The Best Readwise Alternative Alternatives in 2026

When people search for a Readwise alternative, they are often thinking about two different problems. Some want a replacement for the highlight syncing and daily review workflow that Readwise provides — the system that resurfaces your Kindle underlines and article annotations on a spaced-repetition schedule. Others have heard “Readwise” used loosely and are actually looking for a read-it-later app, something closer to what Pocket or Instapaper did before Pocket shut down. These are different products and different problems, and the confusion is partly the Readwise company’s own doing, since they now have two products under one name.

This post covers the first use case: Readwise as a highlight management and spaced-repetition tool. If you are looking for a read-it-later replacement — saving web articles to read later, browsing RSS feeds, forwarding newsletters — that is Readwise Reader, which is a separate application with a separate set of competitors.

If you are in the right place, read on. Whether you are leaving Readwise because of the price, because you want your data in a local file rather than a cloud service, or because you want something simpler, there are several genuine options worth considering.

Readwise and Readwise Reader: Two Different Products

The confusion starts with the name. There are two distinct products under the Readwise brand, and understanding the difference is worth a minute before evaluating alternatives.

Readwise — the original product at readwise.io — is a highlight aggregator and spaced-repetition review tool. It collects the passages and notes you have marked across Kindle books, Apple Books, web articles, PDFs, and other reading sources, stores them in a unified library, and sends you a daily review showing a selection of those highlights. The review system is built on spaced repetition: the idea that you retain information better when you revisit it at gradually increasing intervals rather than all at once. When you finish a book on Kindle and realize three months later that you remember almost nothing from it, that is exactly the problem Readwise is designed to address.

Readwise Reader — at readwise.io/read — is a completely separate product. It is a read-it-later application: you save web articles to it, subscribe to RSS feeds, forward email newsletters, and read PDFs inside it. In category terms, it sits alongside Instapaper, Matter, and Wallabag — not alongside the original Readwise. Reader is included only in the Full plan ($9.99/month annually). The Lite plan ($5.59/month annually) provides the highlight sync and daily review without Reader.

When reviews discuss Readwise, they often blend both products together because they share a pricing page and branding. If what you want to replace is the highlight review and knowledge retention system, you are looking at Readwise alternatives. If what you want to replace is the read-it-later queue, you are looking at Readwise Reader alternatives, which is a different list.

What Readwise Actually Does

Readwise aggregates highlights from a wide range of sources: Kindle (purchased ebooks and My Clippings.txt from physical books), Apple Books, Google Play Books, physical books via OCR photo capture, web articles via the Readwise browser extension, PDFs, podcasts via a Snipd integration, and YouTube video transcripts. Once highlights arrive in the library, you can tag them, add your own notes on top of them, and search across your entire reading history.

The daily review is the feature that most people pay for. Each day, Readwise selects a handful of highlights from your library and presents them for review. The selection is not random — the algorithm weights recent highlights more heavily early on, then shifts toward surfacing older ones over time. This is the spaced repetition mechanism: you see a highlight frequently after you first make it, then less and less often as the algorithm assumes it is consolidating in memory. You can explicitly boost certain highlights to see them more often, or mark them as mastered to reduce their frequency.

On the Full plan, exports run continuously: Notion, Obsidian, Roam Research, and Evernote all receive your highlights automatically as new ones are added. The Obsidian integration in particular has become a popular workflow for people building a personal knowledge base — highlights arrive in the vault as Markdown files linked to book or article entries, ready to be woven into notes and essays.

At the Lite tier ($5.59/month annually), you get the sync and daily review without the export integrations or the Reader app. At the Full tier ($9.99/month annually, $12.99/month monthly), you get everything including Reader. A 30-day free trial applies to both, and students and academics receive 50% off.

Why People Look for Alternatives

The reasons for leaving Readwise tend to fall into three categories: cost, data ownership, and simplicity.

On cost: at $9.99/month annually, Readwise is among the more expensive single-purpose productivity subscriptions available. For someone who reads intensively — dozens of books and hundreds of articles per year — the value is easier to justify. For someone who reads a few books a year and highlights occasionally, the math is harder. The Lite plan at $5.59/month is more reasonable, but it removes the export integrations, which for many users is the most useful part.

On data ownership: Readwise stores your highlights on its servers, and meaningful access to the daily review depends on maintaining a subscription. If you cancel, you can export your data, but the automated surfacing and syncing stop. For readers who want their notes to live on their own hardware in plain text files — a preference that has grown alongside the local-first software movement — tools like Obsidian are a more natural fit.

On simplicity: not everyone wants to be nudged to review old highlights on a schedule. Some people prefer to search when they need something rather than receive a daily reminder. For those readers, a simpler, cheaper highlight archive serves the same purpose without the ongoing subscription.

