The 9 Best Second Brain Apps in 2027 (Compared by How Much Upkeep They Need)

The best second brain app depends on one question: do you want to build a knowledge base by hand, or just stop losing what you read? If you want to build — write notes, link ideas, design structure — Obsidian or Notion win, and this list would invert. If you want low-effort capture and retrieval of what you save, Marqly wins. Most people want the second, and most people who chose the first abandoned it within a quarter.

That split predicts whether you will still be using the app in three months, which makes it worth more than any feature list. Below are the nine best second brain apps in 2027, ordered by upkeep-adjusted payoff for someone whose knowledge is mostly read rather than written — not by raw capability, because on raw capability the order genuinely changes. Each entry names the axis it is limited on and who should skip it. New to the concept? Start with what a second brain app actually is.

How this list was compiled. We compare capture, organisation, retrieval, portability and pricing using dated competitor fact sheets and linked official sources, published in how we test. Marqly publishes this article and is one of the products discussed, so weigh our own section accordingly. Where we do not maintain a dated fact sheet for a tool — Tana, Logseq, Mem and Reflect — we say so and publish no price for it rather than guess. Where a competitor wins a row, we say so.

What changed in second brain tools since our 2026 edition

We re-verified every claim we could against a fact sheet, and the 2026 edition got several things wrong or left them vague.

• Our description of the Obsidian Web Clipper was unfair and out of date. We called it “clunky” and said it “turns pages into messy Markdown.” It ships per-site templates that auto-title, tag and file clips from page metadata, a highlighter mode that captures only marked passages, and an Interpreter that runs clip-time AI prompts — summarise, extract, translate — against your own API key or a free local Ollama model. It runs on Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari, including Safari on iPhone and iPad. Versions shipped in April, May, June and July 2026.
• Obsidian itself became free for commercial use in February 2025. Our 2026 edition did not mention it. The paid parts are optional add-ons: Sync from $4/month billed annually, and Publish at $8/site/month.
• Notion’s AI is not on the plan most people buy. We listed AI retrieval as “Partial (Notion AI add-on).” The fact sheet is more specific and less flattering: meaningful AI search and chat over clipped content is bundled with Business at $20/member/month, while Free and Plus ($10/member/month, billed annually) get only a trial of it. Offline mode did arrive in 2025 on all plans.
• Notion’s browser support narrowed. Official support is now Chrome and Safari; Firefox was dropped from the lineup.
• Marqly’s platform list was incomplete. We wrote “save in one click from the web, iOS, or Chrome.” The correct list is web, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, iOS and Android.
• Marqly’s AI was described without plan scoping. Auto-tagging, summaries and semantic search are all Pro. The free plan is up to 100 bookmarks with keyword search across the whole library.
• Three verified tools were missing. Karakeep, Readwise Reader and Evernote all do second-brain jobs and all have dated fact sheets. They replace nothing — they are additions, and Evernote’s January 2026 release is the reason it earns a slot.
• Reflect and Mem have no fact sheet in our data layer. We have kept them because the 2026 comparison is still useful, but we publish no prices for either and treat their details as unverified for this edition.

What makes a good second brain app

A good one does three jobs: it captures quickly from anywhere, organises what you save without much effort, and retrieves the right thing exactly when you need it. Most apps nail capture, a few handle organise, and almost none do retrieve well — yet retrieval is the only job that pays you back.

The reason that matters is the maintenance trap. A second brain is only valuable if you keep using it, and you only keep using it if it costs almost nothing to maintain. Every manual step — every folder you choose, every tag you write, every weekly review you promise yourself — is a place where real life eventually wins and the system rots. So weigh upkeep as heavily as features. The most powerful tool in the world is worthless if you abandon it after the first busy week.

Two axes do most of the work, and a third now belongs alongside them:

1. Type — a heavy PKM you build by hand, or a lightweight capture tool that organises itself.
2. Maintenance effort — how much ongoing work it demands before it rots.
3. Exit path — whether you can leave with everything in a documented format. This was a nicety in 2024. After Omnivore shut down in November 2024 with an export deadline of November 30, 2024, and Mozilla shut Pocket down on July 8, 2025 with export access disabled on November 12, 2025, it is a primary criterion. See the portability table below.

