wallabag
The open-source, self-hosted read-it-later app: Pocket's workflow, but the articles live in your own database.
About
wallabag is the most mature self-hosted read-it-later app, running since 2013 when Nicolas Loeuillet started it as the French project Poche. Click the browser button to save a page; wallabag fetches it, strips ads and trackers, and stores a clean reader-mode version in your own database. Read on the web, on iOS, and on Android, with tags, full-text search across saved content, annotations and highlights, and export to EPUB, PDF, MOBI, and JSON so your library is never locked in.
It is MIT-licensed and free, with no paid tier and no telemetry. Deployment is a PHP/Symfony app via the official Docker image, with MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite under it and about 256MB of RAM needed. A hosted option exists at wallabag.it for people who do not want to run a server. The trade-offs are honest: the stack is older than the newer Go and TypeScript alternatives, and the iOS app is no longer the official one. It imports cleanly from Pocket, Instapaper, and Pinboard, which made it a natural landing spot after Pocket shut down in 2025. No independent benchmarks are published.
What it can do
- Reader-mode article extraction with ads and trackers stripped
- Full-text search across saved content, titles, and URLs
- Tags, annotations, and highlights with export
- Export articles to EPUB, PDF, MOBI, and JSON
- REST API for integrations and third-party clients
- RSS feed of your reading list; RSS import
- Imports from Pocket, Instapaper, and Pinboard
- Native iOS and Android companion apps
- Browser extensions for the major browsers
- MIT-licensed, no paid tier, no telemetry
Setup
Run the wallabag/wallabag Docker image against MySQL, PostgreSQL, or SQLite, or sign up at wallabag.it for hosted.
Prerequisites
Docker and a database for self-hosting (~256MB RAM). Browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Vivaldi.
Use cases
Works with
Trust score — 8/10
Scored 8/10 (verified tier, metrics-v1). Evidence: GitHub API confirms 13,013 stars under MIT with a commit pushed 2026-10-13; release 2.6.14 shipped October 2025; third-party comparisons confirm the Docker install, full-text search, EPUB/PDF/MOBI export, and Pocket/Instapaper import. Strengths: the most mature self-hosted read-later, genuinely free with no tier, real export story, still actively maintained. Docked for: (1) the PHP/Symfony stack is dated next to newer Go/TS alternatives; (2) the iOS app is no longer the official one; (3) no independent benchmarks. License: MIT.
★ 13,013 GitHub stars
How the trust score is built
Full methodology →- Adoption · stars/downloads, log-scaled vs peers
- 8.0/10
- Maintenance · recency, releases, issue load
- 8.0/10
- Openness · license + docs
- 10.0/10
- Manual review · sanity read + red-flag check
- 8.0/10
- · 13,013 GitHub stars; commit 2026-10-13
- · MIT-licensed, no paid tier, no telemetry
- · iOS app no longer official; dated stack
Sources
Every fact above was checked against these sources. Where a claim comes from the provider and couldn't be independently verified, the text says so.