Instapaper Review

Pocket vs Instapaper (Why Instapaper is the Superior read-it-later App)

Anyone who reads articles using the Internet should have an app that saves those articles. It’s wholely superior to simply having a hundred tabs open in your Internet browser.

After several years of using Pocket, I switched to Instapaper a few months ago and the experience has been a revelation. My only regret is that I did not switch sooner.

I think Instapaper is one of the greatest apps of all-time and in my estimation it’s a damn shame that this app isn’t in everyone’s collection.

Which has me asking – why do people still use Pocket instead of Instapaper? Having used both, here is what I can say about the pros of each app relative to the other:

Pocket pros:

tagging system for finding articles (helpful if you save a tremendous number of articles at any given time and want a variety of ways to search for them)
more consistent article formatting (Instapaper works most of the time, but it definitely botches the occasional article more often than Pocket. Pocket wins for consistency)
dedicated macOS app (helpful if you want to be able to read articles on your computer when you don’t have Internet access. The only option for Instapaper articles on your computer is the website.)
slightly better voice dictation (more granularity in reading speeds and the fast forwarding / rewinding buttons work better than Instapaper. In practice though, I use another app entirely for voice dictation (Voice Dream is my choice).

Instapaper pros:

much cleaner and more accessible UI (Pocket is a quite a messy app full of clutter)
no advertising (a feature on Pocket that’s only available with a premium account that costs $45/year)
search through all articles using keywords or phrases (without the need to use tags like in Pocket)
easy to move articles between folders
swipe left to access any folder from any folder (inexplicably absent on Pocket)
displays a reading time estimate for each article
speed reading feature (a surprisingly nifty feature for those who suffer from attention issues while reading)
highlighting and note taking within articles
15 customizable fonts and 4 color schemes (Pocket has 2 customizable fonts and 3 color schemes, but does include a few extra fonts for the $45/year premium subscription)
customizable 3D touch options (so you can, for example, access a particular folder directly from the iOS home screen)
Apple Watch support (nice for those moments when you want to have articles read aloud for you on the go)
Send articles to e-readers like Kindle (this can also be done automatically)

Yet, despite all of this, Pocket continues to dominate the read-it-later app market. Pocket is the 50th most downloaded iOS news app, while Instapaper comes in at 199th. This despite the fact that Pocket has an average rating of 3.2 and Instapaper has an average rating of 4.5.

I would encourage everyone who has either never used Instapaper (or hasn’t used it since all of its formerly premium features were made free to all in November 2016) to give it a try.