Burkmak vs Omnivore

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.

Omnivore is an open-source read-it-later service for saving articles, newsletters, PDFs, and documents for focused reading. It supports notes, highlights, and synchronization across devices, with labels, filters, and indexed text search to organize saved material. An email inbox can receive newsletters, PDFs, and article emails, including Substack newsletters. Browser extensions and mobile apps are available. On iOS, text-to-speech includes offline audio downloads. Plugins synchronize saved reading, highlights, and notes with Logseq and Obsidian. Rules can trigger actions when articles are created or changed, but remain a web-only beta feature. The project can be extended or deployed on a user's own server; its Docker setup includes PostgreSQL, a web frontend, an API server, and a content-fetching service. The cloud application was deprecated in November 2024, so Omnivore is now self-hosted. The Free (self-hosted) plan is free. Omnivore and its Readability.js extensions use the AGPL-3.0 license.