Software Alternatives & Reviews

ArchiveBox VS Raindrop.io

Compare ArchiveBox VS Raindrop.io and see what are their differences

ArchiveBox logo ArchiveBox

The open-source, self-hosted internet archiving solution

Raindrop.io logo Raindrop.io

All your articles, photos, video & content from web & apps in one place.
  • 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.

  • Raindrop.io Landing page
    Landing page //
    2018-09-30

ArchiveBox

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

Raindrop.io

$ Details
freemium
Platforms
Browser Web Windows Android iOS Google Chrome Mac OSX Linux Firefox Safari REST API Cross Platform JavaScript iPhone Chrome OS Edge
Release Date
2013 October

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

Raindrop.io 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

Raindrop.io videos

Overview of Raindrop.io Bookmarking App

More videos:

  • Review - Raindrop.io Bookmark App Review
  • Review - Raindrop.io - A Bookmark Manager

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to ArchiveBox and Raindrop.io)
Bookmark Manager
15 15%
85% 85
Bookmarks
11 11%
89% 89
Utilities
100 100%
0% 0
Productivity
0 0%
100% 100

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing ArchiveBox and Raindrop.io.

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 Raindrop.io

ArchiveBox Reviews

We have no reviews of ArchiveBox yet.
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Raindrop.io Reviews

Pinboard vs. Raindrop: Two bookmark apps enter…
Raindrop’s URLs, by contrast, are an absolute dumpster fire. Collections (which are the only “shareable” aggregation in Raindrop) are identified by a lengthy meaningless number-string, not collection name; I haven’t memorized my collections’ numbers and likely won’t. Worse, I can’t copy-and-paste URLs from the address bar because they’re different for the logged-in account...
Source: dsalo.info
11 Pocket Alternatives You Must Try Out!
The most common problem that all of us face when we bookmark things is not the bookmarking phase, but the retrieval face. Raindrop as a pocket alternative makes searching for bookmarks pretty easy.
Source: blog.elink.io
15 Best Xmarks Alternatives For Bookmarks Synchronization
Raindrop.io is a freemium bookmark manager available for all platforms, browsers, and operating systems. It has both free and paid versions. The free version allows you to save and sync bookmarks across devices and operating systems. The paid version on the other hand, which costs $3 per month, allows you to find and delete the duplicate entries, use tags, and check for all...
Source: techreen.com
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
XMarks is Dead on May 1st, 2018 : firefox
The Raindrop.io seems to work, but when I go to sort by name, there are some sites that are not sorted by name. For instance on my bookmark bar Yahoo! shows up before reddit in Raindrop.io
Source: www.reddit.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Raindrop.io should be more popular than ArchiveBox. It has been mentiond 178 times since March 2021. 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

Raindrop.io mentions (178)

  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    Raindrop.io - Private and secure bookmarking app for macOS, Windows, Android, iOS, and Web. Free Unlimited Bookmarks and Collaboration. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Linkhut: A Social Bookmarking Site
    I setup Raindrop.io [1] to feed into Archivebox, mostly as an overcomplicated way to automatically submit the page to archive.org [2]. Raindrop is nice since it works in browser and as a phone app - so it truly is a single bookmarking tool. I mostly use it for search purposes, bookmarking things I may want to find again in a few years. I rarely look at my Archivebox, but it's nice to know it's there with offline... - Source: Hacker News / 4 months ago
  • Firefox on the brink?
    What about https://raindrop.io/ ? Seems to do exactly what you're building. Source: 5 months ago
  • What is the best web clipper?
    Raindrop.io is a bookmark manager, right? Source: 5 months ago
  • Evernote is not alone.
    I switched from Pocket to Raindrop. Raindrop is an order of magnitude more feature rich and also less expensive than Pocket. I highly recommend it. Source: 5 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ArchiveBox and Raindrop.io, you can also consider the following products

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

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

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