Omnivore Alternatives: Where to Go After the Shutdown

Why people are searching for an Omnivore alternative

Omnivore was the rare read later app that combined article saving, highlights, notes, PDFs, RSS, newsletter intake, full text search, mobile apps, and a browser extension into one open source project. In late 2024 the team joined ElevenLabs and wound the service down, with a window to export personal data in Markdown before sync stopped.

That left a lot of people in the same spot. Their saved articles, newsletters, X posts, documentation pages, tool pages, and PDFs were sitting in an app that no longer existed, and the obvious next question was where to put them now.

There is no single tool that replicates every part of Omnivore. The honest framing is that you pick the axis that mattered most to you. Reading experience. Bookmark style organization. Highlights as a knowledge layer. Self hosting. Or being reminded of what you saved so it does not sit untouched.

This guide walks through the realistic candidates and where each one fits. Osarai is one of them, and we will be clear about what it does and does not replace.

What Omnivore actually did for you

Before picking a replacement, it helps to name what you used Omnivore for. People tended to fall into a few overlapping camps.

• Saving long form articles to read later in a clean reader
• Highlighting passages and keeping notes against them
• Pulling in newsletters and RSS so reading lived in one place
• Saving PDFs alongside web content
• Running the whole thing on their own server because it was open source
• Coming back to old saves and actually finding them again

Most alternatives are strong on two or three of these and weaker on the rest. Mapping your own list to that is the fastest way to choose.

Readwise Reader

Readwise Reader is the closest commercial match to the full Omnivore feature surface. It handles articles, PDFs, EPUBs, email newsletters, RSS, YouTube transcripts, and Twitter threads in one inbox, and highlights flow into the wider Readwise system for spaced review and export to tools like Notion or Obsidian.

It is paid. The current pricing is $9.99 per month billed annually or $12.99 month to month, with a 30 day free trial.

Reader fits people who treated Omnivore as a serious reading and highlighting hub and want that experience without running infrastructure. If you mostly liked Omnivore because it was free and open source, this is the opposite trade off, and that is worth being upfront about.

Raindrop.io

Raindrop.io approaches the same problem from the bookmark side rather than the reader side. The free plan covers unlimited bookmarks, unlimited collections, unlimited highlights, and unlimited devices, with apps across the major platforms and browsers.

The Pro plan adds full text search, web archive, reminders, annotations, a duplicate and broken links finder, daily backups, and AI features. Pricing is billed monthly or yearly through Paddle, with a yearly discount.

Raindrop is a good fit if your Omnivore usage looked more like a structured library of links across collections than a daily reading queue. The reading view is fine, but it is not the centerpiece. If you saved a mix of articles, documentation pages, and tool pages and wanted them all neatly tagged, this is comfortable territory.

Instapaper

Instapaper is the long running read later service that predates most of this category. The free tier covers unlimited saves, syncing, folders, and the core reader. Premium is $5.99 per month or $59.99 per year and unlocks full text search, a PDF reader, a permanent archive, unlimited notes, Kindle integration, text to speech, and an ad free site.

If you used Omnivore mostly as a clean place to read long articles on phone and tablet, with the occasional highlight, Instapaper covers that quietly and has been doing so for years. It does not try to be an RSS reader, a newsletter inbox, and a knowledge tool at once. That focus is a feature for some readers and a limitation for others.

Readeck

Readeck is one of the natural homes for the part of the Omnivore crowd that cared about open source and self hosting. It is released under AGPL v3 and runs from a Docker container, a binary, or source. The core covers article saving, highlights, full text search, labels, collections as saved searches, and EPUB export so saved articles can move to an ereader.

It does not chase newsletter ingestion or AI features. It tries to be a focused, private, self contained reading archive. If you valued Omnivore for being something you fully controlled and you are comfortable maintaining a small service, Readeck is worth a serious look.

Wallabag

Wallabag is the other established open source option. It is self hostable under a free software license, with apps and integrations across Android, iOS, the major browsers, Kobo, Kindle, and PocketBook. It also imports from Pocket, Readability, Instapaper, and Pinboard, which makes it easy to consolidate older saves.

If you do not want to run the server yourself there is wallabag.it, a hosted instance from the project at around 11 euros per year with a 14 day trial. That keeps the open source feel without the ops work, which is a fair middle ground for ex Omnivore users who liked the philosophy more than the sysadmin time.

Osarai

Osarai is the option to consider if the thing that broke for you when Omnivore shut down was not the reader or the highlights, but the habit of saving something and then actually coming back to it.

Osarai is a bookmark manager built around the idea that read later and regular bookmarks should live in one place. You save web articles, X posts, documentation pages, tool pages, and PDFs into the same library. You can read saved articles in a clean, ad free view, or jump to the original when that fits better. Search runs across title, description, your notes, and the article body.

The piece that is different from the other tools on this list is the daily review. Each day Osarai surfaces a small set of things you have saved before, so the X post you bookmarked because a new AI feature looked interesting, or the long newsletter you meant to sit down with, comes back into view instead of sinking. That is the use case Osarai was originally built around, and it is the reason to consider it next to a read later app rather than instead of one.

A free plan covers the core experience so you can test the fit before committing.

To be honest about the edges. Osarai is not an open source or self hosted product, so it does not replace that side of Omnivore. It is not trying to be an RSS reader or a newsletter inbox. There is no path to recover your old Omnivore data through Osarai, although you can re save what matters from your Markdown export. And the focus is on saving, reading, finding, and being reminded, not on AI driven summarization or study style learning.

How to choose

A short way to read the list above.

• You want the closest single replacement for the full Omnivore feature set and are fine paying for it: Readwise Reader.
• You think of your saves more as a tagged library than a reading queue: Raindrop.io.
• You want a calm, focused read later app with a free tier and a modest premium: Instapaper.
• You want to keep the open source and self hosted spirit, with strong reading and highlights: Readeck.
• You want open source with a hosted option and broad device support: Wallabag.
• You keep saving things and losing track of them, and you want a bookmark manager that brings them back: Osarai.

Most ex Omnivore users end up using two tools rather than one. A reader for long sessions, and a saver that makes sure the rest does not disappear. If you saved your Markdown export before the service went offline, that archive is the starting point for whichever pair you pick.