The 8 Best Web Highlighters in 2027 (Compared on Persistence, Export and Price)

For most people the best web highlighter in 2027 is Marqly — six colours plus notes, free on every plan, highlights still on the page when you come back, and a library you can search by meaning on Pro. Glasp is the best pick if your highlighting should be social and you need the strongest export pipeline in the niche. Readwise Reader wins if your highlights must flow into Notion, Obsidian or Anki and be resurfaced. Obsidian Web Clipper is the best free option if you want highlights as Markdown files you own, and Hypothesis remains the best fully free option for academic annotation.

We judged all eight on four things that decide daily use rather than on feature count: whether the highlight persists on the live page, how good the colours and notes are, whether you can get your work out, and what it costs. Persistence and export are the two that separate a highlighter from a coloured screenshot, and export is the one almost nobody shops for until they need it.

Two entries changed since our last edition. Raindrop.io and Obsidian Web Clipper are additions — both have verified highlighting capabilities that our 2026 list ignored entirely. Weava drops from third to eighth, for reasons in its section below that we could not have written honestly in 2026.

How this list was compiled. We compare persistence, colour and note support, export formats, platform reach 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 eight products discussed, so weigh our own section accordingly — on export, Marqly loses to Glasp, Readwise Reader and Obsidian, and we say so. New to the habit? Start with how to highlight text on any website and keep it.

What changed in web highlighting since our 2026 edition

We re-verified every price and plan limit against its fact sheet. Our 2026 edition contained one claim about our own product that was flatly wrong, and it under-rated two tools.

• We claimed Marqly’s free tier includes AI. Our 2026 FAQ said the free tier “adds AI on top: auto-tagging and search by meaning across your highlights.” That was false. All of Marqly’s AI is Pro — auto-tagging, summaries, semantic search and Ask. The free plan is up to 100 bookmarks with keyword search. Six-colour highlighting, notes, boards, public board sharing and read mode are free on every plan; highlight notes are capped at 10 on free and unlimited on Pro.
• We claimed Marqly has no file export. Our table said “In-app library (no file export yet)” and our cons said “No file export of highlights to Markdown/Notion.” There is a real CSV export button in the sidebar and profile menu. What is true is narrower and worth stating precisely: that CSV carries URL, title, description and tags, and highlights and notes are not in it. A complete account copy including highlights, notes and boards is available from support@marqly.com. See the export table below.
• LINER’s free tier was described as “limited.” It is not limited in the way we implied: the free plan includes unlimited highlighting and unlimited citation-backed AI search. What it does include is ads inside answers, zero agent credits, ten research-assistant uses a day and one small file upload a day. Its real problem is the opposite of the one we named — the current product advertises no export for saved highlights, and the Safari and Firefox extensions were quietly dropped.
• Weava’s maintenance risk was understated. We wrote “updates are infrequent.” The fact sheet is blunter: the Chrome extension has not been updated since February 2024, the site’s copyright notice still reads 2022, the former iOS app returns 404 on the App Store as of mid-2026, and recent reviews report disappearing highlights and folders. That moves Weava from third to eighth.
• Glasp was under-ranked at fifth. Verified, it has the broadest platform coverage in this niche — Chrome, Safari, Edge, Firefox, iOS and Android, including a mobile Safari extension almost nobody else offers — the strongest export pipeline here, AI-suggested tags, and mobile apps rebuilt in 2026. It moves to second.
• Weava’s student discount was vague. We said “a steep student discount.” It is 70% off Premium via an education email, and its exports (Word, Excel, TXT, CSV plus formatted citations) are available on the free plan.
• Raindrop.io and Obsidian Web Clipper were missing. Raindrop gives three highlights per bookmark free and unlimited highlights in four colours with notes on Pro at $28/year. Obsidian’s clipper has a highlighter mode that captures marked passages into local Markdown. Both are verified and both belonged here.

