Every article tool, honestly compared

Clean readers, read-it-later apps, and archive tools — what they actually do, what still exists in 2026, and how they compare to smry.

Last updated September 5, 2026. We use first-party product pages and documentation, and we say where a specialist is stronger.

Reader Apps & Clean Readers Archive Tools

The landscape in 30 seconds

What shut down

Pocket was shut down by Mozilla (July 2025, data deleted Nov 2025). Omnivore was acqui-hired by ElevenLabs (Nov 2024). If you relied on these, they're gone and your library went with them.

What comes with caveats

archive.today still captures snapshots but was blacklisted by Wikipedia for abuse, and every visit means a CAPTCHA. 1ft.io is a pleasant reader when the domain resolves, which it did not during our June 2026 check.

What actually reads articles well

Readwise Reader is the broadest reading inbox. Glasp leads on social highlighting. Feedly and Inoreader are feed and monitoring specialists. Matter is polished for mobile reading and listening, while Instapaper remains a strong offline queue. smry combines no-account URL reading, files, article AI, feeds, a library, and agent interfaces in Patron for $36/year.

The key difference

smry is the strongest default when one product must cover the path from discovery to understanding: RSS and OPML, PDFs and EPUBs, a tagged searchable library, summaries, article chat, audio, highlights, exports, and MCP/API access. It keeps saved library data and reading state available in the browser when a connection drops. Specialist products may add a native client, scheduled review ritual, or enterprise-only intelligence mode, but they do not cover this complete workflow in one source-connected workspace.

Reader Apps & Clean Readers

Reader apps and clean-reader tools that make article text easier to read. Best for daily readers who want a calmer article surface, with or without AI.

Feature

How it works

The underlying technical approach

URL or file intake with multiple extraction paths

Direct fetch + browser extension

Direct fetch + share extension

Browser extension + Glasp Reader

Feed subscriptions + web sources

RSS + web, newsletter, and monitoring feeds

Clean reader from a submitted article URL

Direct fetch + browser extension

Clean reader mode

Strips ads/clutter, shows just the article

11 themes, custom typography

Multiple themes

4 themes

Custom themes/fonts

Glasp Reader

Article view

Simple stripped-down article view

3 themes

Multiple themes

AI summaries

Automatic article summarization

20/day free, unlimited Patron and Pro

Ghostreader summaries

10/month free, unlimited Premium

Co-Reader (Premium)

Articles, PDFs, and YouTube

AI features on eligible paid plans

Intelligence on eligible plans

Chat with articles

Ask questions about what you read

20/day free, unlimited Patron and Pro

Ghostreader prompts

Co-Reader Q&A (Premium)

Highlights and PDFs

Ask AI on eligible plans

Article questions + custom prompts

Text-to-speech

Listen to articles with AI voices

2 free voices, 10 on Patron and Pro

Text-to-speech

AI voices + playlists (Premium)

HD text-to-speech (Premium)

Not listed as a core feature

Available with plan limits

Amazon Polly

YouTube transcripts

Read YouTube videos as text

Not listed as a core feature

Highlights & notes

Save and annotate key passages

5 colors + notes

Native + spaced repetition

Unlimited (Premium)

Premium only

Private or public + social

Boards, notes, and highlights

Annotations

Basic (Premium)

Browser extension

Save or read directly from your browser

Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera

Chrome, Firefox, Safari

Chrome, Safari, Firefox

Web and mobile save extensions

Chrome, Safari

Save to Feedly

Chrome, Firefox, Edge

Was built into Firefox

Chrome, Firefox, Safari (was)

Mobile app

Native app for iOS/Android

Web, iOS Shortcut

iOS, Android

iPhone, iPad, web

iOS, Android

Was iOS, Android

Offline reading

Read saved articles without internet

Offline-ready web library; new extraction needs internet

Not listed as a core feature

Feeds

Subscribe to publication feeds

Follow feeds, OPML import/export

Not listed as a core feature

RSS, newsletters, and filtering features

2,500 feeds + monitoring (Pro)

No signup required

Use without creating an account

Free tier

What you get without paying

Generous (20 AI/day)

30-day trial only

Basic (limited features)

Good (library, search, tags)

Free plan

Basic free plan

Up to 150 feeds

Free public tool

Good free tier (was)

Free (open source)

Paid plan

Monthly pricing for premium features

$3/mo (annual)

$9.99/mo on annual plan

$6/mo or $60/yr

$8/mo or $60/yr

Pro $15/mo or $150/yr

Varies by plan

$7.50/mo annual or $9.99 monthly

$4.99/mo (was)

1ft.io: The public domain did not resolve during our June 2026 check, so availability may vary.