How the best second brain apps compare

App	Type	Upkeep	Retrieval	Free tier	Price (verified October 2026)
Marqly	Lightweight, capture-first	Near-zero	✅ Semantic (Pro)	✅ 100 bookmarks	Free; Pro $72/yr or $9/mo
Obsidian	Heavy PKM, local-first	High	⚠️ Text match + BYO AI	✅ App and clipper free	Free; Sync from $4/mo annual
Notion	Heavy PKM, workspace	High	⚠️ AI needs Business	✅ Clipper + free plan	Plus $10, Business $20/member/mo
Karakeep	Self-hosted, AI-first	High (you run it)	✅ Semantic (BYO key)	✅ Self-hosted	Free; Cloud Pro $4/mo
Readwise Reader	Read-and-highlight	Medium	⚠️ Keyword + review loop	❌ None permanent	$9.99/mo annual ($119.88/yr)
Evernote	Heavy archive	Medium-High	✅ Semantic on paid	⚠️ 50 notes, 1 device	Starter $99/yr; Advanced $249.99/yr
Tana	Heavy PKM, structured	High	✅ AI nodes	UNKNOWN	Not published here
Logseq	Heavy PKM, outliner	Medium-High	⚠️ Plugins	UNKNOWN	Not published here
Mem / Reflect	Lightweight-ish notes	Medium	✅ AI	UNKNOWN	Not published here

Four tools in this table have no dated fact sheet in our data layer, so we publish no price for them rather than print a number we cannot verify. That is a real limitation of this edition and we would rather name it than paper over it. Everything else was checked in October 2026.

1. Marqly — best for saving the web and finding it again

If your real problem is that you read a lot and forget most of it, Marqly is the honest answer, because it does not ask you to write notes. It captures the web you already save — articles, videos, links, and the transcripts of what you watch — in one click from the web app, iOS, Android, or extensions for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari. On Pro it auto-tags and summarises every save and retrieves by meaning: describe “the piece about sleep and decision-making” and it surfaces, even when none of those words appear in the title, because the index covers titles, content, highlights and video transcripts.

This is the lightweight, capture-first end of the spectrum, and it is what most people actually mean when they say they want a second brain but do not want to maintain a wiki. You do not design a schema or run a weekly review. Ask, the Pro assistant, answers questions across your own library with numbered citations back to the source, and AI Organizer handles bulk clean-up of a library that already exists. That is the AI version of a second brain: the same capture-and-recall loop with the filing handled for you.

The limits are worth stating plainly. The free plan stores up to 100 bookmarks with keyword search across the whole library — the whole library is searchable, but by words rather than meaning. There is no AI at all on free: auto-tagging, summaries, semantic search and Ask are every one of them Pro. There is no public API and no self-hosting, so the exit path is export rather than ownership.

Who it’s best for: readers who save a lot from the web and want to find it again with no upkeep, and anyone migrating an existing library — it imports the list.csv from a Pocket export archive, Raindrop HTML and browser bookmark HTML. Skip it if your goal is long-form original writing and deep synthesis by hand; that is genuinely what Obsidian, Notion and Tana are for, and Marqly is built around saved material rather than authored notes.

• Pros: near-zero upkeep; semantic search, auto-tagging, AI summaries and Ask on Pro; six-colour highlights, boards, public board sharing and read mode free on every plan; YouTube AI card keeps transcripts with the video; web, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, iOS and Android.
• Cons: free tier capped at 100 bookmarks; no AI on free; no public API or self-hosting; built around saved material rather than authored notes; offline reading is Pro, on the web and iOS apps only, and cached per device.
• Price: free plan, no card required · Pro $72/year (about $6/month billed annually) or $9/month · a standing $49 first-year offer, 31% off your first year against the $72 baseline · verified students $48 first year, 33% off the same baseline.

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2. Obsidian — best for local-first writing you own forever

Obsidian is the strongest tool here for original writing and connected thinking, and the strongest on portability by construction: notes are plain Markdown files on your own machine, so there is no export step and no lock-in. Backlinks and the graph view make connecting ideas genuinely powerful, and the plugin ecosystem is the largest in the category. Obsidian is free for all use including commercial, a policy in place since February 2025.

Our 2026 edition undersold the Web Clipper, and the correction matters. It is open source, runs on Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari — including Safari on iPhone and iPad, which almost no competitor offers — and saves pages, selections or highlights as clean Markdown. Per-site templates decide how each clip is titled, tagged and filed, pulling metadata through selector and Schema.org variables. The Interpreter runs natural-language prompts at clip time (summarise, extract, translate) using your own API key from Anthropic, OpenAI or Gemini, or a local Ollama model at no cost. Versions shipped in April, May, June and July 2026.