The four things that actually decide a web highlighter

1. Persistence. Does the highlight reappear on the live page when you return, or does it only exist inside the tool? Persistence is what makes highlighting a reading habit rather than an archival one.
2. Colours, notes and privacy. How many colours, whether notes attach to highlights, whether notes are capped, and — the one people discover late — whether your highlights are public by default.
3. Export. Can you leave with your work in a format another tool reads, without asking anyone? This is the axis with the widest spread in the category, from “already plain files on your disk” to “no export advertised.”
4. Price and platform reach. What the free tier actually includes, what the paid tier costs, and whether the extension exists for the browser and phone you use.

Every tool below wins at least one of these and is limited on exactly one. We name the limiting axis in each section, because that is the axis to shop on.

How the best web highlighters compare

Tool	Persists on the page?	Colours & notes	Export	Free tier	Price (verified October 2026)
Marqly	✅ Yes, on revisit	6 colours; notes 10 free / unlimited Pro	⚠️ CSV of links; highlights via support	✅ Highlighting free on every plan	Free; Pro $72/yr or $9/mo
Glasp	✅ Yes — public by default on free	Multiple colours + notes	✅ Best in class	✅ Unlimited public highlights	Pro $15/mo or $150/yr
Readwise Reader	✅ Via extension	Highlights + notes & tags	✅ Continuous, plus API	❌ None permanent	$9.99/mo annual ($119.88/yr)
Raindrop.io	✅ Pro annotations	3 highlights free; 4 colours on Pro	✅ HTML or CSV, free included	✅ 3 highlights/bookmark	Free; Pro $28/yr or $3.25/mo
Hypothesis	✅ With extension	1 colour + notes/replies	⚠️ API/JSON	✅ Fully free	Free; paid LMS plans for schools
Obsidian Web Clipper	⚠️ Captures to Markdown instead	Highlighter mode + templates	✅ Already plain files	✅ Entirely free	Free; Sync from $4/mo annual
LINER	✅ Yes	Colours + notes	❌ None advertised	✅ Unlimited highlighting, with ads	Pro $17.99/mo or $14.99/mo annual
Weava	✅ Yes	5 default colours; custom on Premium	✅ Word, Excel, TXT, CSV	✅ Unlimited highlights, 100MB	$3.99/mo Premium ($7.99 shown struck through as the former price)

Prices were checked against dated fact sheets in October 2026. One disclosure: we do not maintain a dated fact sheet for Hypothesis, so its row carries forward from our 2026 edition and was not re-verified for this one — treat its details as indicative and check the project directly. Everything else in the table is verified.

1. Marqly — best all-round highlighter, and the only one with meaning search

Marqly’s highlighter gets the fundamentals right: select text on any website, pick one of six colours, attach a note. When you revisit the page your highlights are still there, painted on the live article. Highlighting is free on every plan with no gate, and so are boards, public board sharing and read mode; highlight notes are capped at 10 on the free plan and unlimited on Pro.

Every highlight also syncs to your library, where — on Pro — it is auto-tagged and searchable by meaning. That is the part nobody else here offers: you can find a highlight weeks later by describing it (“the stat about sleep and reaction time”) without remembering the page it came from, because semantic search runs across titles, content, highlights and video transcripts. Boards let you group highlights and links and share a board as a public page that needs no account to view. Pages can be captured as a screen-faithful PDF, with lazy-loaded images included, processed locally in Chrome and Edge; Firefox and Safari fall back to browser print-to-PDF.

The limits are export and platform nuance. Marqly’s CSV export carries URL, title, description and tags — not highlights or notes — and a complete account copy including highlights, notes and boards comes from support@marqly.com. There is no spaced-repetition review system like Readwise’s. The Highlights side-panel workspace is Chrome and Edge only; Firefox uses the extension popup and Safari has no Chrome-style side panel. There is no public API and no self-hosting.

Who it’s best for: people whose frustration is “I highlight things and never see them again” — the same retrieval-first thinking behind our AI bookmark manager roundup. Skip it if your highlights must land in Notion or Obsidian automatically (Readwise Reader or Glasp), or you want your highlights as local files (Obsidian Web Clipper).

