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Glasp VS MarkItDown

Compare Glasp VS MarkItDown and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Glasp logo Glasp

Social web highlighter

MarkItDown logo MarkItDown

The MarkItDown library is a utility tool for converting various files to Markdown (e.g., for indexing, text analysis, etc.).
  • Glasp Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-09-14

Highlight the web and share the gist with peers. Learn from like-minded people. Glasp is an easier and faster way to highlight text and leave notes on the web. With one click, the content you’ve collected appears across all your devices. 📚

Glasp beautifully organizes your collection of highlights, so that you can easily come back to what truly matters to you anytime. By following like-minded people, you will discover useful content that expands your knowledge and thoughts. Collective learning is how humans got smarter across generations. 

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Key Features: ✅ Highlight text on the web ✅ Take notes on saved content and highlights ✅ Add tags to your highlights ✅ Discover useful content from like-minded people

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How to Use Glasp: 1. Click "Add to Chrome". 2. Log in to Glasp from the extension menu. 3. Select text and click your favorite color from a pop-up color tip. 4. You can see your highlights and notes on your profile page and/or Glasp home feed. 5. Add tags or leave comments on your saved content 6. Developing your collection of ideas and thoughts will help you connect the dots with like-minded people ;)

—— Benefits of Using Glasp: + Retain more information and easy to look back 📚 + Extract only important parts and use them for the future citation 🔗 + Discover useful information from like-minded people 🔍 + Share your highlights & notes with friends and peers with one click 🚀 + Leave your digital legacy for future generations (contribute to human history) 🙌

Not present

Glasp

Website
glasp.co
$ Details
freemium $15 / Monthly
Platforms
Web Windows Google Chrome Safari Edge Opera Vivaldi
Release Date
2021 December
Startup details
Country
United States
State
California
Founder(s)
Kazuki Nakayashiki, Kei Watanabe
Employees
1 - 9

Glasp features and specs

  • Highlight web articles
  • Kindle's notes & highlights import
  • Highlight YouTube transcripts
  • Highlight PDFs
  • Export highlights & notes
  • Find top highlights of articles
  • See other people's highlights & notes
  • Showcase reading list

MarkItDown features and specs

  • Open Source
    MarkItDown is open source, meaning that anyone can contribute to its development or customize it for personal use. This promotes community involvement and transparency.
  • Microsoft Backed
    As a Microsoft project, it likely benefits from the support and resources of a major tech company, potentially leading to reliable updates and maintenance.
  • Markdown Support
    The tool supports Markdown, which is widely used for formatting text in a simple and readable way, making it accessible for users familiar with this syntax.
  • Versatile Use Cases
    Suitable for various applications such as documentation, note-taking, and content creation, offering flexibility to different user needs.

Possible disadvantages of MarkItDown

  • Limited Features
    Compared to more comprehensive markdown editors, MarkItDown might lack advanced features which could limit its appeal for power users seeking extensive customization options.
  • Learning Curve
    Users not familiar with Markdown may face a learning curve to effectively use the tool, potentially hindering its adoption for those users.
  • Integration Limitations
    There might be limitations in integrating MarkItDown with other platforms or workflows, affecting users who need seamless integration with existing systems.
  • Support and Community
    Despite being Microsoft-backed, community support might be limited compared to other open-source projects with larger active communities.

Analysis of MarkItDown

Overall verdict

  • MarkItDown is a solid, lightweight open-source utility from Microsoft that reliably converts a wide range of file formats into clean Markdown, making it especially useful for LLM and RAG workflows.

