Software Alternatives & Reviews

ArchiveBox VS Pocket

Compare ArchiveBox VS Pocket and see what are their differences

ArchiveBox logo ArchiveBox

The open-source, self-hosted internet archiving solution

Pocket logo Pocket

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

  • Pocket Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-21

ArchiveBox

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

Pocket

$ 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

Pocket 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

Pocket videos

Pocket - App Review for Web Clipping Fun

More videos:

  • Review - Pocket review
  • Tutorial - Pocket App Tutorial/Review| An Easy Way To Save Online Content

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to ArchiveBox and Pocket)
Bookmark Manager
18 18%
82% 82
Bookmarks
15 15%
85% 85
Utilities
100 100%
0% 0
Note Taking
9 9%
91% 91

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing ArchiveBox and Pocket.

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 Pocket. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
Log in or Post with

Reviews

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

ArchiveBox Reviews

We have no reviews of ArchiveBox yet.
Be the first one to post

Pocket Reviews

19 Best Feedly Alternatives To Track Insights Across The Web
Whether it’s the clean interface and robust organization of Inoreader, Flipboard’s personalized recommendations, or Pocket’s collaborative aspects, various Feedly alternatives are available to cater to diverse interests.
11 Pocket Alternatives You Must Try Out!
With similar features, here is a twin and one of the best alternatives to Pocket. Paperspan is an app for Android as well as iOS. You can also use the Chrome extension for bookmarking articles and websites.
Source: blog.elink.io
10 Best Apps like Pocket in 2021 - Pocket Alternatives
Raindrop.io is a capable alternative to Pocket in terms of versatility and intuitive reading experience. In other words, you should consider it a feature-rich bookmark manager. So, if Pocket does not provide you with a variety of tools to manage the massive number of bookmarks that you frequently store, then this should be a more convenient substitute. It can help you get...
Source: asoftclick.com
Del.icio.us is closing down. Time for a roundup of alternative bookmark managers.
It's a bookmark manager for people who don't like graphical interfaces, and value speed and privacy. There are no ads and no third-party tracking. You can connect and sync Twitter, Instapaper, Pocket and similar services.
Source: serafin.io

Social recommendations and mentions

ArchiveBox might be a bit more popular than Pocket. We know about 82 links to it since March 2021 and only 56 links to Pocket. 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

Pocket mentions (56)

  • Any URL/Website hoarders?
    I find Pocket useful for: https://getpocket.com/en/. Source: 11 months ago
  • How to deal with 30,000+ bookmarks? Software suggestions?
    I use the Pocket extension for Chrome. You can tag every one to organize them. They have import options and some paid features that could help you sort of dead links and other things. https://getpocket.com/en/. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Saving links for later app?
    I do use Pocket for this: https://getpocket.com/en/ works great. I‘m not sure about the notes though, have never really tried that. It supports tags, that how I usually categorize my links. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Is there a Linkedin "saved post" solution?
    There is an app called Pocket, also a Chrome extension which allows you to saves links and you can tag them to organise. If you use this on mobile, use the ‘share via’ on LinkedIn and you save to Pocket. That’s how I do it! Hope that helps. Source: about 1 year ago
  • Anti-FOMO
    Leverage RSS feeds, and/or pocket, and/or many other credible alternatives to keep things organized and save time. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ArchiveBox and Pocket, 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.

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

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