• Pros: six colours plus notes, free on every plan; highlights persist on the page when you return; semantic search across highlights on Pro; boards and public board sharing free; local screen-faithful save-as-PDF in Chrome and Edge; web, Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, iOS and Android.
• Cons: highlight notes capped at 10 on free; the CSV export omits highlights and notes; no spaced-repetition review; the Highlights side panel is Chrome and Edge only; no public API or self-hosting.
• 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. Glasp — best for sharing what you highlight, and best export pipeline

Glasp is a social highlighter: your highlights build a public profile others can follow, closer to Goodreads for web reading than to a private notebook. Core highlighting is free and unlimited, with multiple colours and note support, and AI-suggested tags help organise saves. It also makes the widely used YouTube Summary extension, and paid plans add advanced YouTube summaries, channel tracking, PDF chat, audio transcription and an AI clone that answers questions from your highlights.

Its two strongest verified credentials are reach and exit. Platform coverage is the broadest in this niche — Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox extensions plus iOS and Android apps rebuilt in 2026, including a mobile Safari extension almost no competitor offers. And export is the best here: Markdown, CSV, HTML and JSON, with Notion auto-sync, an official Obsidian plugin, Readwise, Roam and Logseq integrations, dedicated Kindle highlight import and export, and a developer API with an MCP connector.

The caveats are real. Free highlights are public by default — keeping them private requires Pro. Free AI caps are tight: three YouTube summaries a day, 30 PDF uploads and 20 PDF chat messages a month. Pro is $15/month or $150/year and the Unlimited tier is $36/month or $360/year, after prices rose about 20–25% in May 2026, and subscriptions are explicitly non-refundable. Students get a discount on Pro yearly with an academic email. There is no full-text search, no full-page archiving and no offline mode, and Glasp is run by its two co-founders, which is a genuine support and longevity risk.

Who it’s best for: learners who want to highlight in public and discover what others underline, and anyone for whom export format is a hard requirement. Skip it if your highlights must stay private on a budget, or you want full-text search and archiving. See Marqly vs Glasp.

• Pros: unlimited free highlighting; the broadest platform coverage here including mobile Safari; the strongest export and integration pipeline in the niche; AI-suggested tags; Kindle import and export; developer API with MCP connector; student discount on Pro yearly.
• Cons: free highlights are public by default and privacy costs $150/year; prices rose about 20–25% in May 2026 and subscriptions are non-refundable; tight free AI caps; no full-text search, archiving or offline mode; two-person team.
• Price: free (public highlights) · Pro $15/month or $150/year · Unlimited $36/month or $360/year · student discount on Pro yearly.

3. Readwise Reader — best for export and spaced repetition

Reader is the power reader’s stack: a read-it-later app, RSS reader and highlighter in one, with the Readwise review system underneath. Highlight on the web via the extension, in PDFs, in ePubs, in newsletters and in YouTube transcripts — everything lands in one place, then flows out to Notion, Obsidian, Evernote and Roam. The daily spaced-repetition review resurfaces old highlights so you actually retain them, which is a genuinely different idea from anything else in this category. Ghostreader summarises documents and answers questions against the text.

It is also the most portable of the commercial options: highlights and notes export continuously in Markdown, your document list exports as CSV, and a documented public API gives programmatic access to everything. If you cancel, you can take the library and the annotations with you in open formats.

The costs are price, complexity and platform. There is no permanent free tier — Readwise offers a 30-day trial, after which a subscription is required — and Reader ships only with the Full plan at $9.99/month billed annually ($119.88/year) or $12.99/month monthly; the cheaper Lite plan at $5.59/month billed annually covers classic highlight syncing without Reader. Verified students and educators get 50% off. It is a whole reading workflow with a real learning curve, and the Reader app’s own browser support is Chrome and Firefox — no Safari or Edge extension, though the separate Readwise aggregator does reach those.

Who it’s best for: heavy readers whose highlights need to end up in a note system and be resurfaced. Skip it if you just want to mark up pages as you browse, you want free, or you need semantic search — Reader’s search is keyword-based and its tagging manual. See Marqly vs Readwise Reader.

