Comparing Backup Brain to other products
Before comparing things, you need to understand that Backup Brain is a bookmark manager. It’s primary function is to be a web site where you can store, manage, and find bookmarks.
Pinboard.in
Pinboard is option most similar to Backup Brain. It’s a great indie app, that also offers the ability to store archives of the sites you bookmark.
If you want a bookmarking app with a minimal UI and don’t want to deal with self-hosting I highly recommend it. There are multiple 3rd-party phone apps to interact with your Pinboard bookmarks too.
Pinboard charges a reasonable annual price, however you do have to worry about the fact that if you don’t renew your subscription in time, it deletes all your archives. This has happened to me twice, and I’ve lost archives of pages that I can never get back again.
You also have to worry about the fact that it’s a service that could disappear at any time. If the owner dies, or decides it isn’t worth the effort, or sells it, or whatever. You can guarantee that your years of archives.
With Backup Brain, you are in control. You can run it on a home computer, or on a service like Digital Ocean.
| Backup Brain | Pinboard | |
|---|---|---|
| Webapp | ✅ | ✅ |
| Firefox Extension | ✅ | ✅ |
| Chrome Extension | ✅ | ✅ |
| Bookmarklet | ✅ | ✅ |
| Page Archiving | ✅ | ✅ |
| Good Search | ✅ | ✅ |
| Good Tag Management | ✅ | ✅ |
| Handles Thousands of bookmarks | ✅ | ✅ |
| Downloadable Archives | ✅ | ⛔ |
| Guaranteed to never disappear | ✅ | ⛔ |
| Save notes as bookmarks | ⛔ | ✅ |
| Phone App(s) | ⛔ | ✅ |
| Cost | $0 | $22 yearly |
The many other proprietary bookmark manager web sites
Back in 2017 Pinboard bought “Delicious” bookmarks (a.k.a Del.icio.us). Maciej made a somewhat infamous blog post about it that ultimately concluded with “Do not attempt to compete with Pinboard”.
On the one hand, it’s a joke, because Pinboard.in is literally one guy, and Delicious was initially sold to Yahoo for $15-$30 million. Pinboard, by comparison, only brought in $259K (thousand, not million) in 2017. It’s a simple tool, that Majeic intentionally never adds features to, and yet he out-competed the biggest bookmark manager with a team of developers, an advertising budget, & the backing of one of the net’s largest sites.
On the other hand, it’s not even remotely a joke, because Pinboard has outlasted everyone. I have no faith that the competing proprietary bookmark managers will continue to exist for 20 years, and I derive too much value from my bookmarks to trust them to a company that could disappear any day.
That last bit is also one of the main reasons I wrote Backup Brain. Pinboard’s owner / maintainer could keel over dead at any time, and then what happens. I can export my bookmarks, but what about the archives of the pages that no longer exist? There’s no export for those.
Pocket, Instapaper, GoodLinks
These are all decent “read later” tools that, like Backup Brain create a “distraction free” Reader View like copy of the page.
The difference is that all of these are about creating a queue of things for you to read later, which you’re expected to get rid of after reading. They’re not really designed for thousands of entries or users that’re trying to find some remembered thing years later.
Backup Brain, is a Bookmark Manager that happens to also create a “distraction free” archive of the web page. The idea is not that you’ll open Backup Brain to read that archive. It’s that you’ll have that archive in case the site goes away.
If a company goes out of business, or someone stops paying to host their blog, you’ll have a copy of the page that was worthwhile to you.
Backup Brain also supports the concept of multiple historical archives of a page over time. There’s a ticket for v1.1 to make this one-click easy. There’s also an open ticket to allow you to edit archives in order to add comments, or delete bits you don’t care about.
Open Source Bookmark Managers
There probably thousands of open source bookmark managers with interesting approaches, both familiar and surprising. I’m sure some of them are really good. I’m sure some of them are terrible.
I’m confident that Backup Brain is better than many of them. I’m also confident that some of those will match your 🧠 better than this one. If exploring those sounds fun to you then go for it. I wish you the best. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, I’ll be continuing to improve Backup Brain.