Add to Chrome
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Add to SafariWhen comparing Turtl vs Buku, the Slant community recommends Turtl for most people. In the question“What is the best alternative to XMarks for syncing and organizing bookmarks across different browsers and devices?” Turtl is ranked 1st while Buku is ranked 3rd. The most important reason people chose Turtl is:
Turtl has applications for all the major operating systems, as well as Android. In addition, there are extensions available for Firefox and Chrome that cooperate with the downloadable applications.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Multiple Platforms (Windows, Linux, macOS, Android, Firefox, Chrome)
Turtl has applications for all the major operating systems, as well as Android. In addition, there are extensions available for Firefox and Chrome that cooperate with the downloadable applications.
Pro Open source
The app is licensed under GPLv3 making it open source. This means that anyone can use the code and contribute. This also makes it easy to use on one's own server or for company solutions.
Pro Good security
After assigning a password to your account in Turtl, a key is created to encrypt the entire account. No data is stored on their servers meaning they have no access to unencrypted content. This is a huge leg up when comparing to other Evernote alternatives.
Pro Import/export
Importing means that you don't need to start from scratch to try Buku, and exporting means that you don't risk locking yourself in by doing so. Buku allows you to import and export bookmarks from and to a few important formats, including the recently added orgfile.
Pro Extensive search options
Include, exclude, regex, tags, all or partial search terms.
Pro Fully compatible with Firefox bookmarks
Also supports Google Chrome, Chromium, Opera...
Pro Under active development, responsive team
The project is maintained actively with a rolling ToDo list and the devs encourage feedback and requests.
Pro Quality documentation
The Github page for Buku is useful for learning how to use it, and discovering features.
Pro Powerful
Advanced bookmark management is possible, with the right use of Buku's commands.
Pro Completion scripts
Handy completion scripts are available for bash, fish and zsh shells.
Pro Easy to use
Using Buku is easy once you memorize its simple syntax.
Pro GUI webserver available
Buku v3.8 has added a GUI based local webserver to access the bookmarks from the browser.
Pro Checks added for deletion options
Checks have been added for all deletion options in v3.8 to show the bookmarks to be deleted and confirm with the user before actual deletion.
Cons
Con No iOS app
While many other operating systems have a client, iOS does not have one yet (though it is planned).
Con No image embedding
Instead of image embeddings, there's a sort of poor man's substitute: image + description. If you add an image, you can create a description of any size and with all the formatting features. It can be used instead of image embedding but much more limited: only one image and only at the very top.
Con Internet dependent
Requires Internet connection to initiate offline mode, loses access to notes without Internet or server.
Con Assumes that you always know what you're doing
Buku doesn't show you what will happen before it performs a command that you input. For example: If you type the command to delete a bookmark, there's no way to see which bookmark is tied to the index that you input before the deletion happens. You need to know yourself by checking with another command. Couple this with the lack of a way to undo actions, and you could end up with a situation where you accidentally delete the wrong bookmark (or worse, range of bookmarks) and find out afterwards, without having any way to know which bookmark was deleted by this mistake (because bookmarks are identified by reassignable indices, not URLs or titles) and no way to undo the damage that was done.
This lack of safety means that you must know exactly what you're doing before using dangerous options like "-d", or you could cause irreversible damage.
Con CLI only backend, Bukuserver provides a self-hosted GUI
