Software Alternatives & Reviews

ArchiveBox VS RetroArch

Compare ArchiveBox VS RetroArch and see what are their differences

ArchiveBox logo ArchiveBox

The open-source, self-hosted internet archiving solution

RetroArch logo RetroArch

RetroArch is a frontend for emulators, game engines and media players.
  • 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.

  • RetroArch Landing page
    Landing page //
    2021-12-22

ArchiveBox

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

RetroArch

$ 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

RetroArch 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

RetroArch videos

RetroArch - Getting Started! Your Ultimate Retro Gaming PC! [Setup and Demonstration]

More videos:

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to ArchiveBox and RetroArch)
Bookmark Manager
100 100%
0% 0
Gaming
0 0%
100% 100
Bookmarks
100 100%
0% 0
Emulators
0 0%
100% 100

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing ArchiveBox and RetroArch.

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 RetroArch

ArchiveBox Reviews

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RetroArch Reviews

Best DS Emulator: Are These Emulators Safe And Legal To Use?
RetroArch also supports a wide range of controller types, making it a great choice for gamers who want to use their favorite controller.
Source: appletoo.us
5 Best Nintendo DS Emulators for PC
It has highlights like RetroArch are shaders, netplay, rewinding, next-frame response times, run ahead, machine translation, blind accessibility features, and much more.
Best emulators for Android in 2023
RetroArch is a popular open-source front-end for emulators. If you’re into playing retro games, RetroArch is your one-stop shop for all your emulating needs. It's not an emulator by itself but instead allows you to add "cores" that act as the backend to emulate several legacy consoles. While most of its most popular emulators are already covered here by dedicated apps, it...
5 of the Best GameBoy Advance (GBA) Emulators for Android
RetroArch is a poster child worldwide of emulation, specifically due to the fact that it’s not precisely an emulator. The retroArch is best refer to as a solitary, unified application where you can communicate with other emulators.
4 Free Open Source Game Emulators For Windows PC, Linux, and macOS
In addition to this, you are able to run original game discs (CDs) from RetroArch. RetroArch has advanced features like shaders, netplay, rewinding, next-frame response times, runahead, machine translation, blind accessibility features, and more! What systems does it play?

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, ArchiveBox should be more popular than RetroArch. It has been mentiond 82 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

RetroArch mentions (20)

  • RetroArch cannot be found on the PlayStore, the first result is a copycat. It is just me?
    No, isn't just you. Every 64-bit phone haves the Play Store Retroarch available, the 32-bits no. But you can still download the 32-bit version on the Retroarch website. Source: 11 months ago
  • Cause of the intrusion has been found and isolated. Sites are operational again.
    It was only the download links on retroarch.com on the Platforms page that got (briefly) redirected for a few hours. That should all be safe now. Source: 11 months ago
  • Malicious download links?
    Yes, only the retroarch.com and libretro.com websites were affected. Source: 11 months ago
  • Recent update from supposed hackers
    I went to retroarch.com and it said "discord.gg/evaderz is big haxors" its unrespectable. Source: 11 months ago
  • Latest RetroArch on Xiaomi Mi box
    I've got installed RetroArch Plus from Google Play on my Xiaomi Mi box 4k and I want to update it to the latest version. I downloaded apk from retroarch.com but when I use apk installer to update it say is not compatible. I removed version from Google Play but fresh install 1.15.0 is not compatible too. I tried 32 and 64 version. What I'm doing wrong? Is any other AndroidTV version? Source: 11 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing ArchiveBox and RetroArch, you can also consider the following products

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

OpenEmu - Console and Arcade video game emulator for macOS.

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

LaunchBox - LaunchBox is a portable, box-art-based games database and launcher for DOSBox, emulators, arcade cabinets, and PC Games. Download it free!

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

BSNES - bsnes is a Super Nintendo (SNES) emulator focused on performance, features, and ease of use.