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Add to SafariWhen comparing start.me vs Instapaper, the Slant community recommends Instapaper for most people. In the question“What are the best ways to organize bookmarks?” Instapaper is ranked 12th while start.me is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose Instapaper is:
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.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Great to have bookmarks, feeds and notes in one place
Start.me offers a great tool to stay organized and productive because it allows all bookmarks, news feeds and notes to be available in one place.
Pro Beautiful & Customizable Interface
It has a very nice and customizable interface + you can get your bookmarks online anyware.
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 No longer able to meet security standards for Google Sign-In
Start.me used to have an e-mail widget which gave you quick access to your Gmail account(s) along with all your other bookmarks, but it requires a security assessment so that Google can ensure that they do not misuse user data obtained using restricted scopes per the Google API policy. As of 2020, they no longer meet that standard and the e-mail widget has been removed altogether.
Con Should sell itself as a start page because they are not just a bookmark service
Be careful if you Curate Bookmarks or even just have a bunch. You can upload and export bookmarks now, the upload limit is raised. Still, you need an internet connection.
Con Development could be faster
There's a lot to like about this product, but you need patience to see new widgets.
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.
