Second ReadWhat are the alternatives to Readwise?
15 September 2026
Readwise defined this category and is still the most complete product in it. Most people looking for an alternative want one of three specific things it does not give them: a lower price, capture from things that are not books, or less friction in the revisiting.
The main alternatives are Second Read, Matter, Instapaper, Obsidian with a community plugin, and Apple Books or Kindle used on their own. They are not equivalent, and they divide fairly cleanly by what they are actually for.
For reading articles later with highlights as a side effect, Matter and Instapaper are the direct comparison. For keeping highlights alongside your own notes in a file format you own, Obsidian with the Readwise Official or Kindle Highlights plugin is the route. For getting saved passages back in front of you with no app to open, Second Read is the one built around that single problem.
If what you want is sync from thirty sources into a hundred other tools, nothing matches Readwise and it is worth its price.
Is there a free alternative to Readwise?
Yes, several. Second Read is free and captures from anything on your screen. Obsidian is free and, with a community plugin, will parse a My Clippings.txt file from a Kindle at no cost. Instapaper's free tier includes highlights with a monthly limit.
The honest caveat on all free tools in this category is that the expensive part is not the software, it is the integrations. Readwise pays to maintain connections to dozens of services that change their formats without warning. A free tool generally does one source well rather than thirty adequately.
For Kindle specifically, the free routes are genuinely good: the clippings file costs nothing, and an extension reading your own notebook page costs nothing.
What does Readwise not do?
Readwise does not capture text that is not already text. Anything you can only see as pixels, which includes book scans, slide decks, Kindle Cloud Reader, video frames, and screenshots a friend sent you, cannot be highlighted and therefore cannot be saved.
It also does not put anything in front of you unless you go and get it. The daily review is excellent and it lives behind a link you have to decide to click, or an email you have to decide to open.
Neither is a flaw in Readwise. They are the edges of what it set out to do. They are, though, exactly the two gaps that make people go looking.
How is Second Read different from Readwise?
Second Read captures from the screen rather than from sources, and resurfaces on the new tab rather than in a review session. Those two choices are the whole difference.
Capturing from the screen means it works on anything visible, selectable or not, because it reads the pixels with on-device OCR. That covers the cases nothing else reaches, and it means there is no integration to break when a service changes its page layout.
Resurfacing on the new tab means you read old passages without deciding to. There is no daily review to skip, because there is no daily review. It also does less: no public library, no dozens of integrations, no highlight sync back out to other apps beyond Markdown and JSON export.
Can you move your highlights out of Readwise?
Yes. Readwise has a full export in CSV and Markdown, reachable from your account's export page, and it includes the text, the source title and author, and the date for every highlight. This is to its credit and not every tool in the category does it.
The CSV is the file to take. It carries the original highlight dates, which means anything you import it into can keep the chronology of your reading rather than treating everything as saved today.
Second Read reads that export directly. The same file, unmodified, and re-importing it later adds nothing, because a passage is identified by its text and its source rather than by a row number.