Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

ArchiveBox VS Archive.org

Compare ArchiveBox VS Archive.org and see what are their differences

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ArchiveBox logo ArchiveBox

The open-source, self-hosted internet archiving solution

Archive.org logo Archive.org

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

  • Archive.org Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-01-29

ArchiveBox

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

Archive.org

$ Details
-
Platforms
-
Release Date
-

ArchiveBox features and specs

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

Archive.org features and specs

  • Extensive Collection
    Archive.org hosts a vast amount of digitized materials including books, movies, music, and websites, providing comprehensive archival resources for education and research.
  • Free Access
    Most of the content on Archive.org is freely accessible to the public, making it a valuable resource for individuals and institutions lacking the budget for paid resources.
  • Wayback Machine
    The Wayback Machine allows users to view archived versions of websites as they appeared at various times in the past, preserving digital history and providing a useful tool for research.
  • PDF and ePub Formats
    Many of the books and texts available on Archive.org can be downloaded in multiple formats, such as PDF and ePub, enhancing accessibility and ease of use.
  • Community Uploads
    Archive.org allows users to upload their own content, fostering a community-driven archive that continuously grows with user-contributed material.

Possible disadvantages of Archive.org

  • Copyright Issues
    Some materials on Archive.org may have unclear or disputed copyright statuses, leading to potential legal issues and the removal of content.
  • Quality Inconsistency
    The quality of scanned materials can vary significantly, with some items having poor resolution or other issues that make them difficult to read or use effectively.
  • Search Functionality
    The search engine on Archive.org can sometimes be less effective, making it difficult for users to find specific materials or navigate the extensive collections easily.
  • Storage and Bandwidth Limits
    While Archive.org offers free uploads, there are limits on storage and bandwidth for users, which may constrain those with large archives to share.
  • Long Loading Times
    The site can experience long loading times, especially for larger files or during periods of high traffic, which can hinder the user experience.

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.

Analysis of Archive.org

Overall verdict

  • Yes, Archive.org is considered good due to its significant contribution to preserving digital history and providing open access to a wide range of resources. Its efforts in promoting free access to knowledge align with educational and cultural preservation values.

Why this product is good

  • Archive.org, also known as the Internet Archive, is considered a valuable resource because it provides access to extensive historical data, media, and web pages through platforms like the Wayback Machine. It preserves the cultural and digital heritage of the internet, offering free access to a vast collection of books, music, software, and more. It's an essential tool for researchers, historians, and the general public who are interested in exploring or referencing past content that may no longer be available online.

Recommended for

  • Researchers looking for historical web data and information.
  • Students and educators seeking free access to a library of digital content.
  • Journalists and historians interested in past media or events.
  • Anyone interested in accessing or preserving digital media and cultural artifacts.

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

Archive.org videos

The Internet Archive Wants To Be A Digital Library For Everything | Sunday TODAY

More videos:

  • Tutorial - How to use the Internet Archive
  • Review - Book Publishers are Trying to Shut Down the Internet Archive

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to ArchiveBox and Archive.org)
Bookmark Manager
34 34%
66% 66
Ebooks
0 0%
100% 100
Bookmarks
100 100%
0% 0
Productivity
4 4%
96% 96

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing ArchiveBox and Archive.org.

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 ArchiveBox and Archive.org. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare ArchiveBox and Archive.org

ArchiveBox Reviews

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Archive.org Reviews

Top 30 Best Movie4u Alternatives To Watch Latest Movies
Are you a fan of old-time media productions? Well, The Internet Archive is the movie site for you if you want to watch movies. There are no distribution rights needed for any of the movies on the site because they are all in the public domain. However, if you want to see the newest summer movie, the Internet Archive doesnโ€™t have anything for you. If you like old movies, give...
9 Best Free Music Download Sites in 2022
The Archive provides not only thousands of free music, but also audio books and programs, and its database contains more than one million free digital files. You can filter the results by title, date, collection, creator, language and other criteria to find the music you want. The platform includes major global songs from Ed Sheeran and John Mayer. Most of the files on the...
Top 10 Best Google Search Engine Alternative List of 2019
Internet Archive is one of the favorite destinations for longtime web lovers. It is a collection of important data, online history, metrics, and a wealth of information.
14 Great Search Engines You Can Use Instead of Google
Essentially, the Internet Archive is a vast online library where you can access just about anything you could imagine.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Archive.org seems to be a lot more popular than ArchiveBox. While we know about 8517 links to Archive.org, we've tracked only 91 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 (91)

  • YouTube downloaders (and how Google silenced the press)
    Https://archivebox.io/ could be a solution for that. - Source: Hacker News / 15 days ago
  • 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 / 5 months 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 / 9 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 / 12 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 / 12 months ago
View more

Archive.org mentions (8517)

  • Why Way Back Machine / Internet Archive Should Matter to you
    In an age where digital content is constantly created and updated, the Internet Archive (accessible at archive.org) stands as one of the most important pillars of online preservation. Launched in 1996, this nonprofit organization has taken on the mammoth task of archiving the internet, preserving digital history, and making knowledge freely accessible to all. - Source: dev.to / about 2 months ago
  • The Hewlett-Packard Archive
    If it doesn't use some BS, try the old standby: https://archive.org. - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • I'm Wirecutter's Water-Quality Expert. I Don't Filter My Water
    If you'd like, use Wayback https://archive.org/ to show reviews from the per-aquisiton days. Notably, they would consistently recommend electronics and even things like dishware that would be sourced exclusively from Amazon over superior products sold directly through the manufacturer or other private-brand retail sites. I have zero issues with affiliate marketing, but I have huge issues when those... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Creating self-healing spiders with Scrapling in Python without AI (Web Scraping)
    To solve this issue, I will use The Web Archive's Wayback Machine. Here is a copy of StackOverFlow's website in 2010; pretty old, eh? - Source: dev.to / 5 months ago
  • Doge staffer's YouTube nickname accidentally revealed his teen hacking activity
    > Why do so many journos keep making these politically motivated articles. Because a bunch of journalists were being paid by the government to be politically-motivated propagandists, and that gravy train went away because of Doge. There's a ton of threads on HN about Doge, but if you search with "site:news.ycombinator.com Internews Network".....only 1 result, in the comments. from:... - Source: Hacker News / 6 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing ArchiveBox and Archive.org, you can also consider the following products

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

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

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

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.

wallabag - Save the web, freely.

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