Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Waybackpack VS ArchiveBox

Compare Waybackpack VS ArchiveBox and see what are their differences

Waybackpack logo Waybackpack

Download the entire Wayback Machine archive for a given URL

ArchiveBox logo ArchiveBox

The open-source, self-hosted internet archiving solution
  • Waybackpack Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-09
  • 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.

Waybackpack

Website
github.com
$ Details
-
Platforms
-
Release Date
-

ArchiveBox

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

Waybackpack features and specs

  • Access to Archived Websites
    Waybackpack allows users to download archived versions of websites from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, enabling access to website content that might no longer be available online.
  • Customizable Date Range
    Users can specify a date range to find specific snapshot versions of a website, making it easier to retrieve and analyze specific changes in web content over time.
  • Open Source
    Being open-source, Waybackpack offers transparency and can be modified or extended by developers to suit their specific needs or contribute improvements to the community.
  • Ease of Use
    Waybackpack provides a command-line interface that simplifies the process of accessing and downloading web archives, making it user-friendly for people comfortable with command-line operations.

Possible disadvantages of Waybackpack

  • Limited to Wayback Machine
    Waybackpack is specifically designed to work with the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, limiting its utility for users who need access to archived content from other sources.
  • Technical Requirement
    The tool requires users to have a basic understanding of command-line operations, which can be a barrier for non-technical users who might prefer a graphical user interface.
  • Potential for Incomplete Archives
    The quality and completeness of archived pages depend on the Wayback Machine's crawls, potentially leading to missing or incomplete data for certain sites or pages.
  • Rate Limits
    Users may encounter rate limitations imposed by the Wayback Machine's servers, which could affect the time it takes to retrieve large amounts of data.

ArchiveBox features and specs

  • Offline website saving
  • Tagging
  • Scheduled archiving
  • Recursive crawling
  • Media extraction
  • Article text extraction
  • Static HTML exports
  • Full-text search

Waybackpack videos

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

Add video

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 Waybackpack and ArchiveBox)
Web App
100 100%
0% 0
Bookmark Manager
8 8%
92% 92
Productivity
100 100%
0% 0
Bookmarks
0 0%
100% 100

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing Waybackpack 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

Share your experience with using Waybackpack and ArchiveBox. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, ArchiveBox seems to be a lot more popular than Waybackpack. While we know about 90 links to ArchiveBox, we've tracked only 3 mentions of Waybackpack. 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.

Waybackpack mentions (3)

  • People who've received a black bar on Hacker News
    Thank you! But the script but the only thing that really deserves credit is Jeremy Singer-Vine's https://github.com/jsvine/waybackpack library. Pretty much made this a very straightforward task. - Source: Hacker News / almost 2 years ago
  • Upgrading from Debian Jessie to Bullseye after nearly 30 years
    > Is there some straightforward way to list all of archive.org's snapshots (of a particular site) without a javascript-enabled browser? I use https://github.com/jsvine/waybackpack.
      $ waybackpack --list https://diziet.dreamwidth.org/11840.html.
    - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago
  • Wayback Machine Downloader – Download an Entire Website from the Wayback Machine
    Which paid services are you referring to? It is likely that these services aren't distributing the projects they are based on, if so, then they are in compliance with the licenses of the open source projects, which don't require attribution unless you distribute them. This project started in 2015 btw. Another similar project called waybackpack started in 2016. There are probably more projects. IMO... - Source: Hacker News / almost 4 years ago

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 / 11 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 / 8 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

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

Famous First Websites - Discover what popular startup websites looked like at launch

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

YouTube Decade - Watch the most viewed videos posted exactly 10 years ago

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

Level Vinyl - Find and frame your favorite albums

wallabag - Save the web, freely.