Becoming: a Readwise alternative for 2026

What Readwise does well

Readwise is the product most people mean by “highlight manager”, so any Readwise alternative gets measured against its integrations list first. That page names around two dozen import sources: Kindle, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, Goodreads, Instapaper, Raindrop, Feedly, Inoreader, Hypothes.is, Snipd for podcasts, Twitter/X, library books, O’Reilly Learning, Everand and others. On the way out, it syncs highlights to Notion, Obsidian, Evernote, Roam, Logseq, Apple Notes, Craft, Capacities, OneNote, RemNote, Tana, Workflowy and NotebookLM, or exports Markdown and CSV.

Review is just as mature: the Daily Review by email and in the app, Mastery spaced-repetition cards scheduled by recall probability, frequency tuning per book, and Themed Reviews that group highlights by book, tag or source on their own schedule.

Reader, which Readwise calls “the first read-it-later app built for power readers”, takes articles, RSS feeds, newsletters, PDFs, EPUBs, YouTube videos and Twitter threads, adds the Ghostreader AI assistant and text-to-speech, and runs on web, desktop, iOS and Android, with Chrome, Firefox and Safari extensions and e-ink support.

Where Readwise is stronger

Readwise is the better fit today if any of these is central to how you read:

• Reader as a daily reading app. RSS, EPUBs, text-to-speech and e-ink have no equivalent in Becoming.
• Desktop apps, more browsers and a widget. Reader has desktop apps and Chrome, Firefox and Safari extensions; the Readwise app adds an iOS home-screen widget. Becoming has none of those.
• Export to a note-taking system. Continuous sync to Notion, Obsidian and a dozen other tools comes with Readwise Full. Becoming has no export integrations.
• Flashcard-style memorization. Mastery has no counterpart in Becoming.
• Niche sources. Library books, O’Reilly, Everand, Moon+ Reader and Hypothes.is integrate only with Readwise.
• A longer trial. 30 days against Becoming’s 7.

What Becoming does differently as a Readwise alternative

Becoming covers the same three jobs, capture, search and resurfacing, and adds the one Readwise leaves to you: doing something with what you highlighted.

Capture from where you already read

• Kindle: the Becoming app or the Chrome extension reads your Kindle Notebook and brings in books, highlights and notes. A device’s My Clippings.txt works too.
• Goodreads, Apple Books, Kobo (your KoboReader.sqlite file), Google Play Books and annotated PDFs.
• Paper books: photograph the pages you marked up and Becoming keeps what you underlined, highlighted or bracketed.
• The web: select text on any page and save it with the extension, or save the whole article to the Reader, Becoming’s read-later queue, and highlight it there.
• YouTube: a video becomes highlights drawn from its transcript, each with a timestamp that jumps to that moment.
• X posts and newsletters, through a personal @in.usebecoming.com address you forward to or subscribe with.
• Readwise itself, covered in the last section.

Every import is deduplicated by content, so re-syncing or uploading the same file twice never creates copies.

Whole-page saves are where The Library’s AI reading comes in. Save an article, forward a newsletter, add a YouTube video or photograph a page, and an AI model reads it and pulls out the passages worth keeping, within a monthly allowance included in the plan. Your own highlights, imports, search, tags and Daily Review never touch it. Readwise’s Ghostreader lives inside Reader on the Full plan; Lite lists no AI.

Search by meaning on every plan

The library searches by the exact words you remember and by a plain description such as “passages about starting over”, both at once. Semantic search is part of The Library, the entry plan, not an upgrade. Filters narrow results by type, tag, origin and date.

A daily review you can tune

Daily Review brings back a small stack of highlights each day, in the app and by email. Less-seen highlights resurface more often, favorites are boosted, and you set the days, the time and the count. It is deliberately lighter than Readwise’s: there are no cloze cards to grade.

Themes and Practices

This part has no Readwise equivalent. On The Academy, Becoming reads across your library for ideas that recur in different sources, favoring recent reading, and proposes a Theme: a 4-week focus grounded in your own highlights. You can also start one from a single highlight in Daily Review, or by describing what you want to work on.

Each day of a Theme brings a Practice of two to five minutes: Reflect practices that help an idea sink in, or Act practices, small experiments in real life. A checkpoint at the start of the final week lets you extend the Theme or finish it. You work on one Theme at a time.

The names collide, so one note: a Readwise “Themed Review” is a filtered review of highlights by tag or book. A Becoming Theme is a month of daily practice built from them. Why resurfacing alone rarely changes behavior is the argument of how to apply what you read.

Your library inside your AI assistant

Both products run an official MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other assistants can search your highlights. Readwise’s also manages Reader documents and ships a command-line tool. Becoming’s connects over OAuth with no token to paste, combines keyword and semantic matching, can add highlights and sources, and on The Academy can generate a Theme and complete Practices from inside the conversation. Every write has to be confirmed first.

Becoming vs Readwise pricing, plan by plan

The entry plans come to roughly $50 against $67 a year, and the top plans $70 against $120. Each premium buys something different: Readwise Full’s pays for Reader and the export integrations; The Academy’s pays for Themes, Practices and automatic tagging, which Readwise does not sell at any price.

Readwise sells two plans. Lite is listed at $5.59 a month billed annually, about $67 a year, or $6.99 month to month, and covers the Daily Review, browsing and search, and syncing from all sources; tags and notes are a Full feature. Full costs $9.99 a month billed annually ($119.88 a year) or $12.99 billed monthly, and adds Reader plus export to Notion, Obsidian and the rest. Both start with a 30-day trial, and students and academics get 50% off.

Becoming also has two subscriptions. The Library, $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year, is the counterpart to Lite: every import source, AI reading of what you save within a monthly allowance, keyword and semantic search, Daily Review with its email, book suggestions and MCP access. The Academy, $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year, adds Themes, daily Practices and automatic AI tagging. Founding Member is a one-time $174 for lifetime Academy access. Trials last 7 days, and The Library’s needs no card.

Current numbers are always on Becoming’s pricing section and on Readwise’s pricing page.

Who should pick which

Stay with Readwise if Reader is where your articles, feeds and EPUBs live; if your highlights have to land in Obsidian or Notion automatically; or if you depend on a source only Readwise integrates.

Pick Becoming if you want the core loop, Kindle and web capture, good search, a daily review, for less money, with AI reading of what you save included; if you read on paper and want those pages in the same library; or if years of resurfaced highlights have not changed what you do.

Use both if you like Reader for reading. Readwise keeps collecting, Becoming syncs from it, and Themes and Practices run on top.

For a wider field, including Screvi, Glasp and Clippings.io, see the best Readwise alternatives or the direct Screvi comparison.

How to move your Readwise highlights into Becoming

Becoming connects to Readwise directly, so there is no CSV to export and re-upload.

1. Sign in to Readwise, open readwise.io/access_token and copy the token.
2. In the Becoming web app, open your library and choose Add source, then Readwise.
3. Paste the token and confirm.

Becoming imports the books, articles and podcasts Readwise has collected, each with its highlights and notes, in the background, so you can keep using the app while a large library comes through.

Worth knowing:

• Nothing changes in Readwise. The connection only reads. Keep your subscription running while you decide.
• Re-sync when you want. Readwise stays connected, like Kindle, Goodreads and email. Run the sync again and only new highlights are added.
• Overlap is safe. If you also connect Kindle or Goodreads directly, deduplication by content keeps a passage from appearing twice.
• Themes need a base. Becoming asks for at least 25 highlights in your language before it generates a first Theme. A Readwise library of any size gets you there in one import.

The full walkthrough is in the help center, under Importing → Readwise.