Software Alternatives & Reviews

ArchiveBox VS Pinboard

Compare ArchiveBox VS Pinboard and see what are their differences

ArchiveBox logo ArchiveBox

The open-source, self-hosted internet archiving solution

Pinboard logo Pinboard

Pinboard is a personal archive for things you find online and don't want to forget.
  • 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.

  • Pinboard Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-10-16

ArchiveBox

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

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

Pinboard 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

Pinboard videos

Pinboard Bookmarking Review - Part 1

More videos:

  • Review - Using Pinboard to save your digital breadcrumbs as you read online
  • Review - Pinboard Bookmarking Review - Part 2

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to ArchiveBox and Pinboard)
Bookmark Manager
31 31%
69% 69
Bookmarks
24 24%
76% 76
Utilities
100 100%
0% 0
Note Taking
15 15%
85% 85

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing ArchiveBox and Pinboard.

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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Reviews

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

ArchiveBox Reviews

We have no reviews of ArchiveBox yet.
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Pinboard Reviews

  1. Simple but effective

    While all the other bookmarking sites have died, pinboard.in remains and is a reliable and handy place to save all those links you love but are sure to otherwise forget.


Pinboard vs. Raindrop: Two bookmark apps enter…
I don’t think Pinboard’s added a feature in ten years. It certainly hasn’t added a feature useful to me in that space of time. A year or so ago I got some Twitter DMs from someone (not Cegłowski) indicating that a refactoring and new features were on the way, but I have heard nothing since and don’t particularly expect to. Its documentation is similarly stale, and so are its...
Source: dsalo.info
11 Pocket Alternatives You Must Try Out!
With this tool, you can organize your pile of links into a clean space. With an easy tag option, finding your bookmarks becomes easier with Pinboard.
Source: blog.elink.io
XMarks is Dead on May 1st, 2018 : firefox
pinboard, $11/yr. It says it's a social bookmarking service but everything is private unless you make it public. I don't think bookmarking pages is done through the browser, though, but you can import your bookmarks and just use pinboard instead.
Source: www.reddit.com
Del.icio.us is closing down. Time for a roundup of alternative bookmark managers.
And as of recent events it was sold again to competing service Pinboard which plans - as I've foreseen this - to shut it down almost completely. Today (June 15, 2017) it will be set to read-only mode without ability to save new bookmarks as to preserve the "fascinating piece of web history" that contains around 1 billion of bookmarks.
Source: serafin.io

Social recommendations and mentions

ArchiveBox might be a bit more popular than Pinboard. We know about 82 links to it since March 2021 and only 67 links to Pinboard. 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 / 6 months ago
View more

Pinboard mentions (67)

  • Show HN: Personal Knowledge Base Visualization
    You might get lucky and find a NLP expert's bookmarks on https://pinboard.in. - Source: Hacker News / about 1 month ago
  • I Miss Human Curation
    The list of text links is basically what https://pinboard.in is, basically - social bookmarking. I only use it privately, but it does have the exact function you're talking about as well. I don't think I would use it with thumbnail previews, since I like how lightweight it is, but it wouldn't be difficult to build something like that. - 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
  • The Small Website Discoverability Crisis
    I'm using a similar service - https://pinboard.in to both managing my own bookmarks and to browse other users' public bookmarks of interest by tag or using built-in search functionality. Quite useful imo. I do remember so-called "Web Rings" and still think they were a nice idea (among others, passed away), and it seems to me, del.icio.us and then pinboard.in are one of a few options we still have to make smaller... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
  • After more than 20 years, I published my first dirty project
    The categories of RSS feeds from my bookmarks service, Pinboard, were all concatenated to a single string instead of being displayed separately. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ArchiveBox and Pinboard, 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.

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

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

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

Diigo - Diigo is a powerful research tool and a knowledge-sharing community