Becoming: a Glasp alternative for book readers (2026)

What Glasp does well

Glasp is a social web highlighter, so a Glasp alternative has to be judged in the browser first. You install the extension, select a sentence on any page, and the passage is saved with its source. The same works on PDFs, where page numbers are kept, and on YouTube, where a highlight is tied to a timestamp you can jump back to.

Glasp describes the project as a place “where people could highlight, share, and connect through knowledge”, and the product follows: highlights can be public, you can publish posts built on them, turn a quote into a shareable image, and see what other readers marked on the page you are on.

On top sits a broad AI layer: summaries of articles, PDFs and videos, chat with a single PDF, chat across everything you saved, audio transcription, a writing assistant that drafts from your cited passages, and an “AI clone” built from your reading that other people can question.

Where Glasp is stronger

• A real free plan. Not a trial: a permanent tier with unlimited public highlights and a monthly allowance of AI features. Becoming has a 7-day free trial and then a subscription.
• More browsers. Glasp lists extensions for Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox. Becoming’s extension is for Chrome on desktop.
• More export targets. Notion, Obsidian, Readwise, Markdown and CSV appear across Glasp’s pricing, features and support pages, along with Roam, HTML and JSON, and paid plans add a daily automatic sync to Notion. Becoming’s help center documents no comparable list; its way out to other tools is an MCP server for AI assistants. If your highlights have to end up inside a notes app, Glasp serves that better.
• More read-later and annotation imports. Pocket, Instapaper, Matter, Medium, Hypothesis, Raindrop, Diigo, Weava and Snipd are all on its list.
• Social reading. A public profile and following other readers are what Glasp is built around; Becoming has nothing like it.

What Becoming does differently as a Glasp alternative

Becoming is a full highlight manager first: Readwise done better, plus Practices. It captures from everywhere you read, makes all of it searchable, brings it back every day, and then does something no highlighter does with it.

Books are first-class

Glasp’s center of gravity is the browser; Becoming’s is your reading as a whole, books included. Kindle highlights sync from the Becoming app or the Chrome extension: either one reads Amazon’s Kindle Notebook and imports books, highlights and notes, and a later run adds only what is new. A Kindle that is rarely online can upload its My Clippings.txt instead, which Becoming parses in English, Spanish, German and Japanese.

Beyond Kindle there are importers for Goodreads, Apple Books, Google Play Books and Kobo, a Readwise connection that brings books, articles and podcasts with their notes, and one for paper: photograph a marked-up page and Becoming reads back what you underlined. Glasp lists Kindle among its imports, but none of those other book sources.

The web, video, X and newsletters too

The extension saves a whole article in one click, or just the passage you selected. A YouTube video is saved with its transcript, which follows playback in the Reader; tap a line to jump, highlight it, and the highlight keeps its timestamp. Posts from X can be saved from the post itself, and bookmarks brought across. Your own @in.usebecoming.com address takes newsletter subscriptions and forwarded email into the Reader, from approved senders only.

Whenever you save something whole, an article, a newsletter, a video or a photographed page, The Library’s AI reading pulls out the passages worth keeping, within a monthly allowance; highlights you make yourself never count against it. Two of these have their own guides: saving highlights from X and saving highlights from YouTube videos.

Search and a Daily Review that covers everything

Everything you import is searchable by exact words or by meaning: describe an idea in plain language, such as “passages about starting over”, and semantic search finds highlights that fit even when they share none of your words. Highlights can be tagged, and on The Academy they are auto-tagged as they arrive, each suggestion yours to confirm or remove.

The Daily Review resurfaces a short stack of highlights each day, in the app and by email. Less-seen highlights come back more often, favorites are boosted, and you choose the days, the time and the count. Glasp’s features page describes a daily email review for imported Kindle highlights; Becoming’s review draws on every source in the library, from a photographed book to last week’s newsletter.

Themes and Practices

This is the part with no counterpart in Glasp. Becoming looks for the threads that run through your highlights and proposes a Theme: four weeks on one idea, such as protecting focused time or pausing before you react. You can also start one from a single highlight in the Daily Review, or describe what you want to work on and have it grounded in your own library.

Each day the Theme gives you one Practice, a concrete action of two to five minutes, shown with the highlight it came from, and you can write a short reflection when one lands.

Glasp’s AI answers “what did this say?” and “what have I saved about this?”. Themes and Practices answer “what do I do about it today?”. The reasoning is in how to apply what you read.

An MCP server that can also act

Both products offer an MCP connector. Glasp describes its connector as read-only access to your library for Claude, ChatGPT and other MCP clients. Becoming’s lets an assistant search your highlights, sources and notes, and also generate Themes and run Practices for you.

Becoming vs Glasp pricing

A private highlight library with capture, search and a daily review costs $4.99 a month on The Library against $12.50 on Glasp Pro, and The Academy, at $6.99, still comes in under Glasp Pro. The exception is Glasp’s free plan, which undercuts both if you do not mind public highlights and tight AI limits.

Glasp’s paid plans are Pro at $12.50 a month, or $150 a year, and Unlimited at $30 a month, or $360 a year. What you pay for is mostly private highlights, larger AI allowances and the daily Notion sync. The pricing page also lists a 40% discount for students and educators, and says Glasp does not offer lifetime deals.

Becoming has two subscriptions. The Library is $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year, and includes every importer, the extension, the Reader, the email inbox, AI reading of what you save within a monthly allowance, the Daily Review, semantic search and the MCP server. The Academy is $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year, and adds Themes, daily Practices and AI tagging. Both start with a 7-day free trial, and Founding Member gives lifetime Academy access for a one-time $174. Full details are in the pricing section.

Who should pick which

Choose Glasp if you:

• want a free highlighter and are comfortable with public highlights;
• highlight in Safari, Firefox or Edge, or mainly on your phone;
• need your highlights inside Notion, Obsidian or Roam;
• enjoy reading in public and following other readers;
• mostly want AI summaries of videos and PDFs.

Choose Becoming if you:

• read books as much as the web, on Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books or paper;
• want one private library for books, articles, videos, posts and newsletters;
• want a daily review across all of it, on your schedule;
• have collected highlights for years and want them to turn into things you do.

For other tools, the Readwise alternative page and the roundup of the best Readwise alternatives use the same format.

How to move your highlights from Glasp to Becoming

There is no direct Glasp importer, so the route depends on where the highlights came from.

1. Kindle highlights. Skip Glasp as the middleman: in the Becoming app, or in the web app with the Chrome extension, choose Add source, then Kindle, and sign in to Amazon when asked. Books, highlights and notes come straight from Amazon.
2. Anything already in Readwise. Glasp exports to Readwise. If you use that export, paste your Readwise API token into Becoming under Add source, then Readwise; the import runs in the background.
3. Web and PDF highlights. Export Markdown from Glasp. In Becoming choose Add source, then Manual highlight import, create a source with the title and author, and paste that source’s highlights, separated by bullets or blank lines. You see a preview before anything is saved.

Highlights are deduplicated by content, so overlapping routes do not create copies. From then on, the extension and the Reader capture new highlights directly. Step-by-step guides for every importer are in the help center.