A social magazine that curates stories from publishers, creators, and your network.
Free
- Beautiful magazine-style reading UI
- Deep publisher partnerships
- Social features for following creators and curators
Flipboard vs SMRY
Compare Flipboard and SMRY side by side on features, pricing, and the workflows each one is designed for.
SMRY
Paste an article URL, get a clean reader with AI summaries, audio, and chat.
Free, paid from $6/mo
- Zero-friction reading: paste a URL or prepend smry.ai/ and you have an article in seconds, no signup
- Genuinely cheap: $3/mo on annual for unlimited summaries, 10 voices, and ad-free reading
- Multiple extraction paths under the hood, so it works on more sites than a single-method bypass tool
Feature comparison
Here's how Flipboard and SMRY compare across the features people actually look for. They share 2 core capabilities; the differences show up in what each tool focuses on.
| Feature | SMRY | |
|---|---|---|
| Capture and save | ||
| Browser extension | Bookmarklet | Chrome extension captures from your authenticated session for paywalled and JS-rendered pages |
| Mobile apps | iOS, Android | |
| Save from email | ||
| Save tweets | Partial | |
| Save YouTube videos | Partial | Paste a YouTube URL to get a readable transcript, summary, and TTS |
| Save GitHub stars | ||
| Save PDFs | ||
| Save files (docs, spreadsheets) | ||
| Save audio files | ||
| Save via API | ||
| Auto-sync sources | ||
| RSS auto-sync | Partial | |
| YouTube channel sync | ||
| X bookmarks sync | ||
| GitHub stars sync | ||
| Newsletter inbox sync | Partial | |
| Library and reading | ||
| Reader view | 11 themes, custom typography, 6 interface languages | |
| Offline reading | Partial | |
| Full-text search | Partial | No personal library to search across |
| Semantic / AI search | ||
| Highlights | 5 colors, notes per highlight, syncs across devices on Pro | |
| Notes | Per-highlight notes | |
| Tags | ||
| Collections | Magazines | |
| Public sharing | Public magazines | Share quote links with rich social previews |
| Full-text RSS extraction | ||
| AI and agents | ||
| Markdown export for AI agents | Manual highlight export to Markdown only, no per-item markdown URL | |
| Bulk markdown export | Highlights export to Markdown / Notion / Obsidian on Pro, not the full article | |
| MCP server | ||
| CLI tool | ||
| Claude Code skill | ||
| AI summaries | Summaries in 6 languages, plus chat with the article | |
| Public API | ||
| Import and export | ||
| OPML import / export | ||
| Pocket import | ||
| Instapaper import | ||
| CSV / JSON export | Highlights only, Pro feature | |
| Send to Kindle | ||
| Import Kindle highlights |
Pricing
Flipboard is free and SMRY is free, paid from $6/mo. The tier that fits best usually comes down to how many items you save each month.
- Free
Free
All features free; ad-supported.
SMRY
- Free
Free
20 AI summaries per day, 2 voices, basic AI model, no export, no ad-free reading. Rate limited to 6 summaries per minute per IP.
- $6/mo
Pro
Unlimited summaries, 10 voices including a studio-quality voice, premium AI model, highlight export to Notion / Obsidian / Markdown, ad-free reading, priority support. 7-day free trial. Annual is half price ($3/mo effective).
Strengths and weaknesses
Both tools do their category well, but the specifics differ. Here's what each one is good at and where it tends to fall short.
What Flipboard does well
- Beautiful magazine-style reading UI
- Deep publisher partnerships
- Social features for following creators and curators
- Works entirely for free
Where it falls short
- Not a read-later app; you cannot reliably save arbitrary articles
- Heavy algorithmic curation with little user control
- No tagging, highlighting, or structured export
- Ads throughout the reading experience
What SMRY does well
- Zero-friction reading: paste a URL or prepend smry.ai/ and you have an article in seconds, no signup
- Genuinely cheap: $3/mo on annual for unlimited summaries, 10 voices, and ad-free reading
- Multiple extraction paths under the hood, so it works on more sites than a single-method bypass tool
- AI summaries available in six interface languages (EN, PT, DE, ZH, ES, NL)
- Chat with the article, with your highlights used as context
- Highlight export to Notion, Obsidian, Markdown, and JSON
- YouTube transcript view with summary, chat, and TTS
Where it falls short
- No personal library: SMRY is a single-article tool, not a place where your saves accumulate, search, or organise
- No auto-sync from RSS, X bookmarks, YouTube channels, GitHub stars, or a newsletter inbox
- No mobile app and no offline reading
- No public API, no MCP server, no agent-ready markdown URLs
- Highlights export, but the article itself doesn't export as a clean per-item markdown URL for AI agents
- Rate limited to 20 AI summaries per day on the free tier and 6 per minute per IP
- Paywall access depends on extraction methods that publishers can patch, with no guarantee for any specific site
About Flipboard
Flipboard is a free social news app, not a power-user reading tool. It curates stories from major publishers and independent creators into magazine-style feeds, with public Flipboard 'magazines' users can create and share. iOS, Android, and web only, no browser extension beyond a bookmarklet, no public API. In recent years Flipboard has leaned into Mastodon and fediverse integration, making it one of the few mainstream apps that speaks ActivityPub. The reader experience is beautiful. The power-user experience is not the point.
About SMRY
SMRY started life in late 2023 as an open-source paywall bypass tool that piped articles through archive.org and ran a ChatGPT summary on top. Two years on it has been repositioned as a full AI reading app. You paste a URL (or prepend smry.ai/ to it) and get a clean reader with 11 themes, an AI summary, text-to-speech in up to 10 voices, highlights in 5 colors, an article chat, and a YouTube transcript mode. The product is intentionally narrow. There is no personal library, no inbox, no RSS, no auto-sync from anywhere, and no mobile app. The pricing matches that scope: free with a daily summary cap, or $3 per month on annual ($6 monthly) for unlimited summaries, the premium voice, highlight export, and ad-free reading. The Chrome extension is optional and captures from your authenticated session so JS-rendered and paywalled pages render cleanly.