Obsidian with Kindle Highlight Plugins

For users who already have Obsidian as their knowledge base, the most practical free path away from Readwise is one of the community-built Kindle sync plugins. Two are worth knowing about in detail.

The Kindle Highlights plugin, developed by hadynz, syncs ebooks purchased from Amazon by authenticating with your Amazon account and reading the Kindle Reader web interface at read.amazon.com. Each book receives its own Markdown file in your vault containing all your highlights and notes formatted as structured text. The plugin also accepts My Clippings.txt uploads for content not purchased through Amazon — this covers physical books you clipped with a Kindle device, sideloaded ebooks, and highlights made on non-Amazon ebook stores if you export a clippings file. A detailed sync log helps with debugging if something does not come through correctly.

The Kindle Bridge plugin takes a different technical approach. It authenticates through Amazon’s official sign-in page and generates one Markdown note per book, with a plugin-managed section specifically for highlights and notes. Kindle Bridge supports scheduled sync — it can run automatically on Obsidian startup or at fixed time intervals — so your vault stays current without manual importing. You can also trigger a sync manually at any time.

Both plugins are free and require only Obsidian, which is itself free for personal use. (A commercial license is $50/year for anyone using Obsidian as part of paid work.) Neither plugin sends your data to any external service beyond Amazon’s own servers, which addresses the data sovereignty concern entirely.

The gap compared to Readwise is spaced repetition. Neither Kindle plugin automatically surfaces old highlights for daily review. If you want that behavior inside Obsidian, the community Spaced Repetition plugin can provide it — but you need to format your highlights as flashcards or use the plugin’s expected syntax for it to detect them. For highlights in particular, this typically means writing each highlight with :: or similar delimiters after the fact, which is more manual work than most people anticipate. The out-of-the-box experience is considerably less automated than Readwise.

For users whose goal is a searchable, permanent archive of Kindle highlights inside Obsidian — without automated review — the plugin approach is genuinely excellent and costs nothing beyond the time to set it up. For users who specifically want the daily review nudge, the setup required to replicate it in Obsidian is substantial enough that a cheaper paid alternative may be a better trade-off.

The Obsidian approach also works best for Kindle content specifically. If you also highlight web articles via a browser extension, or highlight in Apple Books or Kobo, you need additional plugins or manual processes for each source. Readwise’s strength as a platform is unifying many reading sources in one place; the Obsidian plugin approach works source by source.

Notion as a Highlights Home

Notion is a general-purpose workspace, not a dedicated highlights tool. But for users who already organize their reading notes and book summaries inside Notion, it can function as a usable highlight library when combined with the right import method.

The direct approach is manual: Amazon’s highlight page at read.amazon.com/notebook shows every highlight you have made across Kindle purchases, organized by book. You can copy highlights from there and paste them into a Notion database with whatever structure you prefer — book title as the page title, highlights as block quotes, tags by topic or book type. For light readers or for someone setting up a one-time import of past highlights, this is sufficient. For someone who highlights heavily across many books and wants new highlights to appear automatically, it becomes unsustainable quickly.

Several paid tools automate the Notion pipeline. Screvi (covered in the next section) exports to Notion at $6.99/month. Glasp Pro ($12.50/month) offers daily automated Notion sync for Kindle highlights. And Readwise’s own Full plan exports continuously to Notion — which is one reason some users stick with Readwise even when their actual note-taking happens entirely inside Notion.

The fundamental limitation with Notion as a Readwise replacement is that it does not offer spaced repetition. You can build a Notion database with date-based reminders that prompt you to review older entries, or use filter views to surface notes you have not opened in a while. But there is no algorithm behind it deciding what to show you based on a retention model. If the daily review behavior is specifically what you rely on, Notion is a storage destination, not a replacement for that feature.

Notion works well as a terminal for highlights rather than an active review system: highlights arrive from another tool, sit in a searchable database, and you retrieve specific passages when you are writing or researching. That is a legitimate workflow, but it is different from what Readwise does.

Screvi

Screvi is the closest paid alternative to Readwise’s core highlight and review feature set. It syncs highlights from Kindle, Kobo, and Apple Books, provides spaced-repetition daily review, and exports to Notion and Markdown. The price is $6.99/month with a 14-day free trial. No credit card is required to start the trial.

The most notable difference from Readwise is narrower source support. Screvi covers the three major ebook platforms well, but web article highlights — the kind you make using a browser extension on a blog post or news article — are not a first-class feature the way they are in Readwise. Readwise also integrates with Snipd for podcast highlights and with YouTube transcripts, which Screvi does not offer. If your highlights are concentrated in ebooks rather than web content, this gap is not meaningful. If you highlight heavily across the open web, it is.

What Screvi does well, it does cleanly. The review interface is straightforward, the Notion export is reliable, and the Kobo support is actually a meaningful advantage over Readwise, which handles Kobo highlights through a less polished manual export process rather than a direct integration.

