Keep and SMRY both let you read articles in a clean reader with AI on top, but they answer different questions. SMRY is built for one article right now. Keep is built for a personal library that an AI agent can read later.
Pick SMRY if you want a one-off reader with an AI summary and don't want an account or a backlog. Pick Keep if you want everything you save (articles, tweets, YouTube videos, newsletters, RSS, GitHub stars) in one searchable library, with a markdown URL on every item that Claude Code, Cursor, and any MCP client can read. They're not really substitutes. SMRY ends when you close the tab; Keep is where things accumulate.
Save anything from the web and get it back as markdown for AI agents or a simple reading feed.
Free, paid from $10/mo
Paste an article URL, get a clean reader with AI summaries, audio, and chat.
Free, paid from $6/mo
The two products overlap on reading and AI summaries. Keep adds a library, auto-sync from multiple sources, and agent-ready exports. SMRY adds article chat, text-to-speech voices, and the lowest price tag in the category. Here's how they line up.
| Feature | Keep | SMRY |
|---|---|---|
| Capture and save | ||
| Browser extension | Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Brave | Chrome extension captures from your authenticated session for paywalled and JS-rendered pages |
| Mobile apps | ||
| Save from email | Forward to in.keep.md | |
| Save tweets | ||
| Save YouTube videos | With transcripts | Paste a YouTube URL to get a readable transcript, summary, and TTS |
| Save GitHub stars | ||
| Save PDFs | Converted to markdown | |
| Save files (docs, spreadsheets) | Word, Excel, CSV, HTML, OpenDocument | |
| Save audio files | With Whisper transcription | |
| Save via API | ||
| Auto-sync sources | ||
| RSS auto-sync | ||
| YouTube channel sync | ||
| X bookmarks sync | Auto-sync on paid plans; manual import from extension export on free | |
| GitHub stars sync | ||
| Newsletter inbox sync | ||
| Library and reading | ||
| Reader view | 11 themes, custom typography, 6 interface languages | |
| Offline reading | Partial | |
| Full-text search | No personal library to search across | |
| Semantic / AI search | ||
| Highlights | Highlight from the extension or from inside the reader, with optional notes; renders inline | 5 colors, notes per highlight, syncs across devices on Pro |
| Notes | Per-highlight notes | |
| Tags | ||
| Collections | ||
| Public sharing | Partial | Share quote links with rich social previews |
| Full-text RSS extraction | ||
| AI and agents | ||
| Markdown export for AI agents | Per-item .md URL | 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 | keep-markdown npm package | |
| Claude Code skill | ||
| AI summaries | AI summary and AI tagging on every saved article | Summaries in 6 languages, plus chat with the article |
| Public API | ||
| Import and export | ||
| OPML import / export | Import from and export to any OPML-compatible reader | |
| Pocket import | ZIP, CSV, and legacy HTML exports | |
| Instapaper import | CSV export with folders, archive, and starred state | |
| CSV / JSON export | Export to CSV or JSON. Import plain CSV/TSV plus Omnivore, Raindrop.io, Pinboard, and Wallabag export files. | Highlights only, Pro feature |
| Send to Kindle | EPUB delivered to your Kindle email | |
| Import Kindle highlights | From My Clippings.txt, no Amazon login required |
SMRY is the cheapest paid plan in the category: $6/mo or $36/yr (effective $3/mo on annual), with a free tier capped at 20 AI summaries per day. Keep has a permanently free tier with unlimited links, RSS, YouTube channel sync, browser extension, API, CLI, and MCP. Paid plans start at $10/mo (Plus) for 500 full-content items per cycle with X bookmarks, the email inbox, GitHub stars, uploads, and AI features.
Free
Unlimited links, browser extension, API/CLI/MCP, RSS feeds, YouTube subscriptions, and free imports from bookmark export files.
Plus
500 full-content items per cycle, X bookmarks, email inbox, GitHub sync, uploads, and AI features.
Pro
1,000 full-content items per cycle, everything in Plus.
Max
5,000 full-content items per cycle, everything in Pro.
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.
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).
SMRY's strengths are zero friction and a tiny price. Keep's strengths are scope and agent-readiness. SMRY wins on 'I just want this article.' Keep wins on 'I want everything I've ever saved, searchable, and available to my AI tools.'
Your workflow is 'save once, refer back many times.' You want a real library: RSS, X bookmarks, YouTube channels, newsletters, GitHub stars, and articles all in one place, searchable, with semantic search and full-text search. You also want every saved item available as clean markdown so Claude Code, Cursor, or a custom agent can read your library.
Your workflow is 'read this one article right now.' You hit a paywall or a wall of ads, you want it stripped clean with an AI summary and maybe a voice reading it back to you, and you don't want another account or another app to manage. $3 a month on annual is the cheapest credible AI reader if that's all you need.
Keep is a save-anywhere tool built around one idea: everything you capture should be available as clean markdown that an AI agent can read. Articles, tweets, YouTube videos with transcripts, GitHub stars, newsletters, RSS, and plain URLs all land in the same searchable library. People read their library in a clean in-app feed. Agents read it through the API, CLI, MCP server, and Claude Code skill, so Claude Code, Cursor, ChatGPT, and other tools can work against the library directly. Auto-sync pulls from RSS, YouTube, X bookmarks, GitHub stars, and newsletter inboxes on a schedule, so the library stays current without manual work. Free users can also import bookmark exports from Pocket, Instapaper, Omnivore, Raindrop.io, Pinboard, Wallabag, Safari, OPML readers, plain CSV/TSV files, and X bookmarks exported by the Keep extension. Semantic search runs across everything you've saved.
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.
No. SMRY is a one-article-at-a-time reader. Highlights sync across devices on Pro, but the article itself isn't stored in a library you own. Keep saves every article you clip into a searchable, taggable library with full-text and semantic search.
SMRY handles YouTube via transcript view. It does not save tweets, ingest newsletters from an inbox, sync X bookmarks, or pull from RSS. Keep handles all of those, plus GitHub stars, with auto-sync on paid plans.
No. SMRY has no public API, no MCP server, no CLI, and no Claude Code skill. Keep ships all four. Every saved item in Keep also has a clean markdown URL designed for AI agents.
Pro exports your highlights to Notion, Obsidian, Markdown, or JSON. The article body itself does not export as a per-item markdown URL. Keep exposes every saved item as a markdown URL by default, plus bulk export to CSV and JSON.
It works on most major publications most of the time. SMRY runs multiple extraction paths and picks the best result, which is more robust than single-method bypass tools, but no extraction method works on every site forever. Keep does not market itself as a paywall bypass tool; it saves whatever the extension or your API call gives it.
Yes. Keep generates an AI summary and AI tags on every saved article, available across the whole library. SMRY's summaries are per-article and surfaced inside the reader.
SMRY Pro at $3/mo on annual is cheaper than Keep's paid plans. Keep's free tier covers more (unlimited links, RSS, YouTube channels, API, MCP, CLI, browser extension), but the paid features (full-content storage, X bookmarks, GitHub stars, email inbox, uploads) start at $10/mo.
Neither has a native mobile app. Both work on mobile web. Keep's browser extension covers Chrome, Firefox, Edge, and Brave on desktop. SMRY's Chrome extension is desktop-only.
If you've collected highlights in SMRY Pro, export them to Markdown or JSON and import to Keep alongside the original article URLs. SMRY doesn't store a backlog of articles to migrate, so the cleanest path is to start clipping