Best Readwise Alternatives for 2026: Free and Paid Options

The best Readwise alternative depends on what you want to keep. Screvi is the closest replacement for reading highlights, Glasp is the best free option, and Daily Brain Bits is the pick for remembering your own Notion or Obsidian notes.

Quick picks:

• Closest Readwise replacement: Screvi, $59.99/year after a 14-day trial.
• Best free highlight tool: Glasp, free for unlimited public highlights.
• Best for your own Notion or Obsidian notes: Daily Brain Bits, free for up to 500 notes.
• Best for memorizing facts: Anki, free on desktop and Android.
• Best open-source Readwise Reader alternative: Wallabag, which you can self-host.
• Best for AI-made flashcards: Recall.

Why knowledge workers are looking for alternatives to Readwise

The limitations of passive highlighting and the cost factor

Readwise pulls highlights from more than thirty platforms, including Kindle, Instapaper, Pocket, iBooks, and even physical books via OCR. It resurfaces those snippets by email to help you revisit useful passages. This core feature prevents valuable passages from slipping away.

However, this workflow remains fundamentally passive. It excels at resurfacing other people’s words, but not your responses to them. Users often accumulate large stores of saved highlights that rarely transform into new ideas or maintained notes.

Price also factors in. Users praise Readwise’s support and newsletters, but Readwise has no free plan after its 30-day trial. Full Readwise costs $9.99/month billed yearly or $12.99/month billed monthly, and the Highlights-only plan costs $7.99/month billed yearly. That adds up for people with subscription fatigue.

The difference between retaining consumption and developing original thought

Readwise helps people retain what they have read by preserving quotes or statistics so they don’t fade from memory. This support is valuable for professionals, academics, and creators who rely on other people’s ideas.

Building a personal knowledge system is a different challenge. Highlighted passages form just the first layer. For users who synthesize, remix, and build the missing piece is tools that surface and connect what they have created. Readwise reminds you what an author said but doesn’t show your syntheses, meeting notes, or links between ideas.

Understanding the need for personal knowledge reinforcement over simple flashcards

There is a gap between recalling fragments and developing deeper understanding. Bite-sized highlights support recall, but they rarely encourage synthesis or original insight. Highlight-driven workflows fragment context and remove the narrative, nuance, and connections that give ideas traction.

As this gap results in lost ideas and stagnant archives, alternatives arise. These tools shift the goal from “How do I never forget what I’ve read?” to “How do I develop, connect, and expand what I’ve created?” Tools like Daily Brain Bits help move users beyond passive retention into active reinforcement and synthesis. They assist Notion and Obsidian users in transforming static archives into living systems that reflect their own voice, not just the books they have read.

The three categories of spaced repetition tools

Spaced repetition tools fall into three categories:

1. Apps like Anki emphasize deliberate memorization of static facts through flashcards, excelling in retention but struggling with evolving ideas.
2. Tools like Readwise focus on resurfacing highlights from reading materials without user effort, aiding recall of others' content but ignoring personal notes.
3. Solutions, such as Daily Brain Bits, reinforce your own ideas from Notion or Obsidian vaults by scheduling reviews of full notes, fostering evolution and synthesis for knowledge workers building a "second brain."

1. Daily Brain Bits: the best alternative to Readwise for Notion and Obsidian users

Daily Brain Bits is a spaced repetition app for Notion and Obsidian that keeps your personal knowledge base alive. It automatically resurfaces your own notes, without forcing you to create flashcards or manually tag anything.

Solving the knowledge worker's paradox by resurfacing created content

Notes pile up, but their value often does not. While Readwise excels at surfacing highlights from books and articles, it does not bring back your own ideas—such as research notes, meeting sketches, or draft fragments.

Daily Brain Bits fills this gap by periodically resurfacing personal notes, keeping your own material visible instead of fading into obscurity.

Regular emails that keep your knowledge alive

Daily Brain Bits sends you carefully timed emails that resurface your notes when your brain needs them most. Rather than relying on fragmented highlights or isolated flashcards, you receive complete notes with full context.

AI quizzes and note prioritization

Instead of requiring you to build flashcards, DBB automatically prioritizes notes and adds AI-generated multiple-choice quizzes that hide key concepts for quick recall.

It prioritizes notes based on your archive. Everything is ready to use immediately, without deck-building, tagging, or manual setup.