• Pros: the best export pipeline among the paid tools; highlights across web, PDF, ePub, newsletters and YouTube; spaced-repetition review that turns highlights into retained knowledge; documented public API; 50% student and educator discount.
• Cons: no permanent free tier; Reader requires the Full plan at $119.88/year; a whole workflow rather than a lightweight highlighter; keyword rather than semantic search; manual tagging; Reader’s extensions are Chrome and Firefox only.
• Price: no free tier · Full $9.99/month billed annually or $12.99/month monthly · Lite $5.59/month billed annually, without Reader.

4. Raindrop.io — best cheap highlighting inside a real bookmark library

Raindrop is the entry our 2026 list should have had. It is first a bookmark manager, but its highlighting is real and its price is the lowest paid number here: the free plan includes up to three highlights per bookmark, and Pro at $28/year or $3.25/month adds annotations with unlimited highlights in four colours plus notes, alongside full-text search across saved pages and PDFs, Stella AI suggestions for tags and collections at save time, permanent page copies and daily backups.

The reason to pick it over a dedicated highlighter is context: your highlights sit inside a library that also holds every link you have saved, organised in nested collections, reachable from web, Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS and Android plus Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari extensions — the broadest platform reach of anything in this article. Public and collaborative collections are included, and export to HTML or CSV works on the free plan.

The limits are the ones that follow from it being a bookmark manager. Three highlights per bookmark on free is a hard ceiling for anyone who marks up seriously. There is no semantic search at any price, no AI summaries, no chat and no YouTube features — Stella suggests tags at save time and does not retrieve. There is no offline reading mode, and the reading experience is basic next to a dedicated reader.

Who it’s best for: people who already keep their links in Raindrop and want highlighting in the same place for $28 a year. Skip it if you highlight heavily on the free plan, you want AI retrieval over your highlights, or you need offline.

• Pros: the most generous free highlighting in a bookmark manager; Pro annotations at $28/year are the cheapest paid tier here; apps on every platform including Linux; export to HTML or CSV on the free plan; permanent page copies and daily backups on Pro; public and collaborative collections.
• Cons: only three highlights per bookmark on free; four colours on Pro versus six in Marqly; no semantic search, summaries or chat at any price; no offline reading mode; basic reader.
• Price: free (3 highlights per bookmark) · Pro $28/year or $3.25/month · App Store pricing $27.99/year or $2.99/month.

5. Hypothesis — best fully free, and best for annotating with other people

Hypothesis is a nonprofit, open-source annotation layer for the web. Install the extension, highlight and annotate — publicly, privately, or inside a group — and the public layer means you can see what others annotated on the same page. Educators use it heavily for social reading, and that is the capability nothing else here has: annotation as a conversation rather than a private act. It works on web pages, PDFs and ePubs, its annotations are anchored robustly to the text, and individual use is completely free, with the business model built on paid LMS integrations for schools.

Disclosure: we do not maintain a dated fact sheet for Hypothesis, so everything in this section carries forward from our 2026 edition and was not re-verified for this one. Its one-colour limitation, its API/JSON export path and its paid-schools model were accurate when we checked them in August 2026; confirm the current state with the project directly before you commit a course to it.

The trade-offs are the ones that come with the model. One highlight colour, with organisation through tags and groups rather than colour. Export is thin — API, JSON and community scripts rather than one-click files. And the social and academic framing is noise if all you want is private markup on pages you read alone.

Who it’s best for: educators running social reading, students in annotation-based classes, and anyone who wants free forever with an open-source layer. Skip it if you want multiple colours, one-click export, or a private tool with no public dimension.

• Pros: completely free for individual use; open source and nonprofit-backed; public annotation and group discussion are unique here; works on web pages, PDFs and ePubs; robust text anchoring.
• Cons: one highlight colour; export is API/JSON and community scripts rather than one-click files; the social framing is noise for private markup; no dated fact sheet in our data layer, so not re-verified for this edition.
• Price: free for individuals · paid LMS integrations for schools (not re-verified for this edition).

6. Obsidian Web Clipper — best if you want your highlights as files you own

Obsidian’s clipper is the strongest portability answer in this category, because there is no export step: its highlighter mode captures the passages you mark as plain Markdown files in your vault, on your own disk, readable by any text editor and importable into virtually any notes tool. No proprietary format, no lock-in, nothing to leave with. The clipper and the app are entirely free, including commercial use, a policy in place since February 2025.

