Becoming: a Raindrop alternative for 2026

What Raindrop does well

Raindrop.io is an all-in-one bookmark manager, and any Raindrop alternative has to start by admitting how much of that job it does for free. Its pricing page promises unlimited bookmarks, collections, highlights and devices with no time limit, plus import and export, sharing and collaboration, and apps for Mac, iOS, Android, Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Edge. The site lists a Windows app and a Brave extension as well.

The organizing idea is the collection: a folder you can nest by dragging one onto another, give an icon, view as a list, grid, headlines or moodboard, share with members, or publish as a public page. Tags and filters run across everything, and Raindrop finds duplicates and pages that no longer load.

Highlighting sits on top of that. Select text on any web page with the extension, in the built-in preview on web and desktop, or in the mobile apps, pick a color, and the passage is saved with the bookmark. Uploaded PDFs and EPUBs can be highlighted too. Highlights are free, up to 100 per bookmark, and sync across devices.

Pro, at $3 a month or $28 a year, adds full-text search of every saved page, PDF, EPUB and YouTube transcript, a web archive that keeps a permanent copy of each bookmark, annotations on highlights, one-time reminders, Stella (an AI assistant in beta that summarizes and answers questions about your saves), a duplicate and broken-link finder, daily backups and 10 GB of uploads a month.

Where Raindrop is stronger

As a place to keep links, Raindrop wins on most counts:

• A free plan that is actually complete. Unlimited bookmarks, collections and highlights cost nothing. Becoming has a 7-day trial and no free tier.
• Price. Pro is $3 a month or $28 a year; The Library is $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year.
• Every platform. Native apps for Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad and Android, and extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge and Brave. Becoming is a web app, a mobile app and a Chrome extension.
• Collections and sharing. Nested collections, members with permissions, public pages and embeddable widgets. Becoming organizes with tags and has none of these.
• Permanent copies. Pro archives the full text, images and formatting of every bookmark, searchable even when the original page is gone. Becoming keeps the text of what you save but does not promise an archive.
• Export and integrations. Whole-account exports in HTML, CSV or TXT with highlights and notes included, daily backups to Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive on Pro, highlight sync to Readwise and Notion, Zapier, IFTTT, Make, n8n and a public API. Becoming has an MCP server for AI assistants and no export integrations today.
• Importers. Browser bookmark files, Pocket, Instapaper, Readwise Reader, Evernote, Notion, Pinboard and a dozen more.

If you are choosing a bookmark manager, that list settles it. The rest of this page is for people whose real question is what happens to the passages they highlight, which is also the question the Readwise comparison starts from.

What Becoming does differently as a Raindrop alternative

Raindrop’s unit is the link. A highlight in Raindrop belongs to a bookmark, lives in that bookmark’s collection and is found by searching the library of links. Becoming’s unit is the highlight: a passage, where it came from, and what happens to it afterwards.

The highlight is the unit

In Becoming a highlight is the thing you open, search, tag, review and build on, and the source is its context rather than its container. That changes what capture looks like. On a web page, the Chrome extension lets you highlight in place; in the Reader, a small toolbar offers Highlight or Copy on any selection. Each highlight lands in the library on its own, next to every other highlight you have ever made.

The Reader is a read-later queue, not a bookmark shelf: Continue reading, Up next and Recently finished, with a reading-time estimate on each item. It holds articles saved with the extension or Save a link, newsletters sent to your own @in.usebecoming.com address, YouTube videos with the transcript following playback so a highlight keeps its timestamp, and PDFs you imported. Finishing marks a piece read; archiving keeps its highlights. There are no folders, no offline mode and no text-to-speech.

When you save a whole page, a newsletter or a video, AI reading goes through it and pulls out the passages worth keeping, so a saved link becomes a set of highlights rather than a title in a list. It is part of The Library, within a monthly allowance, and highlights you make yourself never count against it.

One library, books included

Raindrop’s help center documents no Kindle or book-highlight importer; a book gets in only as an EPUB you upload and highlight inside Raindrop. Becoming brings the highlights you already made: Kindle (synced from the mobile app or the Chrome extension, or from a My Clippings.txt file), Goodreads, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, annotated PDFs and photos of pages marked in a paper book. X posts, bookmarks and likes come in too.

Search covers all of it two ways: by the exact words, or by describing an idea and letting semantic search match the meaning. Raindrop’s free plan also offers meaning-based search, but over bookmarks; its full-text search over page content is a Pro feature.

Highlights that come back, and turn into practice

Raindrop’s reminders are one-time notifications on a bookmark, and a Pro feature. Becoming’s Daily Review brings a handful of highlights back every day, in the app and by email, with less-seen passages coming up more often and favorites boosted.

On The Academy, any highlight can become a Theme: four weeks on one idea, built from related highlights in your own library, with a short Practice each day. The reasoning behind that is in how to apply what you read. Automatic tagging on The Academy files new highlights without your help. Both Raindrop and Becoming expose an MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor can search your saves; in Becoming, what they search is your highlights.

Becoming vs Raindrop pricing

Raindrop is cheaper at every level, and the comparison is only fair once you know what each plan buys.

Raindrop’s free plan is not a trial: unlimited bookmarks, collections, highlights and devices, import and export, sharing, and 100 MB of uploads a month. Pro is $3 a month or $28 a year, with a 30-day money-back guarantee, and adds the Pro features described above. When Pro lapses, archived copies become inaccessible and are deleted after about a month; bookmarks stay.

Becoming has no free plan. Both subscriptions start with a 7-day free trial, and The Library’s trial needs no card.

• The Library is $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year: every import source, the Reader, AI reading of what you save within a monthly allowance, keyword and semantic search, the Daily Review and its email, and MCP access.
• The Academy is $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year: everything in The Library plus Themes, daily Practices and automatic tagging.
• Founding Member is $174 once for lifetime Academy access.

Full details are in the pricing section.

Who should pick which

Stay with Raindrop if what you keep is links: research for projects, references to share with a team, a public reading list, a tidy archive of the web with copies that outlive the originals. It does that for free, on every platform, with more export options than Becoming has.

Pick Becoming if what you keep is passages, and the links are only where they came from: your Kindle and paper-book highlights next to the ones from articles, newsletters and videos, searchable by meaning, back in front of you every morning, and on The Academy turned into something you practice. If Readwise is the other product on your shortlist, best Readwise alternatives puts the two side by side with several others.

Using both is reasonable. File links in Raindrop; let Becoming be where the highlights end up. If you also want a read-later queue that highlights in place, the Instapaper comparison covers that side.

How to move your Raindrop highlights into Becoming

Becoming has no direct Raindrop importer; these are the paths that work today.

1. Through Readwise. Raindrop’s help center documents a sync of Raindrop highlights to Readwise. Once they are there, Becoming’s Readwise import takes one API token (from readwise.io/access_token) and brings over your articles and books with their highlights and notes. Highlights are deduplicated, so a later re-sync only adds what is new.
2. Export and paste. Raindrop exports a bookmark’s highlights as text or CSV, and a whole-account export includes highlights and notes. For an article you care about, copy its highlights and use Add source → Manual highlight import: create a source with the title and author, paste the passages separated by blank lines or bullets, and check the preview before saving.
3. Re-save the articles that matter. Raindrop’s TXT export is one URL per line. Paste a URL into Integrations → Save a link and the article lands in the Reader with its full text, where AI reading extracts the passages or you highlight it again.

Your book highlights are the quick win: in the Becoming mobile app, or in the web app with the Chrome extension, choose Add source → Kindle, and the highlights and notes from your Kindle books sync into the same library. The help center has a page for every import source.