Connecting directly to your knowledge base

DBB integrates with Notion and Obsidian (for now 🙃) to pull content directly from your personal archive. Rather than letting your database sit idle, DBB schedules notes into an active review loop so they get reshaped, connected, and reused over time.

Pricing and customization

DBB has a free plan for up to 500 notes from one source, with five notes per email. The $10/month Pro plan adds AI-generated quizzes, unlimited sources, and custom delivery schedules. Compared to Readwise’s $9.99/month billed yearly, DBB targets knowledge creators who prioritize maintaining and developing their own ideas instead of just revisiting authors’ highlights.

Best for / use cases

Daily Brain Bits suits knowledge workers, researchers, and writers who keep notes in Notion or Obsidian and want those notes to stay useful. It helps reinforce, reconnect, and evolve personal work instead of simply archiving it. For Notion and Obsidian users, DBB shifts the focus from remembering what you consumed to actively reworking what you created.

Anki and Mochi: the best alternatives to Readwise for deep memorization

2. Anki

Key features and spaced repetition mechanics

Anki (opens in a new tab) is a free, open-source tool that uses a rigorous spaced repetition algorithm, including the Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler (FSRS). It adjusts review timing based on your recall history.

Its core strengths include:

• Precise scheduling: items you remember appear less often, while forgotten items reappear sooner.
• Support for images, audio, video, and LaTeX.
• Ability to handle very large decks.
• A wide plugin ecosystem for stats, gamification, and customization.

These features create highly efficient, durable retention of atomic facts.

Manual card creation vs. automated note resurfacing

Anki requires you to create every flashcard individually. This gives you tight control, which is important for subjects like medical training or language study. However, you must convert notes and ideas into separate question and answer pairs.

Anki does not resurface whole notes or keep context. It focuses on bite-sized recall, not revisiting long-form thinking or evolving arguments.

Pricing and accessibility

• Desktop and Android versions are free.
• The official iOS app is a one-time $24.99 purchase.
• Syncing via AnkiWeb is free.

This one-time cost model makes Anki widely accessible.

Reviews and learning curve

Users value Anki for its retention power and customizability. The common issues are a steep initial learning curve, a dated interface, and the risk of a backlog if you skip reviews.

Best for and use cases

Anki works best when you need reliable recall of concrete facts. This includes medical exams, dense vocabulary, formulas, and historical dates. It suits deliberate practice rather than managing or evolving a personal knowledge base.

3. Mochi Cards

Key features and modern workflow

Mochi (opens in a new tab) keeps the spaced repetition basics but modernizes the experience. Its highlights include:

• A clean, keyboard-friendly interface with native Markdown support.
• Image occlusion for diagrams, drawing canvas, and bidirectional linking.
• AI-assisted card generation through the Pro plan’s AI services.
• Simple interval logic: remembered cards have longer intervals; forgotten cards shorten intervals.

Mochi makes card creation and navigation faster and more enjoyable than traditional flashcard tools.

Manual card creation vs. automated note resurfacing

Like Anki, Mochi expects you to create individual cards. The UI speeds up converting notes into cloze deletions, but you still break knowledge into smaller pieces.

Backlinks promote a networked note structure, but Mochi does not automatically bring back full notes for deeper synthesis.

Pricing and accessibility

• The free plan includes unlimited cards and decks, with unlimited offline use on Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.
• Pro costs $5/month billed annually and adds sync across devices, deck publishing, and AI services.

Users who prefer offline-first setups benefit, though syncing between devices requires a subscription.

Reviews and user experience

Users like Mochi’s modern interface and lower friction compared to older flashcard apps. Criticisms include:

• No sync on the free plan.
• The manual effort needed for cloze creation at scale.
• Limited features for rescheduling busy decks or collaboration, especially for heavy users.

Best for and use cases

Mochi suits language learners, diagram-heavy subjects, and knowledge workers who want linked notes plus spaced review. It fits those who prefer Markdown workflows and offline-first tools. However, it’s less suitable for learners who rely on large shared decks or want fully automated resurfacing of original notes.

4. Screvi

Screvi (opens in a new tab) replaces long lists and static databases with a feed that looks and feels like a social app. Highlights appear as story-like cards you scroll through, making revisiting your notes more inviting and easier to turn into a habit.

Moving from one insight to the next becomes a quick, low-friction process, more like browsing than a chore-driven review. This design encourages serendipitous rediscovery naturally.

