Readwise Reader vs Omnivore: Which is better? (2026)
The short answer
Omnivore shut down in November 2024, making Readwise Reader the winner by default — and the closest living match for Omnivore's newsletter-RSS-PDF feature set. The catch former Omnivore users must swallow: Reader costs $119.88/year, while Omnivore charged nothing (which is why it died).
Feature comparison
| Feature | Readwise Reader | Omnivore | 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 | $9.99/month billed annually ($119.88/year) or $12.99/month billed monthly (Full plan) | Free | Free · $48/year (≈$4/mo) or $8/month |
- Readwise Reader
- $9.99/month billed annually ($119.88/year) or $12.99/month billed monthly (Full plan)
- Omnivore
- Free
- Marqly
- Free · $48/year (≈$4/mo) or $8/month
Pricing
- Readwise Reader: Readwise Reader costs $9.99/month billed annually ($119.88/year) or $12.99/month billed monthly (Full plan). 30-day free trial. No permanent free tier — after the 30-day trial you must subscribe. Reader is only included in the Full plan; the cheaper Lite plan ($5.59/month billed annually) covers classic Readwise highlight syncing without the Reader app.
- 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.
- 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 Readwise Reader
Readwise Reader is the read-it-later app from the team behind Readwise, the popular highlight-syncing service. Launched in public beta in 2022, Reader combines saved articles, RSS feeds, email newsletters, PDFs, ePubs, Twitter threads, and YouTube videos into a single triage-oriented inbox available on the web, iOS, Android, and via browser extensions. Its Ghostreader assistant uses AI to summarize documents, define terms, and answer questions against the text, and YouTube videos come with synced transcripts you can highlight like an article. Everything feeds the core Readwise loop: highlights and notes sync to Notion, Obsidian, Evernote, and other tools, with spaced-repetition review built in. Reader is bundled exclusively with the Readwise Full plan at $9.99/month billed annually ($119.88/year) or $12.99/month billed monthly, after a 30-day free trial; there is no permanent free tier. A documented API and active development round out a distinctly power-user product.
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.
Which should you choose?
This comparison ended abruptly in November 2024, when Omnivore’s team joined ElevenLabs and the hosted service closed, deleting whatever its users had not exported. While it lived, Omnivore was the free, open-source counterweight to Reader: newsletters, RSS, PDFs, labels, a genuinely powerful search syntax, native mobile apps with text-to-speech — at zero cost. Reader was the paid professional alternative. Now it is largely the destination.
Choose Readwise Reader if:
- You want what Omnivore did, maintained and improved — the multi-format inbox, plus Ghostreader AI, YouTube transcripts, and the Readwise highlight pipeline into Notion, Obsidian, and Roam
- Sustainability matters after being burned once; a bootstrapped, profitable subscription business is the opposite of free-with-no-revenue
- Active development is worth paying for: $9.99/month billed annually, after a 30-day trial
Choose an Omnivore fork if:
- Self-hosting was always the appeal — the AGPL code survives on GitHub with over a thousand forks, and community projects offer deployments
- You can operate a heavy stack (PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, microservices) and accept volunteer maintenance with no roadmap promises
Bottom line: Omnivore’s shutdown is the read-it-later category’s clearest cautionary tale, and it reframes how to shop here. The feature list matters less than the funding model behind it, because features you rely on can vanish with thirty days’ notice. Reader is expensive precisely because it is built to last. Users unwilling to pay that much should look at open-source options with real sustainability stories — Wallabag’s hosted service, for one — rather than hoping another free hosted miracle appears.
The option both sides overlook
If the real problem is finding things again, neither Readwise Reader nor Omnivore 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.
Readwise Reader vs Omnivore FAQ
Is Readwise Reader a good replacement for Omnivore?
The best like-for-like among hosted apps. Omnivore combined saved articles, newsletters, PDFs, and RSS with labels and powerful search; Reader covers all of that and adds ePubs, YouTube transcripts, Ghostreader AI, and highlight exports to Notion and Obsidian. The differences: Reader has no free tier ($119.88/year after trial) and is closed source with no self-hosting.
Why did Omnivore shut down while Readwise keeps going?
Revenue. Omnivore was completely free with no paid plan, funded by its founders — when the team was acqui-hired by ElevenLabs in late 2024, nothing sustained the service, and it closed within a month. Readwise is bootstrapped and profitable on subscriptions, which makes an Omnivore-style disappearance far less likely, though it means every user pays.
Can I still get my data out of Omnivore into Reader?
Only if you exported before November 30, 2024 — after that deadline, all hosted Omnivore data was permanently deleted, with no archive or read-only mode. If you have your export ZIP, current read-it-later apps can generally import it. If you self-host a community fork, your data sits in your own database and remains fully portable.