What you lose in the move, whichever one you pick
Even a clean import leaves things behind, and it is better to know which before you start rather than to discover it in a year.
- Highlights. Pocket’s HTML export carried links, titles, tags and timestamps. Highlights were not part of it in a form other apps can reliably reconstruct. If you highlighted heavily, that layer is gone.
- The archive/favourite distinction. Pocket had three states — unread, archived, favourited. Most importers flatten these into one list, so the pile you had already dealt with comes back as unread. Check for an “archived” tag after importing and act on it immediately, before the pile stops meaning anything.
- Full-text copies. Pocket stored a parsed copy of each page. The export contains links, not text. Anything that went offline or behind a paywall in the meantime is a dead link now, and roughly a tenth of a decade-old reading list usually is. Pinboard’s archival tier and Wallabag are the two options here that keep their own copies going forward.
- Reading position. No importer carries how far into an article you had got. Long pieces you were halfway through restart at the top.
Apps we left out, and why
A few names come up in every thread about this. They are missing from the list above on purpose.
- Omnivore. Still recommended in older articles, and it no longer exists. ElevenLabs acquired the team on 1 November 2024 and the service shut down on 15 November, two weeks later. The export window was extended to 30 November after users objected, and then the data was deleted. It was open source and self-hostable and that did not save the hosted service — worth remembering when weighing that feature elsewhere.
- Safari Reading List. Free, already installed, syncs across your Apple devices. It is genuinely fine for a handful of articles. It has no tags, no search worth the name and no way out, which is why it is not a Pocket replacement so much as a reason you might not need one.
- Feedly and RSS readers. These solve subscribing to sources, not saving individual pages. Some have a read-later inbox bolted on, but if you came here from Pocket you want the inbox to be the product.
- Browser bookmarks. The honest baseline. If your saved list is under a hundred items and you never revisit them, a bookmarks folder and a monthly clear-out beats every app on this page, including ours.
If you still have your export file
Import the HTML file rather than moving links across by hand. It carries the original saved date, and that single field is what makes a backlog tractable: sort by oldest, and give yourself permission to delete everything older than a year without opening it. Anything you have not read in twelve months you were not going to read.
Raindrop.io, Instapaper, Readwise Reader, Wallabag and Pinboard all accept the file directly. If you are landing somewhere that does not, import into Raindrop first and export from there — its export format is the one most widely accepted.
How to not need this article again in three years
Pocket had fourteen years and a browser company behind it. Omnivore had an enthusiastic community, an open-source codebase and a self-hosting option, and it went dark two weeks after its acquisition with a fortnight’s notice. Two of the category’s best-known names died within eight months of each other. The lesson is not that you picked wrong; it is that this is a hard business and it will happen again.
- Export once a year and put the file somewhere boring. Every app here can produce one in under a minute.
- Prefer tools where a shutdown is survivable — you hold the files, or you host it, or the export is complete rather than a link list.
- Watch the free tier. An unlimited free tier from a company with no revenue is a countdown, not a gift.
That last point applies to us as much as to anyone else on this list.
Where we actually fit
We build SnackBack, so treat this section as the interested party talking.
We put ourselves seventh because for most of the reasons people search for a Pocket replacement, one of the six above is a better answer. If you want the best reader, that is Instapaper. The best free tier is Raindrop. The most capable tool is Readwise Reader. We are not close on any of those, and telling you otherwise would be the fastest way to lose the argument.
Where we are worth a look is the third kind of Pocket user — the one whose library grew for years and was never read. We took the position that this is not a reading problem but a retrieval problem: nothing ever brings the saved thing back to you, so it stays saved forever. So filing is automatic (share a link and AI sorts, tags and summarises it — you never pick a folder), and a few items are served back each day in portions small enough to finish.
Whether that works for you is an empirical question and we would rather you found out on the free tier than on our say-so. It stops at 30 items, which is enough to tell.
Reading Korean? 한국어 페이지로 →
Frequently asked questions
When exactly did Pocket shut down?+
Mozilla announced the shutdown in May 2025. Pocket stopped working on 8 July 2025. An export window stayed open until 12 November 2025, after which the remaining user data was deleted.
I never exported my Pocket data. Can I still get it back?+
No. The export window closed on 12 November 2025 and the data was deleted afterwards. If you saved links you also emailed, messaged or bookmarked elsewhere, those copies are what you have left. Everyone in this position is starting fresh, which is a reasonable moment to pick a tool on how it will behave in three years rather than on how fast it imports.
I do have an export file. Which apps accept it?+
Raindrop.io, Instapaper, Readwise Reader, Wallabag and Pinboard all accept the HTML bookmark file Pocket produced. Import the file rather than copying links by hand — the file preserves the saved date, which is what lets you sort a backlog by age and delete the top of it without reading it.
Which one has the best free tier?+
Raindrop.io, without much argument. Unlimited bookmarks with no time limit and no feature nagging. Instapaper's free tier is the better one if you mainly read rather than collect, and Wallabag is free forever if you are willing to run it yourself.
Is there a real risk another one of these shuts down?+
Yes, and Pocket was the largest of them. The apps least exposed to it are the ones where you hold the data: Wallabag if you self-host, GoodLinks because it syncs through your own iCloud, and Pinboard because it is a small paid business with no investors to satisfy. Everything else, ours included, depends on a company staying interested. Export your library once a year regardless of which you pick.
What is the difference between a bookmark manager and a read-it-later app?+
A bookmark manager is optimised for finding something again — tags, folders, search. A read-it-later app is optimised for reading it once — clean typography, offline copies, a queue. Raindrop and Pinboard are the former, Instapaper and Matter the latter, and Readwise Reader tries to be both. Knowing which one you actually needed is most of the decision.
None of these fixed the problem. I still do not read what I save.+
That is the common case, and it is a different problem from the one most of these apps solve. Saving is frictionless and reading is not, so the queue only grows. The fixes that work tend to be structural: cap the queue, delete without guilt, or have something bring items back to you rather than waiting for you to go looking. SnackBack is our attempt at the last of those, but a weekly calendar block and a ruthless delete key work too, and cost nothing.