A Pocket alternative for your saved articles, now that Pocket is gone

Mozilla shut Pocket down on July 8, 2025, and the last day to export your saves has passed. If you are looking for a Pocket alternative now, you need two things: a new place to save and read articles, and a home for the export you downloaded. Barside does both. It is a free desktop app for Windows, Linux and Mac. Its Reading inbox keeps a readable copy of each article on your computer, and its importer brings in your Pocket export with tags, favorites and highlights.

This page covers what happened to Pocket, what Barside does differently, what you will miss, and how to move your saves step by step.

The short answer

Pocket was Mozilla's read-it-later and content discovery app. You saved an article from Firefox, a browser extension or your phone, read it later, and sorted it with tags, favorites and an archive. It was simple, and it was built into Firefox.

That service is gone. Pocket's web and mobile apps closed on July 8, 2025, and Mozilla began deleting all Pocket accounts and data when the export window closed on November 12, 2025.

Barside works differently in one important way: it keeps the article, not only the link. When you save a page, your computer downloads a clean copy with its pictures and stores it in your library. No account holds it, and no server has to stay online for you to read it. Barside is free, runs on Windows 10 and 11 and on Linux and Mac, and imports the Pocket export file if you have it.

What happened to Pocket

Mozilla announced the shutdown on May 22, 2025, saying the way people save and consume content on the web had changed. Here is the timeline from Mozilla's announcement and help pages:

• May 22, 2025. Pocket left the app stores, new sign-ups stopped, and new Pocket Premium subscriptions were no longer sold. Monthly renewals were turned off.
• June 24, 2025. Pocket stopped being the default experience in Firefox. Its desktop Firefox integration was removed in July, in Firefox 140.
• July 8, 2025. Pocket shut down. Annual Premium subscribers received prorated refunds automatically, and Pocket moved to export-only mode.
• November 12, 2025. The export page closed, the Pocket API stopped working, and Mozilla began deleting all accounts and data. Mozilla had first given October 8, 2025 as the last day to export.

The export was a CSV file of your saves, archive and favorites, with your tags and highlights, sent to your email as a download link. Mozilla's help page says it held the links (URLs) of your saved items and did not extract the text of the articles.

So in 2026, the situation is simple. If you downloaded your export, you can still bring your list into a new app. If you did not, Mozilla no longer has your data, and it cannot be recovered.

Why Pocket users choose Barside

• You keep the article, not just the link. Pocket's export shows how fragile a list of links is. Barside saves a readable copy with pictures on your drive, so an article stays readable even if the site changes or disappears.
• Nothing to shut down. Your library lives in Barside's data folder on your computer, and you need no account to use it. Export backup makes a ZIP of the whole library whenever you want.
• Saving still takes one step. There is no browser button, and you do not need one. Barside reads the address of the page open in your browser, Firefox included.
• Reading next to your work. Articles sit in the same app as your notes, tasks and bookmarks, and one search bar finds all of them.
• Free. Reading, highlights, newsletters, read-aloud and the Pocket importer cost nothing.

Barside at a glance

Reading sits in Barside's sidebar with five lists: Inbox, Newsletters, Favorites, Archive and Highlights. Unread items have a dot, and the sidebar shows how many are unread.

• Three ways to save. Paste a link and choose Save. Choose Save the page open in your browser. Or press Alt+Shift+Space in any app, type save and pick Save to Reading; leave the box empty to save the page in your browser. You can give that command its own hotkey in Settings → Hotkeys and aliases.
• A clean copy. Barside keeps the article itself, with up to 15 of its pictures, and leaves out scripts and forms. Saving the same article twice adds nothing, even when the second link carries tracking tags.
• Read, mark and sort. Highlight a passage and add a comment, star favorites, add tags and archive what you finished. Search Reading looks through titles, sources, tags and the full text.
• Listen. Barside reads an article aloud with your computer's voices, at 0.8× to 2× speed.
• Newsletters in the same inbox. Get Your Barside email address in Settings → Reading, then subscribe with it or forward newsletters to it from Gmail with a filter. They land in the Newsletters list, with tracking pixels removed.

The read-it-later guide walks through every button, and AI search shows how your own AI can answer questions from what you saved, with sources.

Pocket vs Barside: feature comparison

Pocket facts come from Mozilla's announcement and help pages. The Pocket column describes the service as it was until July 2025.

Barside also does jobs Pocket never did: it keeps notes and tasks, records your screen, transcribes calls and works with the AI you connect.

Pricing compared

Pocket has no plans to compare anymore, so this table shows what the common replacements cost. Prices are from each company's own pages, as of September 2026.

Barside has no AI of its own. If you connect Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or OpenRouter in Settings → AI, that company bills you for what you use, and Barside charges nothing for AI.

