wallabag
Free tierSave articles to read later — and they are genuinely saved
A self-hosted read-later service. Save a page with one click and it extracts the article text, stripping ads, pop-ups and sidebars into a clean reading version stored in your library. It supports tags, full-text search, annotations, and export to EPUB, PDF and MOBI, with browser extensions and mobile apps.
Why we picked it
The history of read-later services taught a lesson: Pocket was acquired, redesigned repeatedly and then announced its shutdown in 2025, sending people scrambling to export a decade of saved articles. Instapaper changed hands several times. These tools hold your reading history, and handing that to a company means accepting it can vanish.
wallabag's answer is to run your own. 12,896 stars, MIT licensed, matching Pocket's functionality on a server you control.
Core capabilities:
- Article extraction. What gets saved is not a screenshot or a link but the extracted text — ads, navigation, recommendation blocks and pop-ups removed, leaving title, author, body and images. Even if the original page is later deleted or redesigned, your copy remains.
- Save from anywhere: a browser extension, a phone's share menu, email, or the API.
- Tags and full-text search to retrieve any of the thousands of articles that accumulate.
- Annotations and highlights while reading.
- Export individually or in bulk to EPUB, PDF, MOBI or plain text — EPUB onto an e-reader makes long articles genuinely pleasant.
- Import from Pocket, Instapaper and Readability, so migration loses nothing.
On "free", to be precise:
The software itself is MIT open source and entirely free with no restrictions when self-hosted. Separately the project offers a paid hosted service (wallabag.it) for people who do not want to maintain a server. What we list is the self-hosted path; it carries the freemium label so nobody clicks through expecting the hosted option to be free.
To be clear about:
- Deployment required. It is a PHP application with an official Docker image, and for anyone already self-hosting — running FreshRSS or Nextcloud, say — the additional cost is close to zero.
- Releases are slow. The current stable version, 2.6.14, shipped in October 2025 with continuing commits through 2026. Stable, but not rapidly iterating.
- Extraction is not always perfect. Complex layouts, login-gated content and highly interactive pages may not parse cleanly and occasionally need manual fixing — a limitation shared by every tool of this type.
- It is distinct from RSS. FreshRSS answers "what is new"; wallabag answers "I want to keep this and read it properly". Using both together is a natural pairing.