Compare Instapaper and Keep side by side on features, pricing, and the workflows each one is designed for.
A classic read-later app with clean text extraction and distraction-free reading.
Free, paid from $5.99/mo
Save anything from the web and get it back as markdown for AI agents or a simple reading feed.
Free, paid from $10/mo
Here's how Instapaper and Keep compare across the features people actually look for. They share 11 core capabilities; the differences show up in what each tool focuses on.
| Feature | Instapaper | Keep |
|---|---|---|
| Capture and save | ||
| Browser extension | Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge | Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave |
| Mobile apps | iOS, Android | |
| Save from email | Unique save-by-email address | Forward to in.keep.md |
| Save tweets | ||
| Save YouTube videos | URL only | With transcripts |
| Save GitHub stars | ||
| Save PDFs | Premium | Converted to markdown |
| Save files (docs, spreadsheets) | Word, Excel, CSV, HTML, OpenDocument | |
| Save audio files | With Whisper transcription | |
| Save via API | ||
| Auto-sync sources | ||
| RSS auto-sync | ||
| YouTube channel sync | ||
| X bookmarks sync | ||
| GitHub stars sync | ||
| Newsletter inbox sync | Forward-to-save, not a dedicated inbox | |
| Library and reading | ||
| Reader view | ||
| Offline reading | Partial | |
| Full-text search | Premium | |
| Semantic / AI search | ||
| Highlights | ||
| Notes | ||
| Tags | ||
| Collections | Folders | |
| Public sharing | Partial | |
| Full-text RSS extraction | Partial | |
| AI and agents | ||
| Markdown export for AI agents | Per-item .md URL | |
| Bulk markdown export | ||
| MCP server | ||
| CLI tool | keep-markdown npm package | |
| Claude Code skill | ||
| AI summaries | AI tagging on capture | |
| Public API | ||
| Import and export | ||
| OPML import / export | ||
| Pocket import | ZIP, CSV, and legacy HTML exports | |
| Instapaper import | ||
| CSV / JSON export | HTML + CSV | |
| Send to Kindle | Premium |
Instapaper is free, paid from $5.99/mo and Keep is free, paid from $10/mo. The tier that fits best usually comes down to how many items you save each month.
Free
Unlimited saves, folders, tags, sync across web/iOS/Android, API access.
Premium
Full-text search, permanent archive, PDF reader, unlimited notes, Kindle send, AI voices, speed reading, ad-free.
Free
50 saved items lifetime, browser extension, MCP server, markdown export.
Pro
1,000 saves per cycle, all sources, bulk exports, higher API quota.
Max
5,000 saves per cycle, everything in Pro.
Both tools do their category well, but the specifics differ. Here's what each one is good at and where it tends to fall short.
Instapaper is one of the original read-later apps, still going strong after Betaworks took it back from Pinterest in 2020. The product has always been sharp on one thing: save a web page, read it later in a clean typographic view. Free tier gets you unlimited saves, folders, tags, sync across iOS/Android/web, and a public API. Premium at $5.99/mo or $59.99/yr layers on full-text search, permanent archive, PDF reader, Kindle send, AI voices, and speed reading. Most of the product has shipped in a long tail of small updates rather than big reinventions. The recent wave added tags across every platform, highlights on the open web via the browser extensions, and send-to-Kindle right from the extension.
Keep is a save-anywhere tool built around one idea: everything you capture should be available as clean markdown that an AI agent can read. Articles, tweets, YouTube videos with transcripts, GitHub stars, newsletters, RSS, and plain URLs all land in the same searchable library. People read their library in a clean in-app feed. Agents read it through the API, CLI, MCP server, and Claude Code skill, so Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT, and other tools can work against the library directly. Auto-sync pulls from RSS, YouTube, X bookmarks, GitHub stars, and newsletter inboxes on a schedule, so the library stays current without manual work. Semantic search runs across everything you've saved.