gergan shared this post · 3h ago
jawheeler

Which one should I use for online content archiving? Linkwarden or Karakeep?

I just installed Karakeep after using Linkwarden for a while. Which one should I use? I'm quite undecided. Please, help!

119
Vaviloff A bit late to the party, I'm also shopping for the bookmark manager with archiving.

Probably this is not needed by a lot of people but my OCD self really liked the \nested\ lists (collections) in Karakeep.
Oct 15, 2025 3 likes
vghgvbh They're both kinda shit in my opinion.

Linkwarden has the UI Design of a 2000s app. 30% of the dashboard are wasted with a non-clickable bragboard how many articles you collected. Customizability zero.
You can create Folders/Categories but for some absolutely stupid design reason the developer choose to make the icons all unicolor.

Karakeep has a way more intuitive GUI and better functions like Ai tagging and link description etc. But it's not there yet. Most articles which I saved couldn't generate a banner picture. Karakeep cannot pass cookie banner while fetching a site so all websites out of the EU are basically unavailable to fetch. You cannot even fetch a simple reddit post because it's blocked by a large cookie terms banner. Also the mobile app is not usable at the moment as it lacks basic functionality.

Right now functionality wise raindrop.io is the most sophisticated link grabber. But it's not selfhosted and also not free if you want to save articles offline. In raindrop you can also upload your own icons for categories of your liking. The app on ios and android is near perfect.

I hope karakeep reaches a certain maturity in a couple of years. For linkwarden I have no hope, the GUI is horrible, icons included.
Apr 20, 2025 7 likes
Certain_Repeat_753 Has there been any meaningful update to address that? I'd like to archive Reddit posts too. Mar 15 2 likes
guesswhochickenpoo I had roughly the same opinion of Linkwarden but for different reasons. It’s bloated and when I tried to save a Reddit post, it didn’t even scrape the title properly. It just gave the generic “Reddit, the front page of the Internet” title. Huge fail.

I just found out about Readeck from another comment and it looks really promising. Honestly looks like a more polished version of Karakeep but without the AI part. It even supposedly saves videos to which was one of the big features of Karakeep that I wanted. Going to give it a try.
Apr 20, 2025 3 likes
vghgvbh Is readeck selfhostable in docker? Apr 20, 2025 1 like
vghgvbh Oh thanks! Much appreciated Apr 20, 2025 1 like
guesswhochickenpoo Just tried it briefly and found a couple problems already. One it does a terrible job at saving a Reddit post. At least when I tried to save this thread. Just like link warden it failed to get the title of the actual post and just give the generic Reddit at front page title. Also, it doesn’t seem to save a YouTube short video just the video description and transcript. However it does a great job of saving the text from the short got the entire transcript the description and everything in a pretty clean format. I’ll have to play around a bit more and see if I can get it to save the actual video like Karakeep does.

Edit: Just realized the doc says this about video "A video is a page that was identified as a video container (ie. a link to Youtube or Vimeo). It renders a video player. Please note that videos are played from their respective remote servers." Bummer
Apr 20, 2025 2 likes
Affectionate_End1412 did you add the SingleFile extension and set it to feed into Karakeep. That avoids all the frontend robot checks and such. Dec 3, 2025 1 like
bdu-komrad I tried readeck and missed being able
to download pages for offline storage. Also , the interface is confuse as when you mark and article as “read” , it still appears in the “unread” view. You have to archive a page to remove it from Unread.

The dev knows about it, but hasn’t fixed it yet.

The app was easy on install and it looks nice, but it needs some work. 
May 27, 2025 1 like
Silencer306 Readck does not save reddit posts correctly right? Sep 7, 2025 1 like
guesswhochickenpoo Can't remember. I know I tried it briefly and something about it was a show stopper, at least at the time. Might have been reddit posts. I know Karakeep has been doing a great job with reddit posts in recent releases at least vs the other tools. At least when it's textual. When it's other types of posts like images or other formats it can be a bit messier. This was a save comment but text posts often look like this too, but not always.

https://preview.redd.it/gm7fvx7uftnf1.png?width...
Sep 7, 2025 1 like
Silencer306 Thanks, I just tried Karakeep, but it never downloads anything. Everything says "Failed to fetch link contents". Do you think there is some config I am missing? Sep 7, 2025 2 likes
guesswhochickenpoo Is that just for Reddit or all sites? Sep 7, 2025 2 likes
Silencer306 All sites, nothing seems to work Sep 7, 2025 1 like
guesswhochickenpoo Definitely a config issue then. Sep 8, 2025 1 like
marywang2022 Did you solve the cookie banner issue? It's so frustrating. If not, could you recommend me an alternative as simple as Karakeep? Archivebox is too complicated for me. Apr 14 1 like