ArchiveBox

What is ArchiveBox?

ArchiveBox is an open source, self-hosted web archiving tool — a personal Wayback Machine. You feed it URLs from bookmarks, browser history, RSS feeds, or read-it-later exports, and it saves each page in several formats at once: rendered HTML, a PDF, a full-page PNG screenshot, a WARC file, article text, and any media it finds.

What is ArchiveBox best for?

People who want to permanently preserve web pages before they change or disappear — researchers, journalists, and digital-preservation hobbyists — plus anyone leaving a read-it-later service who wants a durable archive instead of a hosted account. It shines when you want fidelity and data ownership, not just a tidy list of links.

What can ArchiveBox do?

• Save each URL in multiple formats: HTML, PDF, PNG screenshot, WARC, JSON, article text, and downloaded media (via yt-dlp)
• Import from browser bookmarks and history, RSS feeds, Pocket, Pinboard, Instapaper, and plain URL lists
• Run scheduled, automated imports so new bookmarks or feed items archive themselves
• Access archives through a CLI, a web UI, a REST API, webhooks, and a browser extension
• Store every snapshot as an ordinary folder with SQLite metadata — browsable even with the app turned off
• Optionally push copies to Archive.org for off-site redundancy

Where does ArchiveBox fall short?

• It’s an archiver, not an organizer. Compared to Raindrop.io or a dedicated bookmark manager, its collections, tagging, and highlighting are thin — the point is preservation, not curation.
• It pulls in a heavy stack of external capture tools (Chromium, wget, yt-dlp, Node.js, singlefile). Docker bundles them, but bare-metal installs mean managing several system dependencies yourself.
• It has no built-in change detection or alerting — it snapshots what you give it, but won’t watch a page and tell you when it changes.
• Parts of the interface are still maturing: the Python API is beta and the REST API is alpha.

Is ArchiveBox free?

Yes — ArchiveBox is completely free and open source under the MIT license, with no paid tier or feature gating. You only pay for the server or NAS you run it on and the disk space your archives consume. Some third-party providers offer managed ArchiveBox hosting for a monthly fee, but that’s a convenience, not a requirement.

What does ArchiveBox replace?

ArchiveBox is a self-hosted alternative to Pocket and Instapaper, and overlaps with Raindrop.io for people who mainly want to archive full pages. Where those services store a link and a stripped-down reader copy on their servers, ArchiveBox keeps a complete, multi-format snapshot on infrastructure you control — so your library survives even if a company shuts down, as Pocket did in 2025. It’s closer to running your own Internet Archive than to a cloud read-it-later app; if you want tag-and-highlight curation on top, pair it with a bookmark manager like Karakeep.

FAQ

Is ArchiveBox open source? Yes. ArchiveBox is released under the MIT license — one of the most permissive open source licenses — with the full source on GitHub and no paid edition.

Can I self-host ArchiveBox for free? Yes. Self-hosting is the intended way to run it and costs nothing beyond your own hardware or VPS. Docker Compose is the recommended setup and bundles the capture dependencies for you.

Is ArchiveBox a good Pocket alternative? For preservation, yes — it saves a far more complete copy than Pocket ever did and you own the data. If you mainly want a clean mobile reading experience with sync across devices, a hosted read-it-later app is simpler.

What do I need to run ArchiveBox? A Linux, macOS, or Docker host with disk space for your archives. It’s built on Python 3.13+, Django, and SQLite, and relies on Chromium, wget, and yt-dlp for capture — all bundled in the Docker image. Native Windows needs WSL or Docker.