Using AI semantic search to organize highlights without complex tagging

Organizing a large collection of highlights is tedious. Screvi’s semantic search removes the need for precise phrases or heavy tagging. You simply search for a concept, and the AI surfaces related notes from your entire library.

This approach saves time and helps you focus on connecting ideas instead of maintaining rigid systems like PARA. For example, if you vaguely recall something about “motivation,” Screvi will bring up relevant passages regardless of the exact wording.

Integrating multiple sources like YouTube, podcasts, and physical books

Screvi consolidates highlights from various sources:

• Kindle and Kobo
• Twitter
• YouTube transcripts
• Podcasts
• Web articles
• Scanned pages from physical books

This makes it easier to link what you read with what you heard or watched. A Chrome extension and background Kindle sync reduce capture friction. Additionally, a built-in reader supports offline access and spaced-review workflows for articles and newsletters.

Pricing and platforms

Screvi costs $6.99/month or $59.99/year after a 14-day free trial with no credit card, and a one-time lifetime purchase is also available. It runs on iOS, Android, the web, a browser extension, and macOS. Daily review, widgets, and streaks are included, and highlights sync to Notion and Obsidian.

Screvi targets people whose knowledge mainly comes from consumed content. It offers a visually engaging, intuitive way to collect and revisit highlights across formats. If you want a lively, low-friction alternative to Readwise’s list-based approach, but don’t need resurfacing of your own original notes, Screvi is a strong fit.

The friction of manual flashcards and the path forward

Anki and Mochi excel when deep, precise memorization is the goal. Their main drawback is the manual effort needed to create and maintain cards. This leaves long-form notes, evolving ideas, and whole-paragraph thinking outside the repetition algorithm.

If you want to do more than memorize facts—like keep your ideas active, connected, and reusable—you will notice this gap quickly. You might need a system that applies spaced repetition to full notes and emerging connections without the manual work that even user-friendly flashcard apps require.

Recall: a streamlined alternative to Readwise for students

5. Recall: AI autofill and multilingual flashcards for accelerated study

Recall (opens in a new tab) combines manual control with automation to create flexible study cards. You can create cards yourself or use AI Autofill to add answers, translations, audio, pronunciations, and images. Its spaced-repetition engine adjusts review timing for each card.

Recall supports multiple languages natively, helping with vocabulary, scripts, and pronunciation. This allows students to edit cards carefully when needed or use AI for fast generation of multimedia flashcards.

Recall suits language learners who require audio and translations, advanced users who want to customize cards before studying, and anyone who benefits from multimedia formats. It focuses on memorization rather than developing long-form notes.

When to choose Recall instead of deep knowledge management

Choose Recall when you want efficient, deadline-driven learning with quick card creation and reliable review schedules. It imports decks from Anki, Quizlet, or a spreadsheet, and exports them with their media and review history.

If your goal is to interlink notes, revisit original writing, or develop personal ideas, knowledge-reinforcement tools like Daily Brain Bits better suit those needs. Recall is a practical, fast solution for students who want to learn facts without managing a growing archive.

Free and open-source alternatives to Readwise

Readwise has no free plan, but you can rebuild most of it for free. Glasp covers highlight capture, while Daily Brain Bits or Anki cover the review side.

6. Glasp: free highlights with Notion sync

Glasp (opens in a new tab) is the most complete free tool for capturing highlights. Its free plan has unlimited public highlights on webpages, PDFs, YouTube videos, and Kindle books, with no trial and no credit card.

Exports to Markdown, HTML, CSV, and JSON stay free, and so does the daily sync to Notion. The catch is that highlights are public by default. Private highlights and heavier AI use require Pro, at $12.50/month billed yearly or $15 monthly.

Free options compared

Tool	What's free	Main limit	Best for
Glasp	Unlimited public highlights on the web, PDFs, YouTube, and Kindle, with Notion sync	Private highlights need Pro	Free highlight capture
Obsidian Kindle Highlights plugin	Syncs Kindle notes and highlights into your vault, open source under MIT	Kindle only, and Amazon can cap the text exported per book	Kindle readers who use Obsidian
Wallabag	Open-source read-it-later app you can self-host, with imports from Pocket, Omnivore, and Instapaper	You run the server, or pay for the hosted wallabag.it	Replacing Readwise Reader
Instapaper	Unlimited saved articles, synced across web, iOS, and Android	5 notes a month, no full-text search or Kindle integration	Simple read-later
Anki	Desktop app, Android app, and AnkiWeb sync	The iOS app is a one-time purchase	Turning key highlights into flashcards
Daily Brain Bits	Up to 500 notes from one Notion or Obsidian source, five notes per email	No AI quizzes on the free plan	Resurfacing your own notes

Alternatives to Readwise Reader

Readwise Reader is the read-later half of Full Readwise, and it has no permanent free version either. Instapaper is the simplest free replacement for saving and syncing articles. Wallabag is the open-source pick if you want to own your reading archive, since you can host it yourself.

