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Add to SafariWhen comparing Pinboard vs Instapaper, the Slant community recommends Pinboard for most people. In the question“What are the best ways to organize bookmarks?” Pinboard is ranked 5th while Instapaper is ranked 12th.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro An ad-free site with no third-party tracking
Pro Cheap
The standard account is $11/year. The pro account ($25/year) provides you:
- A permanent personal copy of every bookmark you save.
- Full-text search of all your bookmarks
- Dead link and error detection
Pro A searchable archive of all your tweets and favorites
Pro Easy tagging
Pro Excellent API
Pinboard has an API that gives you access to all features used in the webapp, so you can build scripts and apps that work against it very easily.
Pro Paid service
The service receives direct income from its customers so it is less likely to disappear overnight like so many free services, taking all your bookmarks with it.
Pro Easy download of all your data
Pro The ability to bookmark by email from your iPhone
Pro A way to save notes and other snippets of text as bookmarks
Pro Built-in sync of links and favorites from multiple Twitter accounts
Pro Built-in integration with Instapaper
Pro Annotation tools
Allows leaving notes attached to articles and highlighting certain part of the text. Free version of the app is limited to 5 highlights a month.
Pro Excellent typography choices
Instapaper allows you to choose from 14 different fonts, some of which have been designed specifically for the application. You can manually adjust spacing between lines, padding around text and font size to fit your preferences.
Pro Allows listening to articles
Instapaper comes with a build in text-to-speech feature that will read out loud articles. Premium version of the app allows creating playlists.
Pro Articles can be emailed to Instapaper
You can add articles to Instapaper by sending them to a unique email address associated with your account.
Pro Pagination
Allows for pagination, not just scrolling.
Pro Awesome offline mode
Pro Can look up words in a dictionary and Wikipedia
Pro Can be set to switch to dark mode based on time of day
Instapaper includes a dark theme and allows switching to it after a set period in time or gradually over the course of the day.
Pro Rarely seen organization options
In addition to allowing you to sort articles by when you saved them, you can also order articles by length or read progress and popularity.
Pro Free archiving of deleted webpages
In Pocket, this is a paid function - but Instapaper provides this for free! If a webpage is deleted, it remains in your Instapaper and they even archive pictures of the articles.
Pro Can playback inline video
Instapaper will play videos from YouTube, Vimeo and other sources that are embedded in articles, but you have to be online for playback to work.
Pro Has a font designed for readers with Dyslexia
Instapaper includes Dyslexie a font that helps people with reading problems understand the text better.
Pro Includes optional social features
If you set your Instapaper profile to be public, your friends will be able to see articles you've liked.
Cons
Con Paid service
Costs $11/year. Many features are available elsewhere for free.
Con Unresponsive support
Don't expect a response from their support email. Developer is very active on twitter, perhaps a tweet might work better.
Con Can't provide service paid for
I paid for an archival account for 5 years; as my subscription was about to end, there was no way to download my archive. The download button accomplished nothing, emails went unanswered, my post to the pinboard google support group was not approved, dm on twitter was unanswered. A public comment on twitter got me a reply that he'd "look into it", then nothing. $100+ down the drain! Save your money and look elsewhere.
Con Became a paid service again
Most functions, like search, became premium.
Con Basic search not free
Basic search for link title or website too is part of the premium.
Con Embedded images and videos are sometimes ignored
Instapaper sometimes saves articles without images or videos.
Con Only supports English
It only supports English, and not Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages.
Con Tags not implemented
Con Search functions return random articles
The search function is very slow and does not provide accurate results. The user can not filter or reorder the search results, or search the archive or annotated articles.
