Highlights vs Kiosk
Highlights
highlightsapp.netKiosk
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Highlights | Kiosk |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | $2.50/mo | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | Yes | — |
| Open source | — | Yes |
| Web | — | Yes |
| Windows | — | Yes |
| macOS | Yes | Yes |
| Linux | — | Yes |
| iOS | Yes | Yes |
| Android | — | Yes |
| Self-hosted | — | Yes |
| Plans published | 3 | 2 |
| Spec score · PDF Readers | 8.3 (#6) | 8.8 (#3) |
| Privacy | The maker says it does not require personal information to use the app, stores the optional annotation username locally and collects no payment or licensing information. | The project states that it collects no telemetry, uses no cloud processing, requires no account and processes PDFs on the device. |
| Support | For crash issues, the FAQ asks users to email [email protected] with details and helpful crash reports, screenshots or screen recordings. | The Linux release directs users to report bugs by opening a GitHub issue. |
Plans
In their own words
Highlights
Highlights is a PDF reader for research that turns PDF annotations into notes, available on iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Its free plan supports reading and annotating PDFs, merging annotations, editing PDF metadata, and Handoff. Notes can be exported as Markdown, TextBundle, HTML, WebArchive, or PDF, or sent directly to supported apps including Evernote, DEVONthink, Ulysses, Bear, and Keep It. For scientific articles, Highlights can find DOIs and retrieve metadata; it can link to a PDF on the device if the citation has already been read. Built-in multilingual OCR extracts text from PDFs without searchable text, with processing done on device. Smart Copy outputs copied images as PNG, tables as CSV, and citations as BibTeX. PDFs can be stored on device, in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, or another sync service, while annotations use standard PDF annotations. On macOS it integrates with Bookends and Papers. The free plan is available alongside Pro at $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year. The maker describes the app as intended for students and researchers.
Kiosk
Kiosk is a free, open-source PDF reader for web, desktop, mobile, and browser extensions. It renders PDFs and offers full-text search with highlighted results, page thumbnails, zoom, and light, dark, and night display modes. Its Chrome extension adds highlighting, underlining, strikethrough, drawing, shapes, and text annotations. The project says PDFs stay on the device, with no telemetry, cloud processing, or account requirement. Android works offline after installation, and the extension release notes also state that offline use is supported. The web app can run locally or be deployed through GitHub Pages as a self-hosted instance. Desktop apps can open PDFs directly and associate Kiosk with PDF files; the extension can intercept PDFs opened in Chrome. The extension supports Chrome 88+, Edge 88+, and Brave, but not Firefox or Safari. The project is released under the MIT License. Its Android release is an early alpha, and the macOS app is ad-hoc signed but not notarized, so Gatekeeper may warn on first launch.