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.
- ContextBolt is the pick, because the pile most people lose is saves rather than sentences. It keeps web pages with their text, catches your X, Reddit and LinkedIn saves automatically, AI-tags all of it, and hands the library to your agent on Pro. Free to start.
- Readwise Reader is the highlighting app, if the sentence is what you keep losing. No free tier, $9.99/month billed annually.
- Weava is the free highlighter, 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 fits if you file links by hand and highlight occasionally.
- Karakeep wins if you want to own the data outright and do not mind running a server.
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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ContextBolt | Web and social saves, inside your AI | Keeps the page text instead | 150-bookmark cap | $6/mo |
| 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 |
The 6 best Markwise alternatives
1. ContextBolt
Best for saves, and for your AIContextBolt is ours, so take the bias into account. It is the answer to the pile a highlighter never sees, because you cannot highlight a tweet you scrolled past on your phone.
On the web, one click saves the page and keeps its text, so search works on what the page said. What it adds is the half none of the highlighters reach. 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 for the rest of this list that in-app save is out of reach. ContextBolt is a Chrome extension that captures the full content of those saves as you make them, tags each one by topic automatically, and indexes everything for instant search, so you find a save by what it was about rather than the words it used. Semantic search comes with the Pro MCP endpoint.
The part that changes the job 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 with AI tagging, topic clustering and instant local search, no card. It is capped at 150 bookmarks. Pro is $6 a month for unlimited bookmarks, cloud 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 instant search
- MCP endpoint into Claude, Cursor, and Windsurf
- Free Basic is capped at 150 bookmarks, AI included, no card
- Saves and finds pages, it is not a highlighter or a reader
- Desktop Chrome, no native mobile app yet
- Starts from your next save, with no importer from Markwise
Best for: people who save web pages and social posts alike and who live inside an AI agent.
Verdict: the right one for the pile the highlighters ignore, and the one where the library fills itself. Highlighting is a different job. Basic is free, so try it on your next save.
2. Readwise Reader
Best for highlightsReadwise Reader is the highlighting half of 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 a real exit story. 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 highlighting app, if the sentence is the thing you keep losing. It holds what you read in it; the Reddit comment and LinkedIn post you saved never arrive.
3. Weava
Free highlighterWeava is the quiet one, and it is the answer if you 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 cheapest highlighter here, if you can live without the AI layer.
4. 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.
5. Raindrop.io
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 you clipped by hand with the occasional highlight, Raindrop is a cheap home for them. It never sees a post you saved on X or Reddit, which is where ContextBolt starts. 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 who file links by hand and want them on every platform.
Verdict: cheaper and bigger, with highlighting as a sideline. Fine if your pile is links you clip by hand; the post you saved inside X or Reddit never arrives.
6. 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 pick where “can I leave” is not even a question, because the server is yours.
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 that keeps the page text, which ContextBolt does on the free tier and Karakeep does on your own server. 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 that works on the topic rather than the wording, which is the job ContextBolt was built for.
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 in July 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. If that pile is saves rather than sentences, ContextBolt Basic is free and starts with your next save.