Pocket alternatives: seven options, and where we fit

First, what you are replacing

Pocket did two jobs at once. That is why no single product replaces it, and why most comparisons feel beside the point.

The first job was reading: save an article, read it later, cleanly. The second was keeping: park a link you are afraid of losing, and find it again months later.

Which of the two you cared about decides everything below. Readers want a reading view and the text kept offline. Keepers want to recognize a thing again from a picture.

Your export file holds addresses, not articles. Mozilla’s own help page states the text of the articles is not in it. So no product can give your archived article text back — only the links.

The seven, with prices read in August 2026

Prices move. These were read on each product’s own pricing page in August 2026, and are worth checking again before you pay.

• Raindrop.io — the power user’s bookmark manager. The free tier keeps unlimited bookmarks; Pro is about $28 a year. Deep and fast, and list-shaped rather than warm.
• Instapaper — article reading first. Unlimited free saves, Premium at $5.99 a month or $59.99 a year. It publicly offered Pocket importers a free Premium trial.
• Readwise Reader — for people who highlight and take notes. No free tier, $9.99 a month billed annually. The most capable of the list, and the most expensive.
• Wallabag — free and open source if you host it yourself. Managed hosting at wallabag.it runs about €11 a year. Full control, in exchange for some technical work.
• Pinboard — no free tier, $22 a year, or $39 with archiving and full-text search. Plain, fast, run by one person, no investors.
• GoodLinks — Apple only, $9.99 once. One payment buys the features that exist today, which is rare and stated plainly.
• Anybox — Apple only, a lifetime purchase around $39.99, or $14.99 a year. Tags and full-text search for Mac and iPhone.
• Trouvé — us. Free up to 50 finds, then €29, one payment. A visual library where a find outlives its own link.

Two names come up in these lists that we will not price here. mymind and Matter both showed figures we could not confirm on an official page, so we quote none.

Choose in three questions

You do not need a feature table. Three questions sort this list faster than any of them.

1. 1Do you re-read, or do you retrieve? If you genuinely read your saved articles, take Instapaper or Readwise Reader. Nothing else here beats a real reading view.
2. 2Subscription, or one payment? Only GoodLinks, Anybox and Trouvé ask once. Raindrop, Instapaper, Readwise and Pinboard bill you every year, for as long as you keep your library.
3. 3Which machines? GoodLinks and Anybox are Apple only. Raindrop, Wallabag, Pinboard and Trouvé work in any browser, on any phone.

Two cases where we are the wrong answer, and we would rather say so. If you want the full text of articles kept offline, take Readwise Reader or Wallabag. If you live inside Apple apps and want a native one, take GoodLinks.

Where we are the right answer: you remember a picture and three words, never an address. And you want the memory to survive the day the page goes away.

Move your file, whichever one you pick

The steps are the same for all of them, and the third one is the one people skip.

1. 1Find the file. Search your downloads for “pocket”, then search your inbox: the download link arrived by email.
2. 2Count the rows. The number of rows minus one is how many links you are about to take back in hand.
3. 3See what still answers. A long list has melted along the way, and the real number changes which product you need.
4. 4Then import. Raindrop, Instapaper, Readwise and Wallabag all read a Pocket export, and so do we.

The Pew Research Center, in “When Online Content Disappears” published on May 17, 2024, measured that 38% of the pages that existed in 2013 were gone ten years later. Over one year, 8% of the pages from 2023 had already gone quiet.

Our checking page knocks on every link in your file and shows you which ones are lost. No account, and the file is not kept.