Readwise vs Screvi (2026): price, imports, review, exports
By Nico, Founder of Becoming · Published
Readwise and Screvi do the same job: collect the passages you highlight in Kindle, articles and everywhere else, keep them in one searchable library, and send a few back each day. Readwise has been the default since the category began; Screvi sells the same idea in a single plan with more apps. This page compares them on the questions that decide the choice.
Two disclosures first. Becoming, a third product in this category, makes this page; the last section says where it fits, and the rest is about Readwise and Screvi. Every claim below comes from readwise.io or screvi.com, checked on the date at the end.
Readwise vs Screvi in one minute
- Pick Readwise if you want Reader, its read-later app for articles, RSS, newsletters, PDFs, EPUBs and YouTube; if your highlights must land in Notion, Obsidian or another note app; or if you depend on one of its two dozen import sources.
- Pick Screvi if you want one plan with everything at $6.99 a month or $59.99 a year, a lifetime option, a macOS desktop app, and Anki-style spaced repetition with widgets and streaks.
- The price gap is real but plan-dependent: Screvi undercuts Readwise Full, which is the plan most people compare it with, and costs slightly more than Readwise Lite, which lacks tags, notes and exports.
Comparison table
| Readwise | Screvi | |
|---|---|---|
| Plans | Lite: $5.59/mo billed annually ($6.99 monthly). Full: $9.99/mo billed annually ($12.99 monthly) | One plan: $6.99/mo, $59.99/yr, or $299 lifetime |
| Trial | 30 days; 50% off for students | 14 days, no credit card |
| Kindle | Browser extension sync or My Clippings.txt | Extension, mobile app or My Clippings.txt; auto-sync every 24 hours |
| Other imports | Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, Goodreads, Instapaper, Raindrop, Feedly, Inoreader, Hypothes.is, Snipd, X, O’Reilly, Everand, Moon+ Reader, email, PDF, photos of pages | Kobo, Apple Books (macOS app), Goodreads, Readwise, X bookmarks, EPUB, PDF, web articles, YouTube, photos of pages, manual paste |
| Read-later | Reader (Full plan): articles, RSS, newsletters, PDFs, EPUBs, YouTube, X threads | Built-in reader: articles, RSS, DRM-free EPUBs, PDFs, YouTube transcripts, podcasts |
| Review | Daily Review, Mastery spaced repetition, frequency tuning, Themed Reviews | Spaced-repetition daily review, email digest, home-screen widget, streaks |
| Tags and notes | Full plan | Included |
| Export | Full plan: Notion, Obsidian, Evernote, Roam, Logseq, Apple Notes and more; Markdown, CSV | Obsidian plugin, Notion (beta), Apple Notes, Markdown, PDF |
| AI | Ghostreader inside Reader; hybrid search in the MCP server | Natural-language search, AI topic clusters, OCR cleanup |
| AI assistants | MCP server (Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Perplexity and others) plus a CLI | MCP server with OAuth and optional write access; public REST API |
| Platforms | Web, iOS, Android, iPhone widget; Reader adds Mac and Windows apps, e-ink, Chrome, Firefox and Safari extensions | iOS, Android, web, browser extension, macOS desktop app |
Pricing: two Readwise plans against one Screvi plan
Readwise splits its product in two. Lite, $5.59 a month billed annually or $6.99 month to month, covers the Daily Review, browsing and search, and syncing from all sources. Full, $9.99 a month billed annually ($119.88 a year) or $12.99 monthly, adds tags and notes, export to note apps, Reader, early access to new features and a price locked for life. The trial is 30 days, each referral extends it by another 30, and students get 50% off.
Screvi has one feature set and three ways to pay: $6.99 a month, $59.99 a year, or $299 once. The trial is 14 days with no card.
So the answer depends on which Readwise you mean. Against Lite, Screvi is $1.40 more per month on annual billing and includes tags, notes, a reader and exports that Lite does not. Against Full, Screvi is $60 cheaper per year, and Full’s extra money buys a broader Reader, more export targets and more sources.
Imports: breadth against a shorter, tighter list
Both sync Kindle through a browser extension or a My Clippings.txt upload. Screvi’s integrations page adds that its extension and mobile apps auto-sync every 24 hours; Readwise’s docs describe automatic sync through its extension without stating a frequency.
Past Kindle, Readwise’s catalog is the longest in the category; the table above leaves out Refind, BookFusion and voice notes. Screvi lists thirteen sources, among them Kobo (the KoboReader.sqlite file, parsed in the browser), Apple Books through its macOS app, X bookmarks with daily auto-sync, YouTube with timestamped transcript highlights, and Readwise itself, which makes switching a one-step import.
If your highlights come from Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, the web and YouTube, both cover you. If they come from Instapaper, an RSS reader, Hypothes.is, O’Reilly or Snipd, only Readwise does.
