Readwise Reader alternatives

What reviewers actually said

Built only from these 120 real reviews (foreign ones translated). Superscripts jump to the quote here. Apple has no per-review links, so [ref] opens that app's reviews on the App Store.

1. [R3] Readwise Reader 3/5 · US Great app, disastrous quality control: The amount of bugs this app has is amongst the highest I've ever seen on any app, whether high quality or otherwise . It's too bad, because this thing is really, really, really good when it works. For at least a year or two now, my inbox on my iPhone just does not want to work properly. It takes forever to load, and I've cleared the cache and done everything
2. [R4] Readwise Reader 1/5 · US TTS broken again: No QA testing before each update? Now when using TTS and you tap the button to jump back, it jumps ahead instead. Acceptable for a free or cheap service, not acceptable at this price.
3. [R6] Readwise Reader 3/5 · US Unreliable: I love the idea of this app. I love the feature set. What I do t love is that a substantial portion of the articles I save get improperly saved. For example, I saved an article and the top and bottom sections (about 80% of the article) weren’t saved. I tried the same thing in GoodLinks, none. The article was as expected. Not sure what’s going on here but great features can’t make up f
4. [R9] Readwise Reader 3/5 · US Severe overheating: I've renewed my subscription for two years in a row. My phone overheats shortly after I open the app, so I mostly use the web version. iOS has had many updates in between, and each time I hoped an update would fix the overheating, but the developers still haven't solved this problem. I hope the developers take this issue seriously and resolve it soon. · translated
5. [R1] Readwise Reader 1/5 · US Just downloaded but my trial is expired?: This app must be connected to to original in terms of subscription. I’ve never used this one before but I’ve used the Readwise app; just downloaded this, signed up and it told me to subscribe to continue as my trial is expired. I can’t move past that page to even see what the app entails. Thats a real bummer, really wanted to try it as I get back into read
6. [R21] Readwise Reader 3/5 · US Subscription: Can’t justify $12/m
7. [R30] Readwise Reader 3/5 · US Good App, too pricey: I enjoyed my first day using the app, but learned that it costs about $10-13 a month! I read that a year ago it was $8-9. In a perfect world I would use this app, but this cost is ludicrously high for the service offered. Subscriptions are everywhere now and I’m frankly fine with a free version that is slightly worse.
8. [R7] Readwise Reader 1/5 · US No RSS compact view: Unlike every other rss app or similar apps such as email clients that all offer compact view vs default or vs expanded etc, Reader still has 0 options to customize the RSS screen. Can’t hide the image, can’t hide the excerpt etc so it’s a terrible rss experience and seems more aimed for the view one would want for curated saved articles not all ones rss feeds. Every years more
9. [R11] Readwise Reader 4/5 · US Great, but no Widget support?: I’m enjoying the app and the service. But it would be great to see a widget for the news feeder.
10. [R12] Readwise Reader 3/5 · US Disingenuous update re Apple Pencil: Yes, you can finally use an Apple Pencil to highlight. But it’s nothing like you’d expect. You can’t highlight PDFs unless you’re in “text” view. Ok, annoying, but maybe not the end of the world. Until you switch back to pdf view. Then you can’t see your highlights anymore. Forget about something basic like handwriting notes. Not available. I realize this is a
11. [R22] Readwise Reader 1/5 · US Analytics/streaks?: As an avid reader, I optimistically switched over from my previous reader. However, I deeply miss being able to see my reading progress, streaks, goals, etc for the year at a glance
12. [R16] Readwise Reader 1/5 · US Missing functionality: I got this to be a good place to read all my favorite publications in one app. Unfortunately, it has been my experience that I’m unable to read any of these publications, such as the Economist, New Yorker, or History Today, in the Reader App. Whenever I try to import them, I only get the first paragraph, presumably because when Reader goes to grab the article, it does not ha
13. [R45] Readwise Reader 3/5 · US Not saving any pdf’s?: I like the idea of what this app is supposed to be, but its not saving PDF’s at all for me - not from Safari, Chrome or my files folder. That - on top of the paid only model (which is a bit steep) - no way not paying for a broken product.
14. [R27] Readwise Reader 3/5 · US Inexplicably not the web-app on iPad OS: I love Readwise on my phone, my Palma, and my web browser. It’s the best reading app & it’s expensive enough that I almost trust it’ll stick around (unlike Omnivore…). For unknown reasons, though: the iPad OS app is the web browser’s inferior in every way. The lack of a sidebar is nuts and it’s basically a high-res version of the phone app. What’s up with t
15. [R52] Goodreads 5/5 · US Time Saver: I love this app so far and was able to import my cumbersome spreadsheet of 165 books. Simple to use and love the updating of the page I’m on, I drop my book way too often and it keeps my place. Love it!
16. [R55] Goodreads 5/5 · US Absolutely LOVE Goodreads: Not only have I found tons of new books, authors, genres to read… I’ve also met a lot of really cool people in the book community. Definitely recommend to all book lovers.
17. [R61] Goodreads 5/5 · US Find a book read about it first..: The app has filled my library with potentials that I can peek at when looking for a book at the store.. it’s fun to have people to follow to see what the next best read may be too
