Software Alternatives & Reviews

Webrecorder VS ArchiveBox

Compare Webrecorder VS ArchiveBox and see what are their differences

Webrecorder logo Webrecorder

Create high-fidelity, interactive web archives of any web site you browse.

ArchiveBox logo ArchiveBox

The open-source, self-hosted internet archiving solution
  • Webrecorder Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-03-13
  • 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.

Webrecorder

Categories
  • Bookmark Manager
  • Utilities
  • Bookmarks
  • Download Manager
Website conifer.rhizome.org
Details $-
Platforms
-
Release Date-

ArchiveBox

Categories
  • Bookmark Manager
  • Bookmarks
  • Utilities
  • Internet Archiving
  • Digital Preservation
  • Backups
Website archivebox.io
Details $free
Platforms
Linux Mac OSX Docker
Release Date2017-05-05

Webrecorder 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

Webrecorder videos

7. 'Web & Social Media Archiving:' Rhizome’s Webrecorder

More videos:

  • Review - Learn more about Webrecorder.io collections (Pelican Bomb)

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 Webrecorder and ArchiveBox)
Bookmark Manager
11 11%
89% 89
Utilities
21 21%
79% 79
Bookmarks
7 7%
93% 93
Download Manager
100 100%
0% 0

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing Webrecorder 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 Webrecorder 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 Webrecorder. While we know about 82 links to ArchiveBox, we've tracked only 4 mentions of Webrecorder. 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.

Webrecorder mentions (4)

  • How to archive the tweets and replies of my own terminated twitter account(s)
    Try Conifer, it's free for 5 GB of data. You get a virtual browser inside their website and every page you navigate to is automatically saved to a WARC file (look it up). Source: over 2 years ago
  • How can I save websites to Wayback Machine that has content behind an account lock?
    Probably try : https://conifer.rhizome.org/ or https://webrecorder.net/ (all previously webrecorder.io). Then you can export your saved pages file into archive.org (but my guess not in the Wayback Machine). Source: over 2 years ago
  • Family member died - archiving their sites?
    You could crawl them using Conifer and keep the crawls private, then download the WARC files. WARC or Web Archive files can be 'played' back using any web archive playback software. ReplayWeb is a good one. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • My mother just passed away. She wrote extensively on this website. What can I do to archive everything she wrote?
    Https://conifer.rhizome.org/ is what you're looking for. Source: about 3 years ago

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 / about 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 / 3 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: 4 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 / 6 months ago
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What are some alternatives?

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

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

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

wallabag - Save the web, freely.

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

Reminiscence - Self-Hosted Bookmark and Archive Manager

Pocket - When you find something you want to view later, put it in Pocket.