Burkmak vs Burn 451

Burkmak is a free, MIT-licensed, self-hosted read-it-later application for saving links, reading articles, highlighting passages, syncing with Kobo, and exporting notes to Obsidian. Its reader extracts articles into a clean view with highlights and notes, while tags, read states, favorites, and search organize per-user libraries. Links can be captured through the web app, Android share sheet, or desktop browser bookmarklet. Kobo support provides an OPDS catalog for EPUB and KEPUB downloads plus native store-protocol synchronization that writes reading state back. An Obsidian plugin transfers article notes, highlights, and metadata through Burkmak’s export API. Docker Compose deployment includes backend and web containers, a data volume, and amd64 and arm64 images; the volume stores the SQLite database, cached articles, images, and EPUBs. Product requirements state that server-fetched content remains on the self-hosted instance and no third-party analytics are used. Native Kobo synchronization requires HTTPS, physical-device support remains pending, and the architecture targets one instance rather than horizontal scaling or high availability.

Burn 451 is a read-later app that puts saved links on a schedule and turns retained items into a searchable knowledge base. A link begins in Flame for 24 hours; opening it moves it to Spark for 30 days, and users can move it to Vault for permanent retention. The free tier permits five Flame saves per day, 30 Spark items, 100 Vault items and 30 MCP requests per day. Pro costs $4.99 a month and removes limits on Spark items, Vault items and MCP requests. Pro also includes AI summaries and decision cards, voice notes, YouTube transcripts, automatic Vault tagging, full-text search and Markdown export. A 26-tool MCP server can search saved content and manage the queue in Claude, Cursor and Windsurf; the service also offers a REST API. Users can save links through the web app, Chrome extension, iOS share sheet or Safari extension for Mac. The maker describes Burn 451 as a personal tool for triaging unread links rather than maintaining an enduring bookmark archive. The Web Clipper requires a free account to sync saves across devices.