18. [R64] Goodreads 5/5 · US Perfect app!!!: I love this app so much it makes keeping track of my books I want to read, have read, or that I am reading or books I didn’t like and didn’t finish. I also love that you can see my friends books too!! Only thing I want to criticize is that we should be able to rate books like 4.5 stars instead of a full star rating but we can’t but it’s ok!!
19. [R65] Speechify 1/5 · US Never again: This app is cool if you pay for it it’s not free all the voices that are free. Suck they sound terrible. I definitely will not be re-downloading this app.
20. [R68] Speechify 1/5 · US Solo de pago: Solo de pago:(
21. [R71] Speechify 1/5 · US Misleading: Free to download but prepare to pay to use the app
22. [R72] Speechify 5/5 · US Speechify: I love speechify because it has help me get my reading level up in school
23. [R80] Notion 5/5 · US my notion is amazing: this is the best platform for planning and building your projects that you will ever use. it can be so structured but also has incredible flexibility, and sharing workspaces with others is fast and easy. I have been using this tool for years and will continue to do so. the only thing I wish there was is a mind map feature within pages to allow users a visual representation fo
24. [R83] Notion 5/5 · US Journaling: Notion has always been a great place to jot down and plan my life out.
25. [R93] Voice Aloud Reader 1/5 · US Bait & Switch Scam: I THOUGHT I was buying a pay-once product. But the voice for that product is a sub-1980s robo voice. Unlistenable. To get a better quality voice, you have to make a SECOND purchase, and that is for a SUBSCRIPTION. The app should be banned from the App Store.
26. [R94] Voice Aloud Reader 5/5 · US Ofc there’s ads: But nothing is free free. Watch an add get like 10 mins of reading. Rinse repeat. Does all I need it to do tho
27. [R95] Voice Aloud Reader 3/5 · US Amazing yet infuriating: There is a character limit for premium voices that makes this amazing app worthless. It harms my productivity when I have to wait a week just to get my voices back. Frankly, I feel cheated. Why an I paying for this if I keep getting cut off without options?
28. [R96] Voice Aloud Reader 1/5 · US Frustrated!: I purchased the ability to use premium voices for $9.99, and I’ve tried everything to change from the horrible robot voice and nothing works. I also can’t contact support for help! Cancelling this one!
29. [R108] Voice Dream 5/5 · US Vision and great resources: This is one of them. This program on my phone got me through a very rigorous graduate level program with honors. I was able to listen to all textbooks and articles with ease. I could adapt the speed the color. The print.
30. [R111] Voice Dream 5/5 · US Beats Speechify for academics!: Got this to read my research material for my PhD. Was working full time and taking care of my family. Voice dream’s bookmark and highlight feature allows you to tab sentences while on a run or a drive and lets you export only your tabbed text into a single txt file with the push of a button! Saves me weeks of time writing notes, trying to find them for papers/diss
31. [R113] Voice Dream 4/5 · US Mostly good, but voice selection is quite confusing: First of all, I would like to thank you for develope this app. At the beginning, the voice selection is very good: a clear button for playing sample and downloading. It vividly divides into category like American English, British English. But now, the voice selection is mixed up. I have to scroll a long list to find the voice I want.
32. [R115] Voice Dream 5/5 · US Just my experience: I’ve struggled with reading my entire life, in school, trying to keep up with classmates, and later at work, trying not to fall behind my colleagues. I tried so many reading apps over the years. Most were expensive, and even then, they still couldn’t do what I needed. Voice Dream changed everything for me. The first time I used it, it felt like a locked door finally opened.
33. [R42] Readwise Reader 3/5 · US nice: but should be charge less 95$/yr for a reading app sounds crazy
34. [R49] Readwise Reader 1/5 · US subscription price makes no sense: I am not really sure why the subscription price for this product is about the same as the subscription for any magazine/newspaper subscription. All it does is reference other information and provides no distinct value on its own to warrant that price.
35. [R28] Readwise Reader 1/5 · US One huge issue: This Reader at fist glance seemed perfect but it seems to be completely missing a reading statistics page. Every reader has some type of stats page. How was this overlooked? Readers just aren’t useful to me without a way to track my reading progress
36. [R31] Readwise Reader 1/5 · US Zero statistics: The app is beautiful and revolutionary but it has no reading statistics which is the only feature that I wanted. Just a simple line plot showing pages read per day so I can see some type of trend to improve myself. The developers mentioned this was low on their priority list which was very sad since statistics is what set their original Readwise app apart from the competition and
37. [R10] Readwise Reader 1/5 · US Last update introduced crashes.: Been us the Readeise reader app to have it read to me the details of a very large PDF and after the recent up the app crashes after about 5 minutes. This happens on both iPad and iPhone. I hope the developer fixes soon. All what good until then update yesterday.
38. [R13] Readwise Reader 1/5 · US Buggy and poor UX for reading: Got this because I already use readwise highlights and wanted to sync e-books and reading states across devices to my android e-reader. I don’t enjoy reading with it. I would cancel if it weren’t part of the highlights subscription which I value more. - Buggy: highlighting a word doesn’t always bring up the menu to allow highlighting. Often it mis-registers a page t