Battle of the Bookmark-and-Read-Later Apps: Instapaper vs. Read It Later [Lifehacker Faceoff]

You click through an awful lot while browsing that you just don’t have time to read now but plan to later, that’s why services like Instapaper and Read It Later have skyrocketed in popularity. Here’s a handy guide a rough examine the two popular tools.

Photo by Abby .

Both services work inside the browser, on iOS devices, on third-party Android apps, and a couple of other places. Here’s what sets them apart.

Instapaper

Instapaper is dead simple. You add a Read Later bookmarklet to any browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, your mobile browser, etc), click it once you’re staring at something you’d desire to read, you know, later, and then visit Instapaper, either on your browser or a device with an Instapaper app, to read a stripped down, primarily text-only version of the thing you bookmarked to read later.

Instapaper’s biggest following is likely because of its minimal iOS application, where you may download your to-read items for browsing offline in adjustable and tasty text. It’s like a newspaper packed with only stuff you need to read, to-go.

Read It Later

Read It Later is a whole lot like Instapaper at its basic level: You mark web items to read later, then you definitely can read them while you’re able to catch up, either for your browser or favorite mobile device.

Unlike Instapaper, Read It Later is a section more tightly integrated together with your browser (if you need it to be) through its browser extensions (either the official Firefox extension or third-party extensions for browsers like Chrome), but like Instapaper, you may as well just use a bookmarklet. And where Instapaper focuses primarily on text, Read It Later is way more excited by multimedia. Text, images, and video. Its iOS app has a feature called Digest that creates a kind of virtual newspaper front page, which you’ll see above.

Which Do You favor?

To a huge extent, both tools accomplish very similar tasks, with only a few differences-some purely aesthetic differences, some small feature differences. We’d recommend kicking the tires on either to make a decision which matches right for you, but out of curiosity, we’d wish to hear which you love best:

Which Do You favor to your Reading-Later Needs? online surveys

Let’s hear more details behind your preference within the comments.

Source

This post is tagged: apps, battle, BookmarkandReadLater, faceoff, instapaper, read, vs