Omnivore

What is Omnivore?

Omnivore was a popular open-source read-later app that served as a privacy-focused alternative to Pocket, offering article saving, highlighting, full-text search, and integrations with Obsidian and Logseq, all without the tracking and ads of commercial alternatives. The platform was fully free for end users, sustainable through community contributions and small-scale hosting. In October 2024, the Omnivore team announced they had been acquihired by ElevenLabs, the audio AI company, and the service would shut down. The service went offline permanently in November 2024, with all user data deleted 15 days after the announcement. Users who had existing reading libraries had to export their data or lose it permanently. This was a painful event for Omnivore's 500,000+ users, many of whom had accumulated years of reading history. The one piece of good news is that the Omnivore source code is still on GitHub at omnivore-app/omnivore, licensed under AGPL-3.0, a strong copyleft license rather than a permissive one, so anyone can in principle self-host an instance. As of August 2026 the repository is still public and not archived, and community contributors have kept it ticking over with occasional fixes (the most recent commit at the time of this check was 7 July 2026), but the project is self-host only, there is no roadmap, and the original team has not returned to it. The self-hosted setup is also genuinely complex, requiring PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, and several microservices. For most former Omnivore users, the practical path forward was migration to Readwise Reader or Matter; Pocket, once the obvious fallback, was itself shut down by Mozilla on 8 July 2025, with saved data deleted after 8 October 2025. For users evaluating read-later apps in 2026, Omnivore is no longer a working option, you should choose from the active alternatives listed below.

Pricing

Omnivore was always free and open-source as a hosted service, there was no paid tier and no subscription required. The service permanently shut down in November 2024 after the team was acquihired by ElevenLabs. All user data was deleted two weeks after the shutdown announcement. The source code remains on GitHub at omnivore-app/omnivore under the AGPL-3.0 license, a strong copyleft license, not a permissive one, and anyone can in principle self-host their own instance. Self-hosting requires PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, several microservices, and significant DevOps experience to set up and maintain. Since the team moved to ElevenLabs, maintenance has been community-driven and sporadic: the repository is still public and unarchived and picks up the occasional fix (most recently 7 July 2026 as of this check), but there is no roadmap and no guarantee of timely security patches.

Status check, August 2026: omnivore.app still resolves and still serves the old marketing shell, but there is no working hosted service behind it. Treat any Omnivore sign-up link you find as dead.

Key Features

• Open source under AGPL-3.0, source still public on GitHub
• Article saving, highlighting, and full-text search (historical)
• Integrations with Obsidian, Logseq, and note-taking apps (historical)
• No tracking or ads (historical)
• Self-hosted option via GitHub source code (still available)
• iOS, Android, and web clients (historical)
• Export tools to migrate data to other read-later apps (before shutdown)
• 500,000+ active users before shutdown

Pros & Cons

FAQ