The costs are the ones you assemble yourself. There is no sync out of the box — cross-device means Obsidian Sync from $4/month billed annually ($5 monthly) or a DIY route like iCloud — and public sharing means Publish at $8/site/month. There is no automatic tagging and no semantic search: retrieval is text matching, and the AI is only as good as the provider you wire up and pay for. You are the organising engine, permanently.

Who it’s best for: writers, researchers and Zettelkasten practitioners who want local-first file-based notes they fully control and are happy to configure their own AI. Skip if your need is saving and re-finding web content with no upkeep, or you do not want to manage a sync solution. Marqly vs Obsidian Web Clipper breaks down the split.

• Pros: free including commercial use; plain Markdown on your disk with zero lock-in; backlinks and graph view; largest plugin ecosystem; a capable open-source clipper with templates and BYO-key AI; works on Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari including iOS Safari.
• Cons: no sync out of the box; no automatic tagging or semantic search; AI needs your own provider and usage costs; Publish costs extra; you maintain the vault yourself.
• Price: app and clipper free · Sync from $4/month billed annually ($5 monthly) · Publish $8/site/month · your own LLM usage if you enable Interpreter.

3. Notion — best all-in-one workspace

Notion is the pick if you want one tool holding notes, docs, databases and projects together, and its flexibility is unmatched — you can model almost any knowledge system inside it. The Web Clipper is free and works with any Notion account including the generous free plan, and clips land in databases, so saved links inherit properties, views, filters and tags. Offline mode arrived in 2025 on all plans, and native apps cover web, Mac, Windows, iOS and Android.

The cost is that you are the one doing the modelling, and Notion’s power comes entirely from structure you build and maintain. The clipper itself is bare-bones at capture time — no tags, notes, highlights or screenshots, just a destination picker — and Notion’s own documentation warns that clip fidelity varies and formatting can go missing. Official browser support has narrowed to Chrome and Safari; Firefox was dropped.

The pricing correction is the one that matters most. People assume Notion AI is a modest add-on. In fact meaningful AI search and chat over your workspace is bundled with Business at $20/member/month (billed annually); Free and Plus at $10/member/month get only a trial of it. So the “AI second brain in Notion” is a $240-per-member-per-year product, not a $120 one.

Who it’s best for: people who want a single workspace for notes, wikis and project tracking, enjoy designing databases, and are already paying for Business. Skip if you mostly read and want things filed automatically — Notion starts from a blank page, so most of what you consume never becomes a note. See Marqly vs Notion Web Clipper and our Notion Web Clipper alternatives guide.

• Pros: clipper is free and works on the free plan; database properties give views and filters; one workspace for notes, tasks and saves; offline on all plans; official API and mobile share-sheet saving; exports to Markdown, HTML, CSV and PDF on every plan.
• Cons: nothing at capture time beyond a destination picker; documented clip-fidelity problems; real AI needs the $20/member/month Business plan; browser support narrowed to Chrome and Safari; saving to large databases is slow.
• Price: clipper free · Plus $10/member/month · Business $20/member/month, billed annually.

4. Karakeep — best self-hosted second brain with real AI

Karakeep is the answer if you want a second brain you own and one that files itself. Formerly Hoarder and renamed in early 2025, it is free and open source to self-host with every feature included. An LLM you configure — any OpenAI-compatible key, or a local Ollama model at no cost — auto-tags everything and writes summaries, and Meilisearch-backed full-text search gained semantic and hybrid modes in 2026. Because the model can be local, the AI can be private as well as free.

It is also a serious archive. Full-page preservation stores a page copy, a screenshot and a PDF, and can pull video with yt-dlp, so link rot cannot take the library. Extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari, iOS and Android apps with offline reading, shareable public lists with RSS, and a REST API, webhooks, CLI and MCP server for wiring in AI agents. It exports in its own JSON or standard Netscape HTML, including lists.

The catch is that a self-hosted second brain is a hobby with a maintenance bill: Docker, updates, backups, and eventually token costs or a local GPU. There is no built-in AI Q&A over your saves and no YouTube-specific AI. The hosted Karakeep Cloud is in public beta with a $0 tier capped at 10 bookmarks and a $4/month Pro tier, so “free Karakeep” means your own server.

Who it’s best for: technical users who want AI organisation without handing a vendor their library, and who treat running software as part of the appeal. Skip if you do not want to administer a server — that is the whole cost, and it is real.

