Mozilla killed Pocket. Your browser's built-in bookmark folder is a disorganized mess you haven't opened in months. And every read-it-later SaaS you've trusted is one acquisition away from shutting down.

Karakeep solves this — and it runs on your hardware.

What It Is

Karakeep (formerly called Hoarder) is a self-hosted bookmark manager that goes well beyond links. You throw URLs, images, PDFs, and notes at it. It pulls title and description previews automatically, tags everything with an LLM, and makes it all full-text searchable. Think Pocket, but you own the data — and it actually understands what you saved.

The name comes from "كراكيب" (karakeeb) — Arabic slang for that drawer full of odds and ends you can't quite bring yourself to throw away. If that describes your browser bookmarks tab, this tool was built for you.

Why It's Worth Your Time

Three things set it apart:

AI tagging that respects your privacy. Karakeep uses an LLM to automatically tag everything you save. Point it at OpenAI, or wire it to a local Ollama instance and keep it entirely offline. Automatic organization without handing your reading list to anyone.

Full-page archiving against link rot. It uses monolith to save a complete snapshot of every page you bookmark. Links disappear. Paywalls appear. Domains expire. With karakeep, you have the content, not just a dead reference.

Video archiving via yt-dlp. Bookmark a YouTube URL and it archives the video locally. Combined with Meilisearch-powered full-text search, you end up with a searchable personal knowledge vault — links, articles, videos, images, and notes all in one place.

There are browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Native iOS and Android apps exist. RSS feed ingestion is built in — set it to auto-pull and archive items from feeds you follow.

Hands On

The install is clean Docker Compose. Start here:

mkdir karakeep-app && cd karakeep-app
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/karakeep-app/karakeep/main/docker/docker-compose.yml

Create your .env file:

KARAKEEP_VERSION=release
NEXTAUTH_SECRET=<run: openssl rand -base64 36>
MEILI_MASTER_KEY=<run: openssl rand -base64 36>
NEXTAUTH_URL=http://your-server-ip:3000

Then spin it up:

docker compose up -d

Visit port 3000, create your account, and start bookmarking. For local AI tagging with Ollama, the AI providers guide walks through pointing karakeep at your local model endpoint.

One thing worth knowing upfront: this is a multi-container stack. Karakeep runs alongside Meilisearch and a browser crawler service. On a capable home server that's fine. On a low-memory VPS, plan your resources accordingly.

Honest Verdict

This is the tool I've been looking for since Pocket died. The core works: links in, previews generated, tags applied, full-text search works. The archiving is genuinely useful — not something most alternatives offer out of the box, and not something you realize you need until the third time a link you saved goes dead.

The rough edges: it's still under active development (their words, not mine), the config surface area grows fast when you enable advanced features, and Meilisearch adds meaningful memory overhead. SSO setup is also non-trivial if you're going down that road.

Who it's for: anyone running a homelab who actually reads the things they save. If your Pocket, Raindrop, or browser bookmarks folder holds more than a hundred dusty links, this pays off quickly.

Go Try It

Live demo at try.karakeep.app — login with [email protected] / demodemo.

→ GitHub: github.com/karakeep-app/karakeep
→ Docs: docs.karakeep.app