Software Alternatives & Reviews

ArchiveBox VS 12 Foot Ladder

Compare ArchiveBox VS 12 Foot Ladder and see what are their differences

ArchiveBox logo ArchiveBox

The open-source, self-hosted internet archiving solution

12 Foot Ladder logo 12 Foot Ladder

Prepend 12ft.io/ to the URL of any paywalled page, and we'll try our best to remove the paywall and get you access to the article.
  • 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.

  • 12 Foot Ladder Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-03-09

ArchiveBox

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

12 Foot Ladder

Website
12ft.io
$ Details
-
Platforms
-
Release Date
-

ArchiveBox features and specs

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

12 Foot Ladder features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

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

12 Foot Ladder videos

No 12 Foot Ladder videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

+ Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to ArchiveBox and 12 Foot Ladder)
Bookmark Manager
16 16%
84% 84
Productivity
0 0%
100% 100
Bookmarks
31 31%
69% 69
Utilities
100 100%
0% 0

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing ArchiveBox and 12 Foot Ladder.

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

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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, 12 Foot Ladder seems to be a lot more popular than ArchiveBox. While we know about 2367 links to 12 Foot Ladder, we've tracked only 82 mentions of ArchiveBox. 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.

ArchiveBox mentions (82)

  • Vice website is shutting down
    If you really want to save the content for yourself, use something like https://archivebox.io/ I've been running a local instance for a few years now and download/save tech articles all time. I can search and find them as needed. - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago
  • Ask HN: How can I back up an old vBulletin forum without admin access?
    I guess your best chance is to use something like https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / 3 months ago
  • Linkhut: A Social Bookmarking Site
    Delicious[1] was delicous, and Pinboard[2] is just there. Not into bookmarks that much except for less than 10 significant websites. I might look at ArchiveBox[3] or something like it to bookmark and take a snapshot. Again, none of them as important as it used to be. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delicious_(website) 2. https://pinboard.in 3. https://archivebox.io. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Best practices for archiving websites
    Look into ArchiveBox, which is purpose-built for this process, and provides a wealth of options for the archival process. From the website:. Source: 5 months ago
  • Omnivore – free, open source, read-it-later App
    Perhaps ArchiveBox[0] will work for you? A self-hosted archiver to save websites in various formats. Has a section on that page for alternatives as well that might work too. [0]: https://archivebox.io/. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
View more

12 Foot Ladder mentions (2367)

  • Incompetent Middle Management Killed Google
    Use https://12ft.io/ to read if you aren’t a member. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Christmas Day menu ideas
    This pot roast with winter root vegetables (I use rutabaga instead of celery root, but any root veggies are perfect) No sides needed other than bread and/or maybe some noodles. If you want a green vegetable, track down a whole stalk of brussels sprouts and roast them. Recipe is paywalled on epicurious.com and you can no longer paste links from 12 ft ladder, but you can access yourself through it https://12ft.io/. Source: 5 months ago
  • CT pushing for decriminalizing psychedelic mushrooms
    Use 12ft Ladder. Breaks the formatting, but you can read all the text. Source: 5 months ago
  • Open Thread: Weekend Edition #50 (Dec 2023)
    I've never had an issue with a paywall on their website so no idea but you can try opening it via 12ft or Archive. Source: 5 months ago
  • Real-Life Questions/Chat Week of December 04, 2023
    12 ft wall also seems to allow access. Source: 5 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ArchiveBox and 12 Foot Ladder, you can also consider the following products

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

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.

Bypass Paywalls - Bypass Paywalls is a web browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites.

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

Pocket - When you find something you want to view later, put it in Pocket.