What is a good alternative to Readwise?

Readwise gathers the highlights you make elsewhere. Its home page names Kindle, Instapaper, Apple Books, X, Goodreads, Medium and Snipd, and you can add a printed page by taking a photo of it. The best lines come back through a daily email and the app on spaced repetition, and on the Full plan they go out to Obsidian, Notion, Evernote and Craft. Full also includes Reader, Readwise's own app for articles, newsletters, RSS feeds, ebooks and YouTube transcripts.

People who leave usually have one of five reasons. The price adds up next to a free highlighter. They read mostly on the open web and rarely on a Kindle. They want a read-later app and no review at all. They want highlights as Markdown files on their own disk. Or they notice that most of what they meant to learn this year came from short videos, which give a highlighter nothing to mark.

A highlighter needs text in front of you. A Reel where a chef explains a method, or a TikTok about a money habit, has none, so it stays saved and unread. scrollandlearn reads the post for you. Paste the link or send it from your phone, and a TikTok or Reel is read from what is said in it, a YouTube video is read from its captions, posts on X, Threads, Reddit, Bluesky and LinkedIn are read from their text, and on Instagram, TikTok, X, Threads and LinkedIn the words printed on slides count too. A minute or so later there is a lesson: a core idea, key points, the line worth keeping and, when the post suggests one, a thing to try. Here is an example of the lesson a Threads post about prompts becomes.

Where Readwise shows you a highlight again, scrollandlearn asks you a question about the lesson first, and your grade (Forgot, Kind of or Knew it) sets when it comes back, from tomorrow to a year away. Lessons sort themselves into topics, and each topic keeps a big picture and a knowledge score.

What a Readwise user gives up: there are no Kindle or book highlights, nothing to highlight inside a lesson, no import of the highlights you already have, and no sync to Notion or Obsidian; Export lessons is a download of Markdown, CSV or JSON. Articles from a pasted link work for LinkedIn only; others need the browser extension, in Firefox so far. It is a web app with no native app. On scrollandlearn your first 10 lessons are free with no card, then Starter is $19.99 a month for 100 saves. You can cancel any time.

Glasp is a highlighter that lives in the browser. Its pricing page says highlighting the web, YouTube and Kindle is free and stays free, and it lists YouTube summaries, AI chat credits, a daily Notion sync, an Obsidian plugin and exports as Markdown, HTML, CSV and JSON on every plan. The free plan is, in its own words, not a trial, and there are extensions for Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox and apps for iOS and Android.

The limit for someone leaving Readwise: highlights are public by default, and keeping them to yourself takes Pro. Its pricing page does not describe a daily review of past highlights.

Instapaper is one of the apps Readwise itself pulls highlights from, so some people simply drop the layer on top. It syncs saved articles across the web, iPhone and Android. Premium, at $5.99 a month or $59.99 a year, adds full-text search through everything you saved, unlimited notes, AI voices and text-to-speech playlists on mobile, and a Kindle integration.

The limit: the free plan caps notes at five a month, and its Premium page describes no review that brings saved passages back. You read, annotate and search.

Matter calls itself the modern read-later app for iPhone, iPad and the web. It saves articles and threads, takes your newsletters through Gmail or its own address, lets you follow writers from X, and transcribes YouTube videos and podcast episodes into time-synced text. You highlight with a finger or the Apple Pencil, and audio highlights let you mark a line while listening to its speech synthesis. Its home page says highlights can sync to a second brain tool, without naming which.

The limits: its pages name iPhone, iPad and the web, not Android, and show no price, so check its App Store listing before you count on it.

Raindrop.io is a bookmark manager first, with unlimited highlights and bookmarks on its free plan, sharing and collaboration, and 100 MB of uploads a month. Pro adds full-text search, reminders, annotations, a web archive that keeps permanent copies, an AI assistant and 10 GB of uploads. Billing is monthly or yearly, and its FAQ says yearly usually costs about 20% less.

The limit: highlights live next to the bookmark they came from. Reminders bring a link back on a date you set, which is a different thing from a daily review of everything you marked.

Obsidian stores notes as plain text Markdown files on your device, readable offline, and the app is free without limits. The community plugin Kindle Highlights, by hadynz, with about 169,000 downloads, syncs and resyncs highlights and notes from Amazon's Kindle reader, or from the My Clippings file on the device, into your vault. From there you link them to other notes like anything else you write.

The limits: its description covers Kindle only, not Apple Books or articles, and a review of old highlights is something you build with other plugins. Sync across devices is $4 a month billed yearly, or free if you move the files yourself.

• One library for many reading apps. As of 22 October 2026, no other app on this page describes pulling highlights from Kindle, Apple Books, Instapaper, Goodreads, Medium, Snipd and X into one place.
• A daily review of book highlights. Readwise brings your best lines back by email and in the app on spaced repetition. scrollandlearn reviews lessons from posts, not book highlights.
• Reader in the same subscription. Articles, newsletters, RSS feeds, ebooks and YouTube transcripts, with Ghostreader to answer questions, text-to-speech, offline reading, sending to a Kindle and a mode for e-ink devices.
• Exports to the tools you already use. On Full, highlights go to Obsidian, Notion, Evernote and Craft.
• A student price. Readwise gives 50% off to students and people in academia.

• Look at what you saved last month. Mostly TikToks, Reels and posts with advice: scrollandlearn. Mostly web pages: Glasp or Raindrop.io. Mostly articles you meant to read: Instapaper or Matter. Mostly Kindle books: Obsidian with the plugin, or stay with Readwise.
• Decide whether you want to be reminded. Readwise and scrollandlearn bring things back on a schedule; the others wait for you to open them.
• Decide who may see it. Glasp highlights are public by default, with private ones on Pro. scrollandlearn keeps your library private, and Obsidian keeps it in files on your device.
• Check your phone. Matter's pages name iPhone and iPad, Instapaper's web, iPhone and Android, and scrollandlearn works in any browser.

You may end up with two tools: one for reading and one for what you scroll. Nothing here syncs with scrollandlearn, so each keeps its own copy.