It is also more capable than its reputation suggests. 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. It runs on Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Safari, including Safari on iPhone and iPad, which almost no competitor offers, and it shipped versions in April, May, June and July 2026.

The costs are assembly and retrieval. 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 unless you wire up your own model and pay its usage. And highlights become files rather than paint: the clipper does not repaint your marks on the live page when you return to it, so if persistence-on-the-page is your primary criterion, this is the wrong tool.

Who it’s best for: local-first purists and Obsidian users who want web passages as portable Markdown they own forever. Skip if you want highlights to reappear on the live page, you do not want to configure your own AI, or you need cross-device sync without paying for it.

• Pros: entirely free and open source including commercial use; highlights become plain Markdown with zero lock-in; highlighter mode captures only marked passages; per-site templates; Interpreter AI with your own key or free local Ollama; 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; does not repaint highlights on the live page; only useful if you also run Obsidian.
• 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.

7. LINER — the former favourite that pivoted away, and stopped letting you leave

LINER was once the default answer to “web highlighter,” and in 2027 it is primarily an AI search and research-agent company. The old getliner.com domain now returns a 410 pointing to liner.com. Highlighting still works and syncs — it clips web pages, PDFs and YouTube moments into a private My Space with notes and folders — but it is a supporting feature, and the pricing page leads with AI models, agent credits and file uploads.

Its free tier is better than most roundups say, and we under-rated it in 2026. Free includes unlimited highlighting and unlimited citation-backed AI search, plus ten research-assistant uses a day. What it also includes is ads inside AI answers, zero agent credits and one small file upload a day. Paid tiers unlock credits, larger uploads and premium models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic under one subscription: Pro $17.99/month or $14.99/month billed annually, Max $35.99/month or $29.99/month annual, and Team $26.99/seat/month annual. Agent credits do not roll over, and Deep Research costs 40 per request.

Two things should decide whether you use it. First, the current product advertises no export for saved highlights in My Space, and no import tools either; the legacy highlighter could export to Evernote and Word, and the developer API targets search integrations rather than personal data portability. If your highlights matter long-term, treat the library as a dead end and copy important passages out manually. Second, there is a card-required trial whose length is not published, alongside a verified pattern of Trustpilot complaints about trials auto-converting to roughly $400 annual charges and refused refunds. That is a reason to check your subscription settings the day you sign up, not a reason to avoid the product — but it is a reason to be careful. The Safari and Firefox extensions of the highlighter era are no longer offered; reach is now web, Chrome, Edge, iOS, Android, Mac and Windows.

Who it’s best for: researchers and students who want AI search answers they can verify line by line, with Liner Scholar’s literature-review and citation agents, and who treat highlighting as a bonus. Skip it if highlighting is the actual job, or if being unable to export your library is disqualifying — which for a long-term annotation habit it usually should be.

• Pros: unlimited highlighting and unlimited AI search on the free plan; line-by-line citations on every answer; serious academic tooling in Liner Scholar; one subscription covers multiple premium models; wide device coverage including Mac and Windows desktop apps; public API and MCP server.
• Cons: the highlighter is no longer the product; no export advertised for saved highlights; free tier shows ads inside answers and grants zero agent credits; credits do not roll over; Safari and Firefox extensions dropped; an unpublished-length card-required trial with documented billing complaints.
• Price: free (unlimited highlighting, ads, no agent credits) · Pro $17.99/month or $14.99/month annual · Max $35.99/month or $29.99/month annual · Team $26.99/seat/month annual.

8. Weava — best for student citations, if you accept the maintenance risk

Weava is built for research projects: it highlights both web pages and uploaded PDFs in one tool, organises everything into folders and sub-folders, and generates citations in APA, MLA, Chicago and Harvard — which is why it became a staple across more than 200 universities. The free plan is genuinely usable: unlimited highlights and notes, folder organisation, citations and export to Word, Excel, TXT and CSV, all on free, with 100MB of PDF storage, no sub-folders and ads. Premium is $3.99/month billed annually or $7.99/month monthly, adding unlimited storage, sub-folders, custom colours and invite-based collaboration, and students get 70% off with an education email — the deepest student discount in this article.