Why this product is good

  • Supports many formats including PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images, audio, HTML, and more
  • Optimized to produce Markdown output that works well with LLMs and text analysis pipelines
  • Open source and backed by Microsoft, with active development and community contributions
  • Simple Python API and CLI that integrate easily into automation and data-processing workflows
  • Lightweight and free to use, with optional plugin support for extending functionality

Recommended for

  • Developers building RAG or LLM pipelines that need clean text extraction
  • Data engineers converting diverse document formats into a unified Markdown format
  • Teams needing automated document-to-text conversion for indexing or search
  • Python developers who want a simple CLI or library for file conversion
  • Anyone preparing documents for ingestion into AI or NLP tools

Glasp videos

Glasp - Tutorial Video

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Glasp User Profile Page
  • Tutorial - How to use Glasp browser extension (Chrome Extension)
  • Tutorial - Create and take a note on the Atomic Note
  • Tutorial - Highlight Web Pages with Glasp

MarkItDown videos

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

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Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Glasp and MarkItDown)
Productivity
100 100%
0% 0
Documentation
0 0%
100% 100
Bookmark Manager
100 100%
0% 0
Markdown Editor
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

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

Glasp Reviews

Best AI YouTube Summarizers in 2025 (Free & Paid)
Glasp is a user-friendly tool for straightforward summaries of YouTube videos. It uses typical natural language processing algorithms to ensure that the summaries are simple and coherent. The simplicity of its interface makes it accessible to users of all ages, from tech novices to seasoned professionals. Users can also copy summaries, as in Scripsy, allowing for easy...
Source: www.scripsy.ai

MarkItDown Reviews

We have no reviews of MarkItDown yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, MarkItDown should be more popular than Glasp. It has been mentiond 16 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.

Glasp mentions (9)

  • Improve your learning with Glasp: A Comprehensive Guide.
    To sign up, visit the Glasp website and click the Sign-up button in the top right corner, or log in if you already have an account. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Unlock Your Full Learning Potential with Glasp: The Ultimate Study Tool
    You can install the Glasp browser extension to your web browser from its website or as an app on Play Store. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Daily Thread / June 29
    For no reason at all, if you wanted to read the transcript of their dumb podcast without giving them views or listens, you can use the Glasp extension on chrome or safari to give you a summary instead of sitting through the video. Source: about 3 years ago
  • How to improve my workflow? Need help.
    Also glasp.co and https://roamresearch.com/ look interesting. I haven't tried them yet. Source: over 3 years ago
  • What’s a 100 dollar item you use every day that really boost productivity?
    These ones are free (since im a cheap person) but I use: - This for youtube summaries. Source: over 3 years ago
View more

MarkItDown mentions (16)

  • My AI said the PDF was empty. The PDF was not empty.
    I was preprocessing documents with markitdown, Microsoft's file-to-markdown converter, so I ran it by hand:. - Source: dev.to / 16 days ago
  • Meta Caps Internal AI Token Spending After Costs Approach Billions in 2026
    You don't need to use an online service to do this; you get to avoid spending money on tokens doing it offline. Gemma 4 works perfectly well offline on limited hardware (I have an 8GB video card) and can handle extracting text from image-based PDFs just fine. Take a PDF -> run it through MarkItDown [1], using the OCR plugin if you need (point it to Gemma 4) -> now you can ask Gemma 4 questions about the document.... - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago
  • Jimmy is a tool to convert your notes from different formats to Markdown
    Related: https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown. - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago
  • Computer use in Gemini 3.5 Flash
    I have a standing instruction for any documents that can't natively be read by a given AI to first be converted into .md using https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown which I've found to work really well. - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago
  • Ask HN: How should I convert Microsoft Word documents to Markdown?
    Native support: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/onedriveblog/introducing-markdown-support-in-sharepoint-and-onedrive/4512174 Microsoft OSS python: https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown. - Source: Hacker News / 2 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Glasp and MarkItDown, you can also consider the following products

Raindrop.io - All your articles, photos, video & content from web & apps in one place.

Doc2Markdown - Convert PDF, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and more to clean Markdown

My Mind - All your notes, bookmarks, inspiration, articles, and images in one single, private place, enhanced with artificial intelligence.

Markdown to PDF - Super simple way to get your markdown files to PDF

AdCreative.ai - Give your business an unfair advantage with creatives / banners generated by highly trained Artificial Intelligence.

CloudConvert - convert anything to anything - more than 200 different audio, video, document, ebook, archive, image, spreadsheet and presentation formats supported.