• Pros: free and open source with all features self-hosted; AI auto-tagging and summaries via any provider or a local model; semantic and hybrid search; full-page archiving; iOS and Android apps plus three browser extensions; REST API, webhooks, CLI and MCP server; JSON or Netscape HTML export.
• Cons: you run the server, updates and backups; AI costs surface eventually; cloud free tier caps at 10 bookmarks; no AI Q&A over saves and no YouTube AI; setup is genuinely demanding.
• Price: free self-hosted · Karakeep Cloud Pro $4/month (annual price not published).

5. Readwise Reader — best if your second brain is mostly what you read

For a lot of people the second brain is not notes they wrote — it is everything they read and want to retain. Readwise Reader is the best tool built for that specific job. Articles, RSS, newsletters, PDFs, ePubs, Twitter threads and YouTube videos land in one inbox, YouTube gets synced transcripts you can highlight like an article, and the Ghostreader assistant summarises documents and answers questions against the text.

The part that makes it a second brain rather than a reader is the loop underneath: highlights resurface on a spaced-repetition schedule, which is the only mechanism in this list that actively fights forgetting, and everything exports to Notion, Obsidian, Evernote and Roam with a documented public API. If your knowledge base is quotations and ideas from other people’s writing, nothing else here comes close.

Price it correctly. Reader ships only with the Readwise Full plan; the cheaper Lite plan covers classic highlight syncing and excludes the app. There is no permanent free tier — Readwise offers a 30-day trial, after which a subscription is required — and verified students and educators get 50% off. Tagging is manual and search is keyword-based, so this is a review system, not a retrieval system.

Who it’s best for: researchers, students and writers who highlight obsessively and want those highlights resurfaced and exported. Skip if you want to author your own notes, you want free, or you need semantic retrieval.

• Pros: every content type in one inbox; spaced-repetition review that actively fights forgetting; best-in-class highlighting; exports to Notion, Obsidian, Evernote and Roam; documented API; synced YouTube transcripts.
• Cons: no permanent free tier; the second most expensive option here; Reader requires the Full plan; keyword rather than semantic search; manual tagging; dense UI with a real learning curve.
• Price: no free tier · Full $9.99/month billed annually ($119.88/year) or $12.99/month monthly · Lite $5.59/month billed annually, without Reader · 50% student and educator discount.

6. Evernote — best for a deep archive you will pay to search

Evernote is the oldest idea on this list and, as of January 2026, a more interesting one than its reputation suggests. Version 11 added an AI assistant that chats across your notes, semantic search, and AI meeting notes — so the tool that defined the second-brain category for a decade finally has retrieval by meaning. Its search was already the deepest in the category: OCR reads text inside images, and paid plans search inside PDFs and documents.

The clipper is the richest capture tool here. It works on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge and Opera, offers five capture modes — full page, simplified article, selection, bookmark, or annotated screenshot — and lets you add tags, remarks and a destination notebook at clip time, which neither Notion nor Obsidian does. Apps cover web, Windows, Mac, iOS and Android, with offline notes on paid plans, a public API, and ENEX, HTML and PDF export on every plan including free.

The pricing is the problem. The free plan is 50 notes, one notebook and one device — enough to test, not enough to live in, and the one-device cap means an iPhone plus a desktop already requires paying. Starter is $14.99/month or $99/year; Advanced is $24.99/month or $249.99/year, among the most expensive in the category, and prices have risen repeatedly under owner Bending Spoons. There is still no automatic tagging, and the clipper cannot highlight text on live web pages — markup happens inside notes after clipping.

Who it’s best for: people already living in Evernote, or anyone building a deep mixed-media archive of documents and screenshots who will pay for OCR-grade search. Skip if you want a lightweight capture tool, you are budget-conscious, or you want web highlighting. See Marqly vs Evernote Web Clipper.

• Pros: clipper works on five browsers with tags and notebook at clip time; five capture modes including annotated screenshots; OCR search inside images and, on paid plans, PDFs; v11 added an AI assistant and semantic search; ENEX export on every plan; mature apps everywhere.
• Cons: free plan is 50 notes, one notebook, one device; Advanced is $249.99/year; no automatic tagging; cannot highlight live web pages; heavyweight for link saving; repeated price increases.
• Price: free (50 notes, 1 notebook, 1 device) · Starter $14.99/month or $99/year · Advanced $24.99/month or $249.99/year.

7. Tana — best structured outliner

Tana is the most ambitious tool on this list. Its supertags turn notes into queryable, database-like nodes, so a note about a person or a paper can carry typed fields you later query across your whole graph, and built-in AI can generate and structure content. For people who think in outlines and want their notes to behave like data, nothing else comes close to the ceiling.