We ranked Weava third in 2026 and cannot defend that now. The maintenance signals are consistent and unambiguous: the Chrome extension has not been updated since February 2024, the website’s copyright notice still reads 2022, and the former iOS app returns 404 on the App Store as of mid-2026. Recent reviews report disappearing highlights and folders and slow support. Reach is Chrome and Edge only — no Firefox, no Safari, no working mobile apps, no API. And highlights are tied to exact URLs, so they vanish if a page’s address changes.

None of that means Weava is broken today. It means it is maintenance-mode software, and that you should not put anything into it that you cannot afford to lose. The mitigation is cheap: export regularly to Word or CSV, which the free plan allows, and keep a second copy somewhere else.

Who it’s best for: students on a budget who need web and PDF highlighting side by side with automatic citations, and who will keep exports. Skip it if you use Firefox or Safari, you need a phone app, you want AI retrieval, or you are building an annotation archive you intend to keep for years.

• Pros: highlights web pages and PDFs in one tool; automatic citations in four formats; unlimited highlights and notes on free; export to Word, Excel, TXT and CSV on the free plan; 70% student discount; folder and sub-folder structure suits literature reviews.
• Cons: Chrome extension not updated since February 2024; site copyright still reads 2022; former iOS app delisted; recent reports of disappearing highlights and folders; Chrome and Edge only with no mobile apps or API; highlights tied to exact URLs; 100MB free storage and ads; no AI of any kind.
• Price: free (unlimited highlights, 100MB, no sub-folders, ads) · Premium $3.99/month billed annually or $7.99/month monthly · 70% student discount.

Also tested, and why they are not on the list

• Evernote Web Clipper. A rich clipper on five browsers with tags and a destination notebook at clip time, and v11 in January 2026 added an AI assistant plus semantic search. It is not a web highlighter: it cannot highlight text on live web pages — markup happens inside notes after clipping. The free plan is also 50 notes, one notebook and one device, with Starter at $99/year and Advanced at $249.99/year behind real use.
• Linkwarden. Open source under AGPL-3.0 with highlights and annotations, and it archives every save as a screenshot, PDF and readable copy — so your highlights survive link rot, which nothing else here does. It is an archiver rather than a highlighter, and its cloud has no free tier beyond a trial at $3/month per user billed yearly.
• Karakeep. Free, self-hosted, open source, with highlights and notes plus AI auto-tagging and semantic search via your own key or a local model. Excellent if you want to own the stack; it is not built for marking up pages as you browse.
• mymind. Despite the visual reputation, its fact sheet records no highlighting — text highlights appear in its export but the feature set has no highlighter. It is a card-based saver, not a markup tool.
• Readwise (the aggregator, not Reader). Superb at syncing highlights from Kindle, Apple Books and Twitter and resurfacing them by spaced repetition, but it cannot save or highlight web pages itself — it is the downstream half of a pipeline, and Reader is the tool that does the highlighting.

Can you get your highlights out? Export and portability compared

This is the axis with the widest spread in the category, and the one most people discover too late.

Tool	Self-serve export	Formats	Notes and highlights included
Obsidian Web Clipper	None needed	Plain Markdown on your disk	✅ Everything, by construction
Glasp	✅	Markdown, CSV, HTML, JSON	✅ Plus Notion, Obsidian, Readwise, Roam, Logseq
Readwise Reader	✅ Continuous	Markdown, CSV of documents, public API	✅ Highlights, notes and tags
Weava	✅ On the free plan	Word, Excel, TXT, CSV	✅ Plus formatted citations
Hypothesis	⚠️	API, JSON, community scripts	✅ But not one-click
Raindrop.io	✅ On the free plan	HTML, CSV	⚠️ Links and metadata; annotations are Pro
Marqly	✅ CSV button	CSV	❌ URL, title, description, tags only
LINER	❌	None advertised	❌ No export or import tools

Marqly’s row deserves the full detail rather than the 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. Highlights, notes, boards and dates are not in it. For a complete copy of your account including highlights, notes and boards, you email support@marqly.com and get one. On this axis Marqly loses to Obsidian, Glasp and Readwise Reader, and the honest summary is: your links are one click from portable, your highlights are one email from portable, and neither is as automatic as a Markdown file already sitting on your disk.

