Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Explain Everything VS ArchiveBox

Compare Explain Everything VS ArchiveBox and see what are their differences

Explain Everything logo Explain Everything

Explain Everything is an easy-to-use design, screencasting, and interactive whiteboard tool that...

ArchiveBox logo ArchiveBox

The open-source, self-hosted internet archiving solution
  • Explain Everything Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-10
  • 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.

Explain Everything features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

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

Explain Everything videos

Explain Everything - Whiteboard, Annotation and a Touch of Awesome

More videos:

  • Review - EdTech Showdown: Educreations vs. Explain Everything
  • Review - Explain Everything Whiteboard and Explain EDU – Which version to get for your school?

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

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Explain Everything and ArchiveBox)
Digital Whiteboard
100 100%
0% 0
Bookmark Manager
0 0%
100% 100
Education & Reference
100 100%
0% 0
Bookmarks
0 0%
100% 100

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing Explain Everything and ArchiveBox.

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 Explain Everything and ArchiveBox

Explain Everything Reviews

5 Best Microsoft White­board Alternatives
Explain Everything works a little like the whiteboard option in Zoom or Meet, where you will create a whiteboard and send an invite code to others. There are no desktop apps, but it works on any browser and has dedicated mobile apps. It was created to help teachers and others who give presentations to explain how things work. It also supports audio and video recording.
The 11 best online whiteboards
As a whiteboard, Explain Everything lets you draw, add text, upload files, and create basic shapes. All fairly standard. But because it offers video recording capabilities, it allows you to record your whiteboard—and voice—as you draw, then edit or split elements to refine the finished video. Once you're satisfied, you can save the video to be shared online as a link or...
Source: zapier.com
6 Jamboard Alternatives to Interactive Whiteboard
Known to have similar features to our traditional Microsoft Paint, Explain Everything is a jamboard that allows you to draw, add text, upload files, and create basic shapes while teaching. Without paying, you will be able to utilize up to 3 jamboards with collaboration over voice chat. Explain Everything has more elaborate drawing tools, with features that enable you to...
Source: blog.heyhi.sg

ArchiveBox Reviews

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

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, ArchiveBox seems to be a lot more popular than Explain Everything. While we know about 85 links to ArchiveBox, we've tracked only 6 mentions of Explain Everything. 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.

Explain Everything mentions (6)

  • Use cases for the Canvas
    Logseq even has a Beta Canvas (whiteboard). There's even a Microsoft Windows Whiteboard app on my computer. Here's an app called "Explain Everything" that's on my tablet. It lets us, on a whiteboard, 'explain everything" just like a teacher might do on a blackboard. One. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Apple removes headphone jack from new 10th generation iPad
    Like any other tool, it's in how you use it. If it's just a case of, "Go play games to learn how to spell!" then yes, I agree (and is why I never installed Angry Birds, much to some teacher's chagrin). But you have some pretty neat learning tool; Explain Everything was popular where I was at where they key is to enhance and augment the student's learning. The goal here is it to make the iPad a tool both engage... Source: over 1 year ago
  • What is the best simple setup for recording high quality audio on an iPad with the Explain Everything app?
    I am helping a friend out who makes educational YouTube videos on their iPad Pro (2018 model with USB-C) with the Explain Everything app. It's a whiteboarding app that allows you to make videos by whiteboarding and talking at the same time. Source: over 2 years ago
  • free or inexpensive eLearning software?
    What's your definition of e-learning? A series of tutorial videos, inside HTML pages can be a good solution. Try Explain Everything ... https://explaineverything.com/. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • Online teaching tech
    Explain Everything to make explanation videos of some concepts seen in class. Source: almost 3 years ago
View more

ArchiveBox mentions (85)

View more

What are some alternatives?

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

ActivInspire - ActivInspire interactive whiteboard software is a classroom teaching software from Promethean for...

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

OpenBoard - The OpenBoard software is an interactive white board software.

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

Gynzy - Gynzy is the ultimate educational software that helps teachers create engaging lesson plans that will raise student engagment and save time for educators.

wallabag - Save the web, freely.