If you are leaving Readwise primarily because of the price and your reading is mainly in ebooks, Screvi is the most natural landing spot. The spaced-repetition mechanism is conceptually the same, the export destinations overlap, and you can import your existing Readwise highlight library during the trial period to avoid starting over.

Glasp

Glasp started as a social highlighting platform — a tool for sharing what you underline on the web and in ebooks with a community of other readers. That social orientation shapes its pricing structure in ways that matter for anyone considering it as a private Readwise alternative.

On the free tier, Glasp provides unlimited Kindle highlight imports and sends a daily Kindle Review email in the same vein as Readwise’s daily review. This is genuinely useful if you are comfortable with your highlights being publicly visible. The caveat is significant: your highlights are public by default on the free plan. For most personal reading — especially notes on books about health, relationships, finances, or any subject you consider private — this eliminates the free tier as a viable option.

The Glasp Pro plan at $12.50/month makes highlights private and adds AI features: automated summaries, insight extraction, and daily automated Notion sync. At this price point, Pro costs more than Screvi and approaches the Readwise Full plan at $9.99/month annually. The AI features differentiate it, but the value depends on whether you specifically want automated summarization alongside your highlights.

Glasp is worth evaluating if you are interested in reading as a shared or social practice — following what others are underlining on specific topics, or making your own reading notes visible to collaborators or followers. If the goal is a private, personal replacement for Readwise, the pricing and the public-default model make Glasp a harder choice than Screvi.

Clippings.io and Simpler Single-Source Tools

Not every Readwise alternative needs to replicate the full feature set. For readers who want a clean archive of Kindle highlights they can search and browse — without spaced repetition, without cross-platform sync, and without a $120/year subscription — there are simpler, cheaper tools that serve this narrower purpose well.

Clippings.io is built for exactly this. It imports highlights directly from your Kindle library via the My Clippings.txt file or by connecting to your Amazon account, organizes them by book, and provides a searchable interface. The free tier covers up to 100 highlights, which is enough for several lightly annotated books. Paid plans remove the highlight cap and add features like Kindle Collections sync and export to other formats. The price is lower than Readwise, and the interface is simpler. There is no spaced repetition, but if what you mainly want is to find a specific quote from a book you read last year, Clippings.io handles that without complexity.

PastReads is another option worth knowing. Its free Basic plan includes unlimited uploads, highlights, notes, and full-text search — meaning you can store your entire reading history and query it without a paid subscription. The $49.99/year Pro plan adds Notion and Markdown export. The full-text search across unlimited highlights on the free tier is particularly useful for researchers or heavy readers who want to locate specific content across years of reading without paying for access.

Both tools position themselves as archives rather than review systems. If passive surfacing is not something you want — if you prefer to search actively when you need a quote rather than be prompted to review on a schedule — tools at this tier are a reasonable and significantly cheaper choice.

Manual Export as a Baseline

Before committing to any subscription, it is worth understanding what the ebook platforms themselves provide for free. Amazon’s highlight page at read.amazon.com/notebook shows every highlight you have made across Kindle purchases, organized by book, available at no cost. You can browse, copy, and paste from there at any time. Amazon will also email an export of your highlights if you contact their support. This is not a polished workflow, but for readers who annotate lightly and review specific books rather than maintaining a broad daily habit, it may be all they need.

Apple Books exports highlights to the Notes app on macOS, creating a searchable Notes folder per book. Google Play Books can email you an annotated highlights PDF when you finish a book. Kobo allows you to export a highlights CSV from its desktop application.

A manual approach — export when needed, file in a Markdown folder, Notion database, or even a local text file you manage yourself — is viable if your review habit is infrequent and intentional rather than daily and automated. The friction emerges when you have many sources, many books, and want something to bring highlights to your attention rather than waiting for you to go looking. That is the gap Readwise fills, and it is the gap you are evaluating how to fill when you look for alternatives.

A Note on Bookmend

Bookmend is a free Chrome extension that does something unrelated to highlight management: it repairs your Chrome bookmark library. It adds full-text search across every page you have bookmarked, scans for dead links, and provides one-click access to Wayback Machine archived snapshots of pages that have gone offline.

The connection to Readwise alternatives is indirect and worth being clear about. If your reading workflow has accumulated a collection of bookmarked articles — pages you saved to read later, or links you added after reading something — and some of those URLs have died over time, Bookmend addresses that separately from any highlight tool. A link saved three years ago that now returns a 404 may still have an archived version that Bookmend can surface without any account or subscription required.

Bookmend does not import, store, or surface reading highlights. It does not provide daily review. It is not a replacement for Readwise or for any of the tools covered in this post. It is a bookmark health tool. If some of the articles whose highlights you have stored in Readwise or elsewhere came from links that have since gone dead in your bookmarks, Bookmend handles that separate problem. You can install it free at bookmend.app.