Burkmak vs Matter

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.

Matter is a read-later app for collecting articles, threads, PDFs, YouTube videos and podcast episodes. It is available on iPhone, iPad and the web, and can save content through mobile and web extensions. The free plan includes an unlimited read-later library, unlimited tags and full-text search; offline reading is available by default. Newsletters can be connected through Gmail or a unique Matter email address.

Matter turns YouTube and podcast episodes into text synchronized with playback. Readers can highlight content, export highlights, send articles to Kindle and sync highlights to Notion, Obsidian, Roam, Readwise and other services. Premium adds HD text-to-speech, highlighting, note-taking, integrations and personalization; its listed plans are $8 a month or $60 a year. Premium also lists AI Co-Reader and Send to Kindle. Monthly and annual subscriptions renew automatically unless disabled at least 24 hours before the period ends.