The “Read It Later” Standoff — Comparing features in todays reading apps
It’s that time of year again — everyone is making new year’s resolutions they won’t keep… So in the theme of a new beginning, let’s try to at least declutter our smartphone home-screens and think about which “read it later” apps we’ll use to “read more”. So let’s get right to it!
Last updated March 16. 2019
Table of Contents
TL;DR
Instapaper — The clean minimalist hipster
Choose Instapaper, if your focus is reading or speed-reading and you enjoy a clean interface with a polished hierarchy!
Pocket — The loud playful modernist
Go with Pocket, if you enjoy a playful design and like to listen to articles with their unrivalled text-to-speech feature!
Pricing
Both Instapaper and Pocket offer a free and a premium version of their services:
- Instapaper Monthly — $2.99
- Instapaper Yearly — $29.99 (15% off)
- Pocket Monthly — $4.99
- Pocket Yearly — $44.99 (25% off)
Equivalent Features
Both services offer the following more evident features:
- Save unlimited articles, videos, and other pages for reading later
- Sync across web, iOS, and Android
- Bookmarklets to quickly add links
- Explore/Browse to discover new content and follow friends
- Like/Favorite to mark special content
- Archiving articles to remove them from the main list
- Highlights to mark pieces of text (limited amount in free version)
Design
Instapaper gives more of a newspaper-feel and looks very lean, polished, and clean. Pocket on the other hand feels quite bold and colorful using rather playful icons. Nevertheless, design is very subjective so please compare the following screenshots for yourself.
Advantages
Instapaper
- Price
At $2.99 monthly Instapaper costs nearly half as much as Pocket - Speed-Reading
Instapaper comes with a feature that offers a Spritz like experience for speed-reading - Notes
In addition to highlighting, Instapaper users can add Notes to any sections of text (limited amount in free version)
- Extensible Reader
Instapaper offers more fonts and reading options for free (e.g. line-height, page width). Although Pocket has added more fonts and options in their premium version as well
- Tagging
Articles Pocket allows multiple tags per article (instead of Instapapers’ option of categorizing articles in folders) - Desktop App
Even though it is a bit outdated, Pocket users can download the native desktop app and even use macOS continuity features - Text-to-Speech
Pocket offers one of the best and most natural text-to-speech services out there, which is can also be used in a playlist-style audio playback that continues to the next unread article once finished (Pocket uses Amazon Polly, which sounds amazing)
- Instant Tagging
Pocket allows users to instantly tag articles when adding via bookmarklet or mobile extensions
Problems
Instapaper
- Instapaper offers text-to-speech, but it sounds very basic and unnatural (Instapaper uses the device built-in speech APIs, e.g. Siri on iOS)
- Using folders instead of tags, it is not possible to tag something with multiple tags
- Instapapers’ Browse feature to discover new articles looks very dull and monotonous because it does not show thumbnails for articles
- Pocket is pretty expensive if you don’t use it a lot or are looking for a simple bookmark solution
- Most of Pocket’s reading options are only available in the premium version
- Pocket does not offer speed-reading
- Highlighting is sometimes slow and delayed (often makes it look like the highlighting didn’t work, even when it did)
UPDATE: Add notes on text-to-speech APIs, after contacting both companies
Thanks for reading — feel free to comment!
What did you love, what did you hate?
I’m the creator of Grasp and not affiliated with Instapaper nor Pocket. I have not been paid to write anything covered in this article. I chose to write this comparison when I myself was deciding which product to use…