The ceiling is also the cost. Tana has a steep learning curve, and the structure that makes it powerful is upkeep you have to maintain forever — a supertag schema you abandon is worse than no schema, because the notes still carry the fields. It rewards investment, which is exactly the wrong trait for casual capture.

Disclosure: we do not maintain a dated fact sheet for Tana, so we publish no price and no plan limits for it in this edition. Check the vendor’s own pricing page before you commit; treat anything you read elsewhere about Tana’s tiers as unverified.

Who it’s best for: power users who want outliner flexibility with database rigour and will invest in learning the model. Skip if you want something you can pick up in five minutes, or you have bounced off note apps before because maintenance beat you.

• Pros: supertags give notes queryable typed structure; built-in AI generation; the highest ceiling of any tool here; strong for people who think in outlines.
• Cons: steep learning curve; the structure is permanent upkeep; wrong shape for casual capture; no dated fact sheet in our data layer, so pricing is unverified here.
• Price: not published in this edition — no dated fact sheet.

8. Logseq — best open-source outliner

Logseq is the free, local-first outliner built around daily notes. It is open source and privacy-friendly, its block-based linking is excellent for journaling and incremental note-taking, and like Obsidian your data stays in plain files you own. For developers and anyone who thinks in blocks rather than pages, it is the natural home.

The limits are the format and the AI. The outliner model is a love-it-or-hate-it commitment — every paragraph is a block with a bullet, which is powerful for linking and awkward for prose — and Logseq’s AI features lean on plugins rather than shipping in the box. There is no automatic tagging and no semantic retrieval without third-party work.

Disclosure: as with Tana, we do not maintain a dated fact sheet for Logseq, so we publish no price here. The app is free and open source; any paid sync or hosting tier should be checked against the project’s own site.

Who it’s best for: developers and privacy-conscious users who like an outliner-first workflow with daily-notes journaling, at no cost. Skip if you do not want to think in blocks and backlinks, or you want polished AI retrieval out of the box.

• Pros: free and open source; local-first with plain files you own; block-based linking suits journaling and incremental notes; strong for developers.
• Cons: the outliner format is a commitment; AI leans on plugins; no automatic tagging or semantic search; no dated fact sheet in our data layer, so pricing is unverified here.
• Price: not published in this edition — no dated fact sheet.

9. Mem and Reflect — best AI-first note apps

Mem and Reflect are the two tools that tried to make the note-writing half lightweight rather than the capture half. Mem is AI-first: it auto-organises notes, surfaces related ones as you write, and lets you query your knowledge in natural language, which removes most of the folder work. Reflect is a fast, polished networked-notes app with daily journaling at its core, backlinks for connected thought, cross-device sync and an AI assistant for drafting and querying.

Both sit between the two poles — lighter than Obsidian, heavier than a pure capture tool — and both still centre on notes you author. That is the shared limitation: the long articles, threads and videos you consume do not capture as effortlessly as a one-click save, so the read side of your knowledge still has to be typed or pasted in by hand.

Disclosure: we maintain no dated fact sheet for either product. Reflect has historically been paid-only and Mem’s pricing has changed more than once, so we publish no figures for either in this edition and recommend checking both vendors directly. If you are choosing between them, the honest summary is Mem for AI-assisted organisation and Reflect for a clean journaling-and-backlinks habit.

Who they’re best for: people who genuinely want to write notes but hate filing, and want AI to surface connections. Skip if your knowledge is mostly read rather than written — that is the job the capture-first tools do better.

• Pros: both reduce manual filing relative to a classic PKM; Mem auto-organises and surfaces related notes; Reflect is polished with backlinks, daily journaling and an AI assistant; both query your notes in natural language.
• Cons: both centre on notes you author, so consumed content is second-class; neither has a dated fact sheet in our data layer, so pricing and current limits are unverified here; Reflect has historically had no free tier.
• Price: not published in this edition — no dated fact sheets.

Which second brain app should you actually pick?

Pick by maintenance tolerance, then by exit path. If you genuinely enjoy building and tending a knowledge base, go heavy. If you mostly want to stop losing what you read, go lightweight. For most people the lightweight path wins, and the honest reason is not capability — it is that an abandoned system has zero capability.

