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Add to SafariWhen comparing Pinboard vs Buku, the Slant community recommends Buku for most people. In the question“What are the best ways to organize bookmarks?” Buku is ranked 1st while Pinboard is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose Buku is:
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.
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 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 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 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
