Karakeep vs Linkwarden

Karakeep and Linkwarden are the two self-hosted bookmark managers most people shortlist when they want to replace Pocket. Both are AGPL-3.0, both are written in TypeScript on Next.js, both run as a small Docker Compose stack with Meilisearch for search, and both are rated 2 out of 5 to deploy. The difference is the idea behind them. Karakeep is a "bookmark-everything" inbox with AI woven through it. Linkwarden is a preservation tool: it saves several copies of each page and lets a team curate collections.

What each one saves

Karakeep (formerly Hoarder) bookmarks links, takes simple notes, and stores images and PDFs. Its README lists automatic fetching of titles and descriptions, lists you can share with others, OCR for text in images, RSS feeds that auto-save new items, highlights, full-page archival with monolith against link rot, and video archiving with yt-dlp.

Linkwarden is more specific about the web page. It captures a screenshot, a PDF and a single-file HTML copy of each page, and gives you a reader view where you can highlight and annotate text. It can optionally send a page to the Internet Archive, accepts image and PDF uploads, and can subscribe to RSS feeds. Collections and sub-collections are its organising unit.

If you save more than articles, such as notes, screenshots and videos, Karakeep casts the wider net. If you care that every saved page has a screenshot, a PDF and an HTML copy on disk, Linkwarden does that by design.

AI and search

Karakeep's README lists full-text and semantic search, plus automatic tagging and summarisation with an LLM, including local models through Ollama. It also has a rule-based engine for managing bookmarks.

Linkwarden lists full-text search, filtering and sorting, and optional local AI tagging based on a page's content. There is no mention of summarisation or semantic search in its README.

Both AI features are optional; the apps work without a model.

Teams and clients

Linkwarden is the more team-oriented: collaboration on collections, per-member permissions, user administration, public sharing and API keys. Its README lists single sign-on for "Enterprise and Self-hosted users". Native iOS and Android apps exist.

Karakeep also supports shared lists, SSO, official iOS and Android apps, and browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Its README adds a CLI and importers from Chrome, Pocket, Linkwarden and others, so moving between the two is possible.

Footprint

Karakeep's stack is the web app, a headless Chrome crawler and Meilisearch. Linkwarden's is the app, PostgreSQL and Meilisearch. Our minimum RAM figures are estimates, 2 GB for Karakeep and 4 GB for Linkwarden, and the measurements do not follow them: idle on our GCP test box, Karakeep used about 680 MB and Linkwarden about 500 MB. Disk use was close to 3 GB for each. Treat the estimates as headroom for crawling and archiving work, not as a prediction of idle use.

Which to choose

Choose Karakeep if you want one inbox for links, notes, images and PDFs, with semantic search, LLM tagging and summaries, RSS ingest and video archiving.

Choose Linkwarden if the point is preserving pages (screenshot, PDF and HTML copies, a reader with annotations) and sharing curated collections with other people under per-member permissions.

Not the only two options

If you want something smaller, see our Karakeep vs linkding comparison. The setup steps are in the Karakeep deploy guide and the Linkwarden deploy guide, and the wider field is on our Pocket alternatives page.