Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

ArchiveBox VS WebCopy

Compare ArchiveBox VS WebCopy and see what are their differences

ArchiveBox logo ArchiveBox

The open-source, self-hosted internet archiving solution

WebCopy logo WebCopy

Cyotek WebCopy is a free tool for copying full or partial websites locally onto your harddisk for offline viewing.
  • 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.

  • WebCopy Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-04

ArchiveBox

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

WebCopy

Website
cyotek.com
$ 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

WebCopy features and specs

  • Free to Use
    Cyotek WebCopy is a freeware tool, which means you can use it without any cost.
  • Easy to Use
    The user interface of WebCopy is straightforward, making it accessible even for users who are not technically inclined.
  • Comprehensive Documentation
    The tool comes with detailed documentation and tutorials to help users get started and solve any issues they might encounter.
  • Selective Copying
    WebCopy allows you to specify which parts of a website to copy, using rules and filters, giving you control over what content is downloaded.
  • Automated Updates
    The tool can automatically check for updates, ensuring that you are always using the latest version with the newest features and bug fixes.

Possible disadvantages of WebCopy

  • Windows Only
    Cyotek WebCopy is available only for Windows, which means users of other operating systems cannot directly use this tool.
  • Potential for Incomplete Copies
    In some cases, complex websites may not be fully copied, leading to missing content or broken links.
  • No Built-in Scheduler
    Unlike some paid alternatives, WebCopy lacks a built-in scheduling feature for automated tasks.
  • Limited Support
    Being a free tool, it offers limited customer support options, relying mainly on community and documentation.
  • Dependency on Website Structure
    WebCopy's effectiveness can vary greatly depending on the structure of the website, making it less suitable for highly dynamic and complex sites.

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

WebCopy videos

No WebCopy videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to ArchiveBox and WebCopy)
Bookmark Manager
100 100%
0% 0
Utilities
36 36%
64% 64
Bookmarks
100 100%
0% 0
Download Manager
0 0%
100% 100

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing ArchiveBox and WebCopy.

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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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, ArchiveBox seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 90 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 (90)

  • 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 / 3 days 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 / 4 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 / 7 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 / 7 months ago
  • I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and I don't know what to do with them
    Https://archivebox.io/ For those with an interest. My del.icio.us collection (what was still online) lives on my NAS now. - Source: Hacker News / 7 months ago
View more

WebCopy mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of WebCopy yet. Tracking of WebCopy recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

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

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.

GNU Wget - GNU Wget is a free software package for retrieving files using HTTP(S) and FTP, the most...

wallabag - Save the web, freely.

SiteSucker - SiteSucker is a Macintosh application that automatically downloads Web sites from the Internet.

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