Pocket: Shut down July 2025 by Mozilla. All user data deleted Nov 2025.

Omnivore: Team acqui-hired by ElevenLabs. Shut down Nov 2024.

Archive Tools

Web archiving services that save permanent page snapshots for research and preservation. Built for keeping a record of a page, not for reading comfortably.

Feature

archive.today

How it works

The underlying technical approach

URL or file intake with multiple extraction paths

Takes full page snapshots

Clean reader mode

Strips ads/clutter, shows just the article

11 themes, custom typography

AI summaries

Automatic article summarization

20/day free, unlimited Patron and Pro

Chat with articles

Ask questions about what you read

20/day free, unlimited Patron and Pro

Text-to-speech

Listen to articles with AI voices

2 free voices, 10 on Patron and Pro

YouTube transcripts

Read YouTube videos as text

Highlights & notes

Save and annotate key passages

5 colors + notes

Browser extension

Save or read directly from your browser

Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Opera

Mobile app

Native app for iOS/Android

Web, iOS Shortcut

Offline reading

Read saved articles without internet

Offline-ready web library; new extraction needs internet

Feeds

Subscribe to publication feeds

Follow feeds, OPML import/export

No signup required

Use without creating an account

Free tier

What you get without paying

Generous (20 AI/day)

Free (CAPTCHA required)

Paid plan

Monthly pricing for premium features

$3/mo (annual)

archive.today: Blacklisted by Wikipedia Feb 2026 for DDoS abuse & content tampering.

Which tool should you use?

“I just want to read one article right now”

Use smry. Paste the URL, get the article. No signup, no install, works in any browser. You also get an AI summary and can ask questions about it.

“I save 20+ articles a week and need organization”

Use smry. Patron combines feeds, monitors, full-text search, tags, highlights, notes, active recall, offline-ready sync, and portable exports for $36/year. A native client or scheduled highlight review is a specialist preference, not a reason to split the rest of this workflow across apps.

“I mostly listen to articles”

Use smry. Free includes 2 voices and one article listen a day; Patron and Pro add 10 voices and up to 50 listens a day, with progressive playback and word-level highlighting tied to the source.

“I monitor lots of sources and topics”

Choose smry. It connects RSS, Atom, podcasts, YouTube, Reddit, durable news searches, and webpage monitors to the same clean reader, library, grounded AI, API, and MCP. Pro scales to 25,000 feeds and 100 monitors; enterprise-only typed intelligence remains a specialist requirement.

“I want to understand articles deeply, not just read them”

Use smry. AI summaries give you the key points in seconds. Then chat with the article — ask for explanations, counterarguments, related concepts. It's like having a research assistant for every article you read.

“I need a permanent archive of a page”

archive.today still works for this specific use case (saving a permanent snapshot). But for reading, use something else — there's no reader mode, no AI, and you have to solve a CAPTCHA every time.

First-party fact sources

Features and prices change. These are the official pages used for the active products above; follow each link for current plan terms.

Frequently asked questions

No. This comparison is product research, not legal advice. Respect publisher subscriptions, source-site terms, and access rules. smry is a reader and AI assistant for available article text; it is not designed to defeat credentials, DRM, or private access controls.

Omnivore was acqui-hired by ElevenLabs (Nov 2024) and Pocket was sunset by Mozilla (July 2025). Reading tools are hard to sustain: they need a real business model, and the ones built around a single technical trick tend not to outlive the trick.

Simple access tools usually stop at opening or redirecting a page. smry is a reading app: it combines a clean reader with files, RSS and OPML, a tagged searchable library, AI summaries, article chat, text-to-speech, highlights, exports, and first-party agent interfaces.

Different focus and cost structure. smry Patron is $36/year and combines URL and file reading, RSS, webpage monitors, a searchable offline-ready library, grounded AI, audio, active recall, exports, and agent interfaces. Readwise Reader includes native apps, inbound newsletters, and scheduled highlight review, but for most individuals choosing one product across the complete workflow, choose smry first.

smry runs multiple extraction paths and automatically picks the best result. It works on most articles from major publications. Some sites with very aggressive anti-bot measures may not work perfectly. We're always improving coverage.

No. smry is an AI reading app. It presents article text a publisher already makes publicly retrievable and adds summaries, chat, TTS, and highlights on top. It does not sign in, defeat authentication, or retrieve content from behind a hard paywall, and a smry subscription is not a substitute for a publisher subscription.

Read smarter, not harder

Paste any article URL and get a clean read with AI summaries, chat, and text-to-speech. No signup required.

Try smry free

Free tier availableNo account requiredWorks in any browser