What Pocket did that Barside does not

Be clear about these before you move. They are real differences.

• A phone app. Pocket had phone apps, so you could save and read on the go. Barside is a desktop app, and cloud sync (with Barside Plus) keeps your computers in step, not a phone.
• A button in the browser. Pocket had a save button in Firefox and extensions for other browsers. Barside reads the address of the page you have open, which works from its own window and from the search bar, but there is no button inside the browser.
• Discovery. Pocket recommended stories worth reading. Barside keeps what you save and never suggests articles. Mozilla says it continues that work in Firefox's New Tab page and its Ten Tabs newsletter, formerly Pocket Hits.
• Signed-in pages. Barside downloads pages without your browser's cookies, so an article behind a sign-in or a paywall is saved as a link.

If you save mostly from your phone, pick one of the phone-first apps in the list at the end of this page, and keep Barside for reading at your desk if you like.

How to move your Pocket saves to Barside

Barside has a Pocket importer. It reads the file on your computer and uploads nothing, as Imports and your data explains.

1. Find your export. Pocket emailed a link to a ZIP file that holds part_000000.csv. Some exports are a single HTML file, ril_export.html. Pick the ZIP itself; Barside reads what is inside.
2. Install Barside from the download page and open it.
3. Open Settings, find Import notes and choose Import.
4. Next to Pocket, choose Choose file and pick the ZIP or ril_export.html.
5. Barside shows Ready to import, with the number of reading items and any warnings. Under Import into, pick a new workspace or an existing one.
6. Choose Import. When Barside says your reading is here, choose Open Reading.

What comes along:

• Every save as a link, with its title and the date you saved it.
• Your list and your archive. Saves you archived or read go to the Archive. The rest go to the Inbox.
• Tags and favorites.
• Highlights, from the annotation files inside the ZIP, attached to their article. They appear in the Highlights list.

What does not come along is the article text, because Pocket's export never had it. Open an item and choose Get article text, and Barside downloads the article from the web, if the page is still online. Pages that need a sign-in stay links.

A library of several thousand saves can be a lot to face at once. A calm way through it: import everything, narrow the Inbox by searching for a topic or picking a tag, fetch the text of the few you still want to read, and archive the rest. Articles already in Reading are skipped, so you can import the file again without duplicates. The guide to importing your notes covers every other importer.

Keep your library safe this time

Pocket's shutdown showed that a reading list is only as safe as the service that holds it. In Barside, your library is a folder you control:

• It lives on your computer. Reading items, highlights and the pictures in them sit in Barside's data folder. Open local data folder in Settings shows where.
• One file backs it all up. Export backup in Settings & backups makes a ZIP of every note and Reading item with its pictures. Restore backup on another computer brings it back, and Barside checks the file before it changes anything.
• Updates make a safety copy. Before each app update installs, Barside saves a ZIP of the library.
• Cloud backup, if you want it. With Barside Plus, cloud backup encrypts the library on your computer before it uploads, once a day, and you can restore any day from the last 90.

See local-first storage and backups for the details.

Who should switch, and who should look elsewhere

Barside is a good fit if you:

• read at a Windows or Linux computer and saved from Firefox or another desktop browser (in Barside for Mac you paste links from Firefox);
• want a copy of each article on your own drive, so a closed service can never take it away;
• have a Pocket export and want your tags, favorites and highlights back in one place;
• want articles next to your notes, tasks and bookmarks;
• want a free app with no account for your own library.

Look at another app if you:

• saved mostly from your phone and read on the go;
• want story recommendations as well as a reading list;
• want to run your own server, in which case wallabag is built for it.

Other Pocket alternatives worth a look

Mozilla's support page about the shutdown listed services that could import Pocket data, while saying it had not vetted them: GoodLinks, Futurwise, Instapaper, Matter, Raindrop.io and Readwise. With what each company's site says today:

• Instapaper. A read-later app for the web, iOS and Android. Its free plan saves as many articles as you like; Premium adds full-text search, a permanent archive and a PDF reader, for US$5.99 a month or US$59.99 a year, as of September 2026.
• Matter. A polished reader for iPhone, iPad and the web, with natural text-to-speech and newsletters. The Matter alternative page compares it with Barside.
• Readwise Reader. Articles, PDFs, EPUBs, newsletters, RSS and YouTube in one app, with its Ghostreader AI. See the Readwise Reader alternative.
• wallabag. Free, open-source software you can host yourself, or use as the hosted wallabag.it. It imports from Pocket, Omnivore, Instapaper and Pinboard.

Mozilla also points Firefox users to Tab Groups and bookmarks for keeping a reading list. For a side-by-side view of all the options, see the best read-it-later apps.

Works well with Reading