Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Archive-It VS ArchiveBox

Compare Archive-It VS ArchiveBox and see what are their differences

Archive-It logo Archive-It

Archive-It is a free to use web archiving service designed for the libraries and archives.

ArchiveBox logo ArchiveBox

The open-source, self-hosted internet archiving solution
  • Archive-It Landing page
    Landing page //
    2019-03-29
  • ArchiveBox Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-06-13

ArchiveBox is a powerful, self-hosted internet archiving solution to collect, save, and view sites you want to preserve offline.

You can set it up as a command-line tool, web app, and desktop app (alpha), on Linux, macOS, and Windows.

You can feed it URLs one at a time, or schedule regular imports from browser bookmarks or history, feeds like RSS, bookmark services like Pocket/Pinboard, and more. See input formats for a full list.

It saves snapshots of the URLs you feed it in several formats: HTML, PDF, PNG screenshots, WARC, and more out-of-the-box, with a wide variety of content extracted and preserved automatically (article text, audio/video, git repos, etc.). See output formats for a full list.

The goal is to sleep soundly knowing the part of the internet you care about will be automatically preserved in durable, easily accessible formats for decades after it goes down.

ArchiveBox

Pricing URL
-
$ Details
free
Platforms
Linux Mac OSX Docker
Release Date
2017 May

Archive-It features and specs

  • Comprehensive Web Archiving
    Archive-It provides a robust platform designed for institutions to capture and archive web content, preserving important digital information for future research and reference.
  • Customizable Archiving
    Users can customize their archiving settings to target specific web pages, websites, or even entire domains, ensuring that the unique needs of various organizations are met.
  • User Support and Training
    Archive-It offers support and training resources, facilitating ease of use for institutions that may not have specialized staff for digital archiving.
  • Integration with Wayback Machine
    Content archived using Archive-It is accessible via the Wayback Machine, making it easier for the public to access preserved information and increasing its visibility.
  • Collaboration Opportunities
    The platform enables collaboration among member institutions, allowing them to share best practices and resources, and to undertake joint projects in web archiving.

Possible disadvantages of Archive-It

  • Cost
    Archive-It can be costly, particularly for smaller institutions or organizations with limited budgets, potentially limiting access to its services.
  • Complexity
    Setting up and managing web archiving using Archive-It can be complex, requiring a certain level of technical expertise or training, which could be a barrier for some users.
  • Data Volume Limitations
    There may be limits on the amount of data that can be archived, which could restrict the ability to comprehensively capture all desired content.
  • Dependency on Internet Archive
    As Archive-It is a service provided by the Internet Archive, there is a dependency on the overarching organization's longevity and stability, which might concern some users regarding long-term accessibility.

ArchiveBox features and specs

  • Offline website saving
  • Tagging
  • Scheduled archiving
  • Recursive crawling
  • Media extraction
  • Article text extraction
  • Static HTML exports
  • Full-text search

Analysis of ArchiveBox

Overall verdict

  • ArchiveBox is a versatile and robust solution for individuals or organizations seeking to preserve web content. It provides a wide range of archiving options and allows for extensive customization. However, as a self-hosted tool, it requires some technical knowledge to set up and maintain, which may not be ideal for non-technical users. Overall, it is a good tool if you have the technical capability and need to consistently archive online assets.

Why this product is good

  • ArchiveBox is an open-source self-hosted tool designed to help users save and manage web content offline. It is appreciated for its ability to archive web content including static HTML, PDFs, and media files in a format that is easy to navigate and long-lasting, even if the source website becomes inaccessible. The tool supports multiple input methods, including browser integrations, and is capable of running on various platforms, thus offering flexibility and scalability for personal and professional use.

Recommended for

    ArchiveBox is recommended for digital archivists, researchers, journalists, and any individuals or organizations that need to reliably save and organize web content. It is particularly suitable for those with the technical expertise to manage a self-hosted setup and who require an offline, permanent record of online information.

Archive-It videos

No Archive-It videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

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ArchiveBox videos

Archiving the Internet Before it All Rots Away (talk by by ArchiveBox founder)

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Installing ArchiveBox On Ubuntu 20.04 Using A Hyper-V VM To Preserve OSINT Investigation Findings

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Archive-It and ArchiveBox)
Bookmark Manager
17 17%
83% 83
Web App
100 100%
0% 0
Bookmarks
13 13%
87% 87
Productivity
100 100%
0% 0

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing Archive-It and ArchiveBox.

Which are the primary technologies used for building your product?

ArchiveBox's answer:

  • Django
  • SQLite
  • Wget
  • Chromium
  • Youtube-dl / yt-dlp
  • singlefile
  • readability
  • mercury
  • git
  • ripgrep
  • sonic

Who are some of the biggest customers of your product?

ArchiveBox's answer:

What's the story behind your product?

ArchiveBox's answer:

ArchiveBox aims to enable more of the internet to be saved from deterioration by empowering people to self-host their own archives. The intent is for all the web content you care about to be viewable with common software in 50 - 100 years without needing to run ArchiveBox or other specialized software to replay it.