If you also want highlights to come back on a schedule, export them to Notion or Obsidian and let Daily Brain Bits resurface them alongside your own notes. For more read-later apps, see the Omnivore alternatives guide.

Choosing the right alternative to Readwise based on your goals

Choose Anki or Recall for exams, language learning, and mastery of hard facts

When the goal is pure retention—vocabulary, formulas, medical facts—flashcards remain the top choice. Anki offers extensive control with its mature spaced-repetition engine, including FSRS, rich media support, large decks, and a broad add-on ecosystem. It is free on desktop and Android, and costs a one-time $24.99 fee on iOS.

However, setting up and maintaining decks can be time-consuming, and the interface may feel overwhelming initially.

Ideal users include medical students, polyglots, and anyone needing precise, high-volume recall.

If you prefer minimal setup and faster results, consider Recall. It combines manual control with AI autofill for answers, translations, audio, and images, which suits learners who want to edit content before studying, especially with languages.

In short, Anki provides maximum retention and customization, while Recall offers speed and low effort.

Choose Screvi or Readwise to remember what you read

If you want to retain insights from books, articles, podcasts, and essays, reading-highlight managers are the best tools. Readwise collects highlights from Kindle, Instapaper, Pocket, and other sources. Then, it resurfaces these highlights on a schedule to keep key information accessible when needed. It exports to Notion and Obsidian and supports OCR for physical books, making it handy for readers and knowledge workers who extract others’ ideas.

Screvi takes a visual, feed-based approach. Highlights appear as story-like cards you scroll through. Semantic AI search helps find themes without extensive tagging. It pulls data from Kindle, YouTube transcripts, podcasts, and scans of physical pages, turning reading into a more playful and discoverable routine.

Both tools work well for people focused on curated consumption rather than creating original notes. Choose them if you want to regularly revisit and reuse the best parts of what you read or listen to.

Choose Daily Brain Bits to evolve your own notes, thoughts, and knowledge

If you have thousands of notes in Notion or Obsidian that fade from memory, flashcards or highlight managers won’t help. Daily Brain Bits focuses on reinforcing your personal knowledge. It resurfaces whole notes, prioritizes what to review, and encourages remixing and synthesis.

Its key features include:

• Full-context revisits
• Automatic prioritization
• AI-generated quizzes on Pro
• Sync with Notion and Obsidian

This tool is best for researchers, writers, consultants, and anyone building a second brain who wants their notes to stay useful instead of forgotten.

Which path is yours?

• For exam-style mastery and dense factual recall, choose Anki (power and customization) or Recall (speed and ease).
• To remember and reuse others’ ideas, use Readwise or Screvi, or Glasp if you want a free option.
• To keep your own notes active and interconnected, rely on Daily Brain Bits.

Select the tool that matches your main activity—memorizing, consuming, or creating—to save time and get more value from your work.

FAQ about Readwise alternatives

Is there a free alternative to Readwise?

Yes. Glasp is free for unlimited public highlights with Notion sync, and the Obsidian Kindle Highlights plugin syncs Kindle highlights into your vault at no cost. Readwise itself has no free plan after the 30-day trial.

What is the closest alternative to Readwise?

Screvi. It imports highlights from Kindle, Kobo, and Apple Books, adds daily review and streaks, and syncs to Notion and Obsidian. It costs $59.99/year or $6.99/month after a 14-day trial.

Is there an open-source Readwise alternative?

Wallabag is the main open-source option for read-later, and you can host it yourself. For Kindle highlights in Obsidian, the Obsidian Kindle Highlights plugin is open source too.

What's the point of Readwise if you already use Notion or Obsidian?

Readwise resurfaces what you read and exports your highlights to Notion and Obsidian. It does not bring back notes you wrote yourself, which is the gap Daily Brain Bits fills.

Does Readwise use AI?

Yes. Readwise uses AI in Ghostreader, which summarizes, explains, and translates documents, and you can also chat with your whole highlight library.