Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Wikipedia VS ArchiveBox

Compare Wikipedia VS ArchiveBox 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.

Wikipedia logo Wikipedia

Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia, created and edited by volunteers around the world and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

ArchiveBox logo ArchiveBox

The open-source, self-hosted internet archiving solution
  • Wikipedia Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-09-24
  • 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.

ArchiveBox

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

Wikipedia features and specs

  • Comprehensive Coverage
    Wikipedia provides information on an enormous range of topics, often in great detail. This makes it an invaluable resource for quick fact-checking, general research, and gaining a surface-level understanding of a subject.
  • Free Access
    Wikipedia is free to use for anyone with internet access, reducing barriers to information and supporting educational equality.
  • Collaborative Editing
    Articles on Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, allowing for a collaborative and dynamic creation and updating process. This can lead to quick corrections and diverse perspectives.
  • Citations and Sources
    Many articles on Wikipedia include citations and references to external sources, which can be useful for further research and verification of the information provided.
  • Multilingual
    Wikipedia is available in numerous languages, which helps make information accessible to a global audience.

Possible disadvantages of Wikipedia

  • Potential for Vandalism
    Because Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, there's a potential for vandalism or the introduction of incorrect information, which can affect the reliability of some articles.
  • Citation Quality
    The quality and reliability of cited sources in Wikipedia articles can vary, and some articles may cite unreliable or biased sources.
  • Subjectivity and Bias
    Despite efforts to maintain neutrality, some articles may contain subjective viewpoints or bias, reflecting the opinions of their contributors.
  • Incomplete Information
    Not all topics are covered equally well on Wikipedia. Lesser-known or more recent topics may have sparse or poorly developed entries.
  • Misleading Editing Practices
    There can be instances where experienced editors dominate the editing process, potentially leading to gatekeeping and exclusion of alternative perspectives or newer editors.

ArchiveBox features and specs

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

Analysis of ArchiveBox

Overall verdict

  • ArchiveBox is a versatile and robust solution for individuals or organizations seeking to preserve web content. It provides a wide range of archiving options and allows for extensive customization. However, as a self-hosted tool, it requires some technical knowledge to set up and maintain, which may not be ideal for non-technical users. Overall, it is a good tool if you have the technical capability and need to consistently archive online assets.

Why this product is good

  • ArchiveBox is an open-source self-hosted tool designed to help users save and manage web content offline. It is appreciated for its ability to archive web content including static HTML, PDFs, and media files in a format that is easy to navigate and long-lasting, even if the source website becomes inaccessible. The tool supports multiple input methods, including browser integrations, and is capable of running on various platforms, thus offering flexibility and scalability for personal and professional use.

Recommended for

    ArchiveBox is recommended for digital archivists, researchers, journalists, and any individuals or organizations that need to reliably save and organize web content. It is particularly suitable for those with the technical expertise to manage a self-hosted setup and who require an offline, permanent record of online information.

Wikipedia videos

Wikipedia The Game | Beer and Board Games

More videos:

  • Review - Using Wikipedia on an iPod Mini
  • Review - I Don't Use or Trust Wikipedia Anymore.

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 Wikipedia and ArchiveBox)
Content Collaboration
100 100%
0% 0
Bookmark Manager
0 0%
100% 100
Note Taking
83 83%
17% 17
Bookmarks
0 0%
100% 100

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing Wikipedia 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 Wikipedia and ArchiveBox

Wikipedia Reviews

17 open source wiki engine/software
MediaWiki is a free and open source server based wiki engine written in PHP developed by Wikipedia. MediaWiki is an extremely powerful, scalable software and a feature-rich wiki implementation, that uses PHP to process and display data stored in its MySQL database. Pages use MediaWiki’s wiki-text format, so that users without knowledge of XHTML or CSS can edit pages easily...

ArchiveBox Reviews

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

Social recommendations and mentions

Wikipedia might be a bit more popular than ArchiveBox. We know about 127 links to it since March 2021 and only 90 links to ArchiveBox. 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.

Wikipedia mentions (127)

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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 / 30 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 / 5 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 / 8 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 Wikipedia and ArchiveBox, you can also consider the following products

Fandom - The entertainment site where fans come first.

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

Miraheze - Miraheze is a wiki farm (hosts wikis) for free and with no ads, it also provides custom domains...

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

Encyclopædia Britannica - Explore the fact-checked online encyclopedia from Encyclopaedia Britannica with hundreds of thousands of objective articles, biographies, videos, and images from experts.

wallabag - Save the web, freely.