1. Do you want to write and connect your own ideas by hand? Go heavy: Obsidian for local-first writing you own, Notion for an all-in-one workspace, Tana for structure, Logseq for outlining. You get total control in exchange for being the organising engine, forever.
2. Do you mostly read and want to recall it later? Go lightweight: Marqly for the web, Readwise Reader if the retention loop matters more than retrieval.
3. Do you want to own the server too? Karakeep — the only tool here that is both self-hosted and AI-organised.
4. Are you already paying for a suite? Use it. Notion if you have Business, Evernote if you are already archived there. Switching cost is real and a mediocre tool you actually use beats an excellent one you do not.
5. Have you bounced off two or three note apps already? That is not a discipline problem, it is a tool-fit problem. Choose the lightest thing on this list and stop building systems.

Plenty of people run both: a heavy tool for the small amount they truly write, and a lightweight tool for the large amount they read. That is a good stack — keep your writing tool for writing and your capture tool for capturing.

Can you leave with your brain? Portability compared

This is the section we did not write in 2026, and two shutdowns are the reason. A second brain you cannot export is a hostage. Ranked by how easily you can walk away:

App	Export path	Format other tools read	Ownership
Obsidian	None needed	Plain Markdown on your disk	✅ Total
Logseq	None needed	Plain files, open source	✅ Total
Karakeep	Built-in, plus your own DB	JSON or Netscape HTML	✅ Total when self-hosted
Evernote	On every plan including free	ENEX, HTML, PDF	⚠️ Vendor-held
Notion	On every plan	Markdown, HTML, CSV, PDF	⚠️ Vendor-held
Readwise Reader	Continuous, plus API	Markdown to Notion/Obsidian/Roam; CSV of documents	⚠️ Vendor-held
Marqly	CSV button in-app	URL, title, description, tags	⚠️ Vendor-held
Mem / Reflect	UNKNOWN	UNKNOWN	UNKNOWN

Marqly’s row deserves the full detail rather than the table’s shorthand. There is a real CSV export button in the sidebar and profile menu; the free plan exports your newest 100 bookmarks and Pro exports the whole library, including an option to export only what is new since your last export. That CSV carries URL, title, description and tags — nothing else, so it does not include highlights, notes, boards or dates. For a complete copy of your account including highlights, notes and boards, you email support@marqly.com. There is no public API and no self-hosting, so on this axis Marqly loses to Obsidian, Logseq and Karakeep outright and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

The lesson from Pocket and Omnivore is not “avoid hosted tools.” It is: test the exit on day one. Export something the first week, confirm the file opens, and put it somewhere you would find it. That ten-minute habit is the entire difference between a migration and a loss.

The honest take

Most apps marketed as second brains are heavy, and heavy systems rot from maintenance. That is not a knock on Notion, Obsidian, Tana or Logseq — they are excellent at what they are built for, and if you love tending knowledge by hand they are the right call. But if you are like most people, you do not want a second job maintaining a wiki. You want to stop losing the things you read.

For that, the easiest second brain is the web you already save, made searchable. Marqly does that path end to end: import what you already have from a Pocket list.csv, Raindrop HTML or a browser bookmark export, save new things in one click from the web, iOS, Android or extensions for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari, and then ask your library for anything you have read — by meaning, not keywords. On Pro, AI tags and summarises every save so you never touch a folder.

There is a free plan with no card required — up to 100 bookmarks with keyword search across the whole library, plus read mode, six-colour highlights, boards and public board sharing. Pro is $72/year (about $6/month billed annually) or $9/month when you want unlimited bookmarks and the AI layer, with a standing $49 first-year offer and $48 first year for verified students. If “a second brain without the maintenance” is what you are after, that is the whole pitch — and how to build a second brain from your bookmarks walks through the setup in four steps.

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Prices and plan limits verified against dated competitor fact sheets in October 2026; Tana, Logseq, Mem and Reflect have no fact sheet in our data layer, so no prices are published for them here. Changes from the 2026 edition: the Obsidian Web Clipper description corrected — it has per-site templates, a highlighter mode, BYO-key Interpreter AI and iOS Safari support, and Obsidian itself has been free for commercial use since February 2025; Notion AI corrected from an “add-on” to a Business-tier capability at $20/member/month, with browser support narrowed to Chrome and Safari; Karakeep, Readwise Reader and Evernote added as verified entries; Marqly’s platform list corrected to include Edge, Firefox, Safari and Android; Marqly’s AI scoped to Pro rather than implied on free; and a portability section added after the Omnivore and Pocket shutdowns. We’ll update this guide as plans change.