The lesson is the same one the last two years of shutdowns taught everyone about their reading libraries: test the exit in the first week. Export something, open the file, confirm your highlights are actually in it. LINER is the only tool here where that test has no passing answer.

How to choose

1. You highlight to find things again later → Marqly. Persistence plus semantic search over every highlight on Pro is the combination nobody else here has, and highlighting itself is free on every plan.
2. Your highlights must end up in Notion, Obsidian or Anki automatically → Readwise Reader, and pay the $119.88/year; the pipeline and the review loop are worth it for that workflow.
3. You want your highlighting to be social, and you want the best export → Glasp, understanding that free means public and private costs $150/year.
4. You want free forever and want to own the files → Obsidian Web Clipper, accepting that you configure sync and AI yourself.
5. You want free forever and like annotating with other people → Hypothesis, accepting one colour and a thin export path.
6. You already keep your links in Raindrop → Raindrop Pro at $28/year for unlimited highlights in four colours with notes.
7. You are a student on a budget writing papers → Weava with the 70% discount, exporting regularly, and knowing the extension has not been updated since February 2024.
8. You want a citation-backed AI research assistant that also highlights → LINER, if you accept that your highlights cannot leave.

The pattern across the category: capture is solved, retrieval is not, and portability is barely discussed. Any of these tools will paint text yellow. Two questions are worth paying for — whether you will ever see that highlight again, and whether you can take it with you if the answer changes.

What actually matters in 2027

Persistence and retrieval are different problems, and only one of them is solved. Every tool here repaints or captures your marks. Almost none of them help you find a highlight six weeks later when you remember the idea and not the page. Semantic search over highlights exists in Marqly on Pro and in Karakeep if you self-host, and that is the whole list.

Export is a feature you should shop for explicitly. The spread runs from “already plain files on your disk” to “no export advertised,” and the tools with the weakest exit paths are not the cheapest ones — LINER is one of the most expensive here. A highlight library you cannot leave with is a subscription you cannot cancel.

Free is real in this category, but it is free with a condition. Glasp’s free highlights are public. LINER’s free tier shows ads inside answers and grants no agent credits. Weava’s free tier caps storage at 100MB, blocks sub-folders and has not had an extension update since February 2024. Obsidian’s is free and asks you to configure your own sync and AI. Marqly’s six-colour highlighting is free on every plan with highlight notes capped at 10, and its AI is Pro. Read the condition, not the checkbox.

If the frustration that brought you here is highlighting things and never seeing them again, Marqly treats every highlight as something you should be able to find by meaning rather than by memory — six colours free on every plan, notes and boards included, and Pro at $72/year for the retrieval layer. Read our guide to highlighting text on any website, or see the web highlighter overview for how the feature works.

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Prices, plan limits and platform support verified against dated competitor fact sheets in October 2026. Hypothesis has no fact sheet in our data layer, so its details carry forward from August 2026 and were not re-verified. Changes from the 2026 edition: Marqly’s free tier corrected — it never included AI, and auto-tagging, summaries and semantic search are all Pro, with highlight notes capped at 10 on free; Marqly’s export corrected — a CSV button exists and carries URL, title, description and tags, while highlights and notes come via a complete account copy from support; LINER’s free tier corrected to unlimited highlighting plus unlimited AI search with ads and zero agent credits, and its missing highlight export and dropped Safari and Firefox extensions disclosed; Weava demoted from third to eighth on verified maintenance evidence — extension not updated since February 2024, delisted iOS app, and reports of disappearing highlights — with its 70% student discount and free-plan exports documented; Glasp promoted to second on verified platform reach and export breadth, with its non-refundable subscriptions and two-person team disclosed; Raindrop.io and Obsidian Web Clipper added as verified entries; Readwise Reader’s Lite-versus-Full distinction and 50% student discount added; and an export-and-portability comparison added. We’ll update this comparison as plans change.