Most people arrive at a tool like Markwise from the same place. You highlight things while you read, you save links you mean to come back to, and you have slowly realized these are two piles in two different apps that never talk to each other. The highlight lives in one place. The link lives in another. Six months later you remember a sentence and cannot find either.
Markwise pitches itself as the fix, an AI bookmark manager that also stores highlights, notes, and YouTube timestamps in one library you can ask questions of. That is a genuinely good pitch, and it is why the search volume exists. About 480 people a month in the US search for the name.
Before you pick an alternative, though, two things are worth checking, and neither shows up in the usual roundup. The first is that Markwise is very much alive, just very small. The second is that four other products share the name and none of them save bookmarks. Both change what you should do next.
- Readwise Reader is the best all-round Markwise alternative if highlighting is the main job. No free tier, $9.99/month billed annually.
- Weava is the best free pick, with unlimited highlights and notes at $0 and Premium at $3.99/month.
- Glasp has the most generous free plan, but free highlights are public. Private highlights are a Pro feature.
- Raindrop.io wins if you mostly save links and highlight occasionally. Karakeep wins if you want to own the data outright.
- ContextBolt is the pick when the thing you save is a social post and you want your AI to use it. It does not do highlights.
Which Markwise are you actually looking for?
This trips people up before they get anywhere near a feature comparison. “Markwise” is at least five separate products, and only one of them is a bookmark manager.
| Domain | What it is | Who it is for |
|---|---|---|
| markwise.app | AI bookmark manager with highlights and notes | People saving things from the web |
| markwise.io | AI co-marking tool, “Less Time Marking, More Time Teaching” | K-12 and university teachers |
| markwise.uk | AI homework assessment | Teachers |
| markwise.site | Essay feedback | Teachers and students |
| markwise.itatmoz.com | AI answer evaluation | Exam graders |
Four of the five are grading tools. Google blends them all onto one results page, which means a large share of those 480 monthly searches are teachers looking for a marking assistant, not readers looking for a bookmark app. If you landed here from a search and you wanted the thing that grades homework, you want markwise.io and this post is no use to you.
For everyone else, the rest of this is about markwise.app, the bookmark manager.
Is Markwise still around?
Yes, and this is the part most “alternative” posts get wrong by assuming the answer is no.
The Chrome extension, listed as Markwise - Save, Organize & Find Anything Online, shipped version 3.0.5 on July 3, 2026. That is recent. Someone is actively working on it. The web app and the iOS app are both live, and the marketing site is current.
What is small is everything else. The extension has around 276 users and 13 ratings averaging 3.7 stars. For comparison, that is a rounding error next to any tool on the list below.
So the honest risk here is not abandonment. It is size. A one-person tool with 276 installs can be excellent and can also stop existing on a Tuesday, and the thing that decides how badly that hurts you is not the feature list. It is whether you can get your data out.
Markwise does not mention export anywhere on its pricing page. Neither does it mention an API. That is the single most important line in this whole comparison, and it applies to every small tool, not just this one. The test that matters is not “is it good”, it is “can I leave”. Pocket shut down with roughly 30 million users and gave people a window to export. A 276-install indie app may not.
None of that means do not use it. It means know what you are signing up for, and keep a copy.
Why people look for a Markwise alternative
From the review pattern and the shape of the searches, four reasons come up.
- The free plan is tight: 50 bookmarks, 5 spaces, and 5 notes. That is a demo, not a tier. You hit the wall in a week of real use.
- The trial is three days: long enough to click around, not long enough to find out whether you actually retrieve anything, which is the only test that matters for a memory tool.
- Size and trust: people find the tool, like it, then check how many users it has and get nervous.
- It does a lot of jobs: bookmarks, highlights, notes, YouTube moments, spaces, digests, AI chat. Some readers want one of those done properly rather than seven done adequately.
That last one is the real fork in the road, and it decides which alternative you should pick.
Markwise alternatives compared
| Tool | Best for | Highlights | Free tier | Paid from |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Readwise Reader | Highlighting as the main job | Core feature | 30-day trial | $9.99/mo annually |
| Weava | Best free highlighter | Web and PDF | Unlimited | $3.99/mo |
| Glasp | Highlighting in public | Core feature | Public only | $12.50/mo annually |
| Raindrop.io | Saving links first | Secondary | Unlimited saves | About $3/mo |
| Karakeep | Owning your data | No | Self-hosted | Free |
| ContextBolt | Social saves inside your AI | No | 150 saves | $6/mo |
The 6 best Markwise alternatives
1. Readwise Reader
Best overall alternativeReadwise Reader is what Markwise is reaching for, built by a team that has been doing it for years. You save articles, PDFs, newsletters, RSS, EPUBs, and YouTube transcripts into one inbox, highlight as you read, and everything flows into a highlight library you can search and resurface. Ghostreader will summarize a piece, answer questions about it, and suggest tags.
