Omnivore vs Obsidian Web Clipper: Which is better? (2026)
The short answer
Obsidian Web Clipper — and not just because Omnivore shut down in November 2024. Clips saved as local Markdown files can never be deleted by a company going away, which is exactly the lesson Omnivore taught.
Feature comparison
| Feature | Omnivore | Obsidian Web Clipper | Marqly |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI auto-tagging | — | — | ✓ |
| Semantic search (find by meaning) | — | — | ✓ |
| AI summaries | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| YouTube AI (summary, chat, transcript) | — | — | ✓ |
| Chat with your saves | — | — | ✓ |
| Web highlighter | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Notes on highlights | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Save page as PDF | — | — | ✓ |
| Full-text search | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Save all open tabs | — | — | ✓ |
| Public sharing (boards/collections) | — | — | ✓ |
| Pocket import | ✓ | — | ✓ |
| Browser bookmarks import | — | — | ✓ |
| Offline reading | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| iOS app | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Android app | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Browser extension | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free tier | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Public API | ✓ | — | — |
| Self-hostable | ✓ | ✓ | — |
| Price | Free | Free | Free · $48/year (≈$4/mo) or $8/month |
- Omnivore
- Free
- Obsidian Web Clipper
- Free
- Marqly
- Free · $48/year (≈$4/mo) or $8/month
Pricing
- Omnivore: Omnivore has shut down and no longer accepts new users. Omnivore shut down in November 2024 after its team was acqui-hired by ElevenLabs. Users had until November 30, 2024 to export their data before it was deleted. The open-source code remains on GitHub, and community forks offer self-hosted deployments.
- Obsidian Web Clipper: Obsidian Web Clipper has a free tier. The clipper and the Obsidian app are completely free, including commercial use (policy since February 2025). The only paid add-ons are optional: Obsidian Sync from $4/month billed annually ($5 monthly) for cross-device sync, and Obsidian Publish at $8/site/month for public sharing.
- Marqly: Marqly has a free tier; paid plans are $48/year (≈$4/mo) or $8/month. 7-day free trial of Pro. Free tier needs no card; Pro unlocks chat with saves and video chat.
About Omnivore
Omnivore was an open-source read-it-later app that launched in 2022 and quickly became a favorite alternative to Pocket and Instapaper. It was completely free: saved articles, newsletters, PDFs, and RSS feeds landed in a clean library with labels, filters, and a notably powerful search syntax, backed by native iOS and Android apps, browser extensions for all major browsers, text-to-speech, and plugins that synced highlights to Obsidian and Logseq. In late October 2024, the team announced they had joined ElevenLabs to work on its Reader app, and the hosted service shut down the following month — users had until November 30, 2024 to export their data before it was permanently deleted. Because Omnivore was AGPL-licensed, the code remains on GitHub with well over a thousand forks, and community projects offer self-hosted deployments, though the stack (PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, multiple microservices) is demanding to run. No official successor exists.
About Obsidian Web Clipper
Obsidian Web Clipper is the official, open-source browser extension for Obsidian, the local-first Markdown note app. It runs on Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Safari — including Safari on iOS and iPadOS — and saves pages, selections, or highlights as clean Markdown files in your vault, where they stay on your own disk with zero lock-in. Per-site templates decide how each clip is titled, tagged, and filed, pulling metadata through selector and Schema.org variables. An optional Interpreter feature runs natural-language prompts at clip time — summarize, extract, translate — using your own API key from Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, and others, or a local Ollama model at no cost. Everything is free, including commercial use of Obsidian since early 2025. The trade-off is that cloud conveniences are add-ons: cross-device sync via Obsidian Sync starts at $4 per month, and public sharing via Obsidian Publish costs $8 per site per month.
Which should you choose?
The verdict starts with a shutdown: Omnivore’s hosted service ended in November 2024 after its team joined ElevenLabs, with a hard November 30 export deadline. But this pairing carries extra poignancy, because the two tools were friends — Omnivore’s plugin synced highlights and notes into Obsidian, and many Omnivore users already keep a vault. Obsidian Web Clipper closes the loop: instead of highlights flowing from a hosted reader into your vault, capture happens directly into it, as plain Markdown files on your own disk.
Choose an Omnivore fork if:
- You specifically want a hosted-style reading experience — a queue, a web library, labels and filters — and can self-host the heavyweight PostgreSQL/Elasticsearch stack a fork requires.
- You accept volunteer maintenance and an uncertain future in exchange for free, open-source reading software.
Choose Obsidian Web Clipper if:
- You never want to lose a library to a shutdown again — clips live as local files no service can take away.
- You highlight as you read: highlighter mode captures the passages you mark, not just whole pages.
- You want capture automation — per-site templates auto-title, tag, and file clips, and the Interpreter can summarize or extract at clip time using your own API key or a free local Ollama model.
Be clear-eyed about the differences. The clipper is not a read-it-later service: there’s no queue, no text-to-speech, and cross-device access means paying $4/month for Obsidian Sync or wiring up your own workaround. Organizing and finding clips is manual work that Omnivore’s search syntax used to do for you. But both the clipper and Obsidian itself are entirely free — the same price Omnivore charged, attached to a business model that actually sustains it. For most former Omnivore users, that trade is easy to take.
The option both sides overlook
If the real problem is finding things again, neither Omnivore nor Obsidian Web Clipper fully solves it. Marqly auto-tags and summarizes every save with AI and lets you retrieve any of them by describing what you remember — plus a highlighter, YouTube summaries with transcripts, and save-as-PDF. There's a free tier with no card required.
Omnivore vs Obsidian Web Clipper FAQ
Did Omnivore integrate with Obsidian?
Yes — one of Omnivore's best-loved features was a plugin that synced highlights and notes into Obsidian and Logseq vaults. That pipeline died with the hosted service in November 2024. Obsidian Web Clipper replaces the pattern by capturing pages and highlights directly into the vault as Markdown, with no intermediate service to shut down.
Is Obsidian Web Clipper free like Omnivore was?
Yes, and more durably. The clipper is free and open source, and Obsidian itself has been free for all use, including commercial, since February 2025. The only optional costs are Obsidian Sync from $4/month for cross-device sync and Publish at $8/month — and the Interpreter's AI can run free on a local Ollama model.
Can my clips disappear the way Omnivore data did?
No. Omnivore's data lived on servers that were switched off, and anything unexported by November 30, 2024 was deleted. Obsidian clips are plain Markdown files in a folder on your own disk — readable by any text editor, portable to any notes tool, and entirely outside any company's power to delete.