Vast treasure troves of knowledge are lost every day on the internet to link rot. As a society, we have an imperative to preserve some important parts of that treasure, just like we preserve our books, paintings, and music in physical libraries long after the originals go out of print or fade into obscurity.

Whether it's to resist censorship by saving articles before they get taken down or edited, or just to save a collection of early 2010's flash games you love to play, having the tools to archive internet content enables to you save the stuff you care most about before it disappears.

Image from WTF is Link Rot?... The balance between the permanence and ephemeral nature of content on the internet is part of what makes it beautiful. I don't think everything should be preserved in an automated fashion--making all content permanent and never removable, but I do think people should be able to decide for themselves and effectively archive specific content that they care about.

Because modern websites are complicated and often rely on dynamic content, ArchiveBox archives the sites in several different formats beyond what public archiving services like Archive.org/Archive.is save. Using multiple methods and the market-dominant browser to execute JS ensures we can save even the most complex, finicky websites in at least a few high-quality, long-term data formats.

Why should a person choose your product over its competitors?

ArchiveBox's answer:

ArchiveBox differentiates itself from similar self-hosted projects by providing both a comprehensive CLI interface for managing your archive, a Web UI that can be used either independently or together with the CLI, and a simple on-disk data format that can be used without either.

ArchiveBox is neither the highest fidelity nor the simplest tool available for self-hosted archiving, rather it's a jack-of-all-trades that tries to do most things well by default. It can be as simple or advanced as you want, and is designed to do everything out-of-the-box but be tuned to suit your needs.

If you want better fidelity for very complex interactive pages with heavy JS/streams/API requests, check out ArchiveWeb.page and ReplayWeb.page.

If you want more bookmark categorization and note-taking features, check out Archivy, Memex, Polar, or LinkAce.

If you need more advanced recursive spider/crawling ability beyond --depth=1, check out Browsertrix, Photon, or Scrapy and pipe the outputted URLs into ArchiveBox.

How would you describe your primary audience?

ArchiveBox's answer:

  • journalists
  • lawyers
  • librarians
  • digital preservation specialists
  • researchers
  • students
  • homelab / self-hosting community

User comments

Share your experience with using Archive-It and ArchiveBox. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, ArchiveBox seems to be a lot more popular than Archive-It. While we know about 90 links to ArchiveBox, we've tracked only 3 mentions of Archive-It. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Archive-It mentions (3)

  • Not able to access old website, getting this message instead
    Other projects include Open Library & archive-it.org. Source: over 2 years ago
  • How great of a blow to historians is the migration of letters and journals to the digital realm, where most of them are inaccessible to historians (locked email accounts, hard drives, etc)?
    The biggest hurdle in DH of the early internet and manipulating the data at scale is creating collections from archived material that fit your needs. The internet archive has a subscription-based archival tool Archive-It but the collection starts when you (or some other person) creates it. There isn't a collection for anti-vaccine material from 1996-. With Covid, many collections have been started but these will... Source: almost 3 years ago
  • How to archive an entire website?
    Archive-It is a subscription web archiving service from the Internet Archive that helps organizations to harvest, build, and preserve collections of digital content. Through our user friendly web application Archive-It partners can collect, catalog, and manage their collections of archived content with 24/7 access and full text search available for their use as well as their patrons. Source: almost 3 years ago

ArchiveBox mentions (90)

  • Linkwarden: FOSS self-hostable bookmarking with AI-tagging and page archival
    I've used https://historio.us since 2011 and still pay for it to keep access to all the pages I've archived over the years. The price has been kept low enough that I can't bring myself to cancel it even though I've been using self-hosted https://archivebox.io/ for the last few years. I always include an archived link whenever I reference something in documentation. That's my main use at the moment. However, I... - Source: Hacker News / 27 days ago
  • Ask HN: How Do You Bookmark?
    2. Drop the link into my instance of ArchiveBox [0] and will return to it a few weeks/months later or, more often than not, never again [0] https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • Internet Archive breached again through stolen access tokens
    Is anyone using ArchiveBox regularly? It's a self-hosted archiving solution. Not the ambitious decentralized system I think this comment is thinking of but a practical way for someone to run an archive for themselves. https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • Tell HN: The Wayback Machine is up, in read-only mode
    I used to solely depend on Wayback machine to automate archiving pages, now I am archiving webpages using selenium python package on https://archive.ph/ and https://ghostarchive.org/ This told me not to depend on 3rd party parties. Might self-host https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
  • I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and I don't know what to do with them
    Https://archivebox.io/ For those with an interest. My del.icio.us collection (what was still online) lives on my NAS now. - Source: Hacker News / 8 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Archive-It and ArchiveBox, you can also consider the following products

Wayback Machine - Browse through over 150 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago.

Raindrop.io - All your articles, photos, video & content from web & apps in one place.

Archive.md - archive.is allows you to create a copy of a webpage that will always be up even if the original link is down

HTTrack - HTTrack is a free (GPL, libre/free software) and easy-to-use offline browser utility.

Perma.cc - Perma.

Archive.org - Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library offering free universal access to books, movies...