The catch is the pricing model. There is no permanent free tier. You get 30 days free, extended by 30 more for each friend you refer, and after that it is $9.99 a month billed annually for the full plan that includes Reader. A cheaper Lite plan at $5.59 a month covers highlights without the reading app.
It also has the best exit story here. Highlights sync out to Notion, Obsidian, Roam, and plain files, and there is a real API, so your library is not trapped. If you want it inside an AI assistant, that is a separate setup with its own limits.
- The most complete reading and highlighting tool available
- Handles articles, PDFs, newsletters, RSS, EPUB, and YouTube
- Real export, real API, syncs to Notion and Obsidian
- Ghostreader AI summaries, Q&A, and auto-tagging
- No permanent free tier, trial only
- Twice the price of Markwise Pro
- Heavy if all you wanted was a highlighter
Best for: people who read a lot and want the highlights to be the point.
Verdict: the safe upgrade. More expensive, considerably more finished.
2. Weava
Best free pickWeava is the quiet one, and it is the answer for most people who just want Markwise’s highlighting without the subscription. It highlights web pages and PDFs in color, keeps everything in folders by project, and generates citations. The free plan gives you unlimited highlights and notes on unlimited devices.
Premium is $3.99 a month, down from $7.99, and adds sub-folders, folder sharing, real-time collaboration, image saving, and more storage. It is built around research projects rather than a reading inbox, so if your saving is organized by “the thing I am working on” it will feel right immediately.
The honest limit is that Weava is a highlighter with folders, not an AI library. There is no semantic search, no chat over your saves, and the product moves slowly. If AI recall was the reason Markwise appealed, this is not the swap.
- Unlimited highlights and notes on the free plan
- Works on web pages and PDFs, with citations
- Premium is $3.99/month, cheaper than Markwise Pro
- Project folders suit research work
- No AI search or chat over your library
- Sub-folders are Premium only
- Slow-moving product
Best for: students and researchers who highlight sources into projects.
Verdict: the best value on this list if you can live without the AI layer.
3. Glasp
Best for highlighting in publicGlasp is a social highlighter. You highlight as you read, and your highlights become a public profile other people can follow, which is either the whole appeal or an immediate dealbreaker. It handles web pages, PDFs, and YouTube, does AI summaries, and syncs to Notion and Obsidian.
Read the plan carefully before you commit, because this is the detail most roundups skip. The free tier is genuinely generous, with unlimited highlights and basic AI summaries, but those highlights are public. Private highlights are a Pro feature. Glasp raised Pro on May 1, 2026 from $12 to $15 a month, or $150 a year, which works out at $12.50 a month.
That trade is fine for a public reading log and wrong for anything to do with your job, your health, or your competitors. Decide which pile you are building before you start.
- Unusually generous free tier
- Web, PDF, and YouTube highlighting with AI summaries
- Syncs out to Notion and Obsidian
- Student discount on the annual Pro plan
- Free highlights are public by default
- Pro went up to $15/month in May 2026
- The social layer is noise if you only want a private archive
Best for: people who want their reading to be visible.
Verdict: excellent free, as long as public is a feature and not a surprise.
4. Raindrop.io
Best saves-first libraryRaindrop.io comes at the same problem from the other end. It is a bookmark manager first, the most popular one there is, and highlighting is something it also does. Free gives you unlimited bookmarks, nested collections, tags, and highlights. Pro is around $3 a month and adds full-text search, permanent page copies, and the Stella AI assistant that answers questions about your own library.
If you counted your last month of saving and it was 90% links with the occasional highlight, this is the correct swap and it costs less than Markwise. Permanent copies matter more than people expect, because a bookmark to a deleted page is worth nothing. If Raindrop is close but not quite it, the eight best Raindrop alternatives covers where it stops fitting.
- Unlimited bookmarks free, on every platform
- Permanent copies survive the page being deleted
- Stella AI answers questions about your library on Pro
- Easy export, no lock-in
- Highlighting is a secondary feature, not the point
- AI and full-text search are Pro only
- No full capture of social posts
Best for: people whose pile is mostly links.
Verdict: cheaper, bigger, safer, and weaker at highlighting.
5. Karakeep
Best for owning your dataKarakeep, formerly Hoarder, is the answer to the size worry rather than the feature list. You self-host it. It saves links, notes, images, and PDFs, auto-tags everything with AI, runs full-text search, and does OCR so text inside screenshots is searchable. You can point it at OpenAI or run the AI locally with Ollama so nothing leaves your machine.
It cannot be shut down out from under you, which is the entire argument. The trade is the usual one. Setup is a Docker job, you keep it patched, and there is no highlighting layer. It sits alongside the rest of the self-hosted bookmark managers if you want to compare the field.
- Free, open-source, and yours
- AI auto-tagging via OpenAI or fully local Ollama
- Full-text search plus OCR on saved images
- Nobody can retire it
- You run and maintain the server
- No highlighting
- Not viable for non-technical users
Best for: developers who never want this conversation again.
Verdict: the only pick where “can I leave” is not a question.
6. ContextBolt
Best for social saves inside your AII built ContextBolt, so take the bias into account, and take the limits at face value too. It does not do highlights. If highlighting is what you came for, pick Readwise, Weava, or Glasp and stop reading here.
It solves the neighboring problem. A lot of what people save is not an article they can highlight, it is an X thread, a Reddit comment, or a LinkedIn post, and every tool above stores those as a link that dies when the author deletes the post. ContextBolt is a Chrome extension that captures the full content of those saves, tags each one by topic automatically, and indexes everything for semantic search, so you find a save by what it was about rather than the words it used.
The part that has no equivalent on this list is the MCP endpoint on Pro. Your whole collection becomes something Claude, Claude Code, Cursor, or Windsurf can search directly. You type “find the thread I saved about pricing experiments” into Claude, it searches your saves by meaning, and it uses them in the answer. No app to open.
Basic is free for 150 saves with AI tagging, topic clustering, and semantic search, no card. Pro is $6 a month for unlimited saves, encrypted sync, and the MCP endpoint. Month to month, cancel any time.
- Captures full X, Reddit, and LinkedIn posts, not fragile links
- Automatic AI topic tagging and semantic search
- MCP endpoint into Claude, Cursor, and Windsurf
- Free for 150 saves with AI included, no card
- No highlighting at all
- Built for social saves, not a general web clipper
- Chrome and web only, no native mobile app yet
Best for: people whose saves are social posts and who live inside an AI agent.
Verdict: the wrong tool for highlights, the right one for the pile the highlighters ignore.
Highlights or saves? Pick the problem, not the feature list
Here is the take that shaped this whole ranking, and it is the reason a tool like Markwise exists in the first place.
A highlight is a save with a better memory. You dragged your cursor across four sentences because those four sentences were the reason you were on the page. Everything else was packaging. And yet almost every tool in this category stores the packaging and throws away the reason.
That is the split you are really choosing between. Highlighters store the sentence and are careless about the library. Bookmark managers store the library and are careless about the sentence. Markwise is on this list because it tried to do both, and that ambition is what makes it hard to replace with any single tool.
So be honest about which failure actually bites you. If you keep losing the sentence, you need a highlighter and Readwise or Weava is your answer. If you keep losing the page, you need a library and Raindrop or Karakeep is your answer. If what you keep losing is a thread somebody posted at 11pm that you will never find by scrolling, that is a third problem and it needs full capture plus search by meaning.
Most people have two of the three. Very few have all three in one app, and paying two subscriptions that each do their job well usually beats one that does neither.
Before you move anything, run the exit test
This applies to Markwise and to every alternative above, and it takes ten minutes.
- Export first, not last: on day one, find the export button and use it. If there is no export button, you have learned the most important thing about the tool before giving it any data.
- Check the format: a JSON blob only that app can read is not an export. Look for HTML, CSV, Markdown, or plain files.
- Check whether highlights come out too: plenty of tools export bookmarks and quietly leave your annotations behind, which is the half you would actually miss.
- Keep the copy somewhere dull: a folder in cloud storage beats a second app that can also shut down.
None of this is paranoia about small tools specifically. Pocket had 30 million users and shut down anyway. The size of the company was never the protection. The export button was.
If Markwise is working for you, keep using it. Version 3.0.5 shipped this month and somebody clearly cares about it. Just take a copy of your library on your way past, and pick the alternative that matches the pile you keep losing rather than the one with the longest feature list.