Read-later: Reader against Screvi’s built-in reader
Readwise Reader is a separate app and the main reason to pay for Full. It takes articles, RSS feeds, newsletters, PDFs, EPUBs, YouTube videos and X threads; adds Ghostreader, a GPT-based assistant that answers questions, defines terms and simplifies text; reads aloud with AI voices; and runs on web, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android and e-ink devices such as BOOX, with Chrome, Firefox and Safari extensions. Readwise calls it “the first read-it-later app built for power readers”, and the feature list backs that up.
Screvi’s reader lives inside the same app as the highlights, at no extra charge. It handles web articles, RSS feeds, DRM-free EPUBs, PDFs and YouTube transcripts, and adds a podcast player that transcribes what you are hearing so you can highlight it.
The practical difference: Reader is the deeper reading environment, with more formats, desktop apps and text-to-speech. Screvi’s reader covers the common cases without a second app or a higher plan.
Review and spaced repetition
Readwise’s Daily Review shows highlights one at a time, by email and in the app, and lets you tune how often each book appears. Mastery adds spaced repetition scheduled by a recall-probability half-life rather than fixed dates, and Themed Reviews build separate reviews from any mix of books, tags and sources on their own schedule.
Screvi’s daily review is built on spaced repetition, which its site compares to “the science behind Anki”, with an email digest, a home-screen widget that rotates through highlights, and streaks with a calendar history. Readwise has more controls; Screvi has more surfaces.
Exports: where highlights go next
This is Readwise Full’s strongest card. Its export catalog covers Notion, Obsidian (official plugin), Evernote, Apple Notes, OneNote, Roam, Logseq, Tana, RemNote, Craft, Capacities, Workflowy and NotebookLM, plus Markdown and CSV downloads. Lite includes none of it.
Screvi exports to Apple Notes, Markdown and PDF, has an official Obsidian plugin, and syncs to Notion in beta. That covers the two note apps most people ask about; if yours is Roam, Tana or Logseq, only Readwise syncs there.
AI and assistants
Readwise’s AI lives mostly in Reader, where Ghostreader summarizes, defines and simplifies. Its MCP server works with Claude, ChatGPT, Codex, Cursor and Perplexity, searches highlights with hybrid vector and full-text search, creates and updates highlights, manages Reader documents, and comes with a command-line tool for terminal agents.
Screvi’s AI sits closer to the library: natural-language search by meaning, AI-clustered topics that surface patterns across books, and OCR cleanup. Its MCP server connects over OAuth to Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and any MCP client, is included on every plan and, since its September 2026 update, can write with separate permission: save links, capture highlights, add notes and tags. A public REST API with read and write scopes sits alongside it.
Platforms
Readwise runs on web, iOS and Android, with an iPhone widget; Reader adds Mac and Windows apps, e-ink devices and Chrome, Firefox and Safari extensions. Screvi runs on iOS, Android, web and a browser extension, plus a macOS desktop app, which is also how it syncs Apple Books.
Who should pick which
Pick Readwise if:
- You want Reader as your reading app, with RSS, EPUBs, text-to-speech and e-ink support.
- Your highlights must sync to a note app beyond Notion and Obsidian, or you want the longest list of import sources.
- You want Mastery’s half-life scheduling and Themed Reviews, and a 30-day trial.
Pick Screvi if:
- You want everything, reader and exports included, for $6.99 a month or $59.99 a year, or $299 once.
- You read on Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, the web and YouTube, and want a macOS app and a home-screen widget.
- You want an AI assistant that can write into your library, or a REST API, without a higher tier.
Where Becoming fits
Becoming does the same job at a lower entry price and adds what neither of the two sells. The Library, $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year, imports from Kindle (synced from the mobile app or the Chrome extension), Readwise, Goodreads, Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, PDFs and photographed pages; has a Reader that works as a read-later queue for articles, newsletters, YouTube transcripts and PDFs; and adds keyword and semantic search, a Daily Review and an MCP server. It also includes AI reading: save an article, newsletter, video or photographed page whole, and the highlights are extracted for you. The Academy, $6.99 a month or $69.99 a year, adds Themes, four weeks on one idea drawn from your own highlights with a two-to-five-minute Practice each day, plus automatic tagging.
Where it lags both: no export to Notion or Obsidian, no RSS, EPUBs or podcasts, no desktop app, and a 7-day trial.
| Readwise | Screvi | Becoming | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Entry price | $5.59/mo billed annually (Lite) | $6.99/mo or $59.99/yr | $4.99/mo or $49.99/yr (The Library) |
| Exports to note apps | Full plan | Included | Not offered |
| AI reading of what you save | Ghostreader in Reader (Full) | Not listed | Included (The Library) |
| Daily practice from your highlights | Not offered | Not offered | Themes and Practices (The Academy) |
The side-by-side pages go deeper: Becoming as a Readwise alternative and Becoming as a Screvi alternative. For the wider field, see the best Readwise alternatives.
Sources
Every Readwise and Screvi fact on this page was last verified on September 23, 2026, on these pages:
- Readwise: pricing, Reader, MCP, all integrations, importing highlights, exporting highlights, reviewing highlights, mobile apps
- Screvi: home, pricing, integrations, MCP, September 2026 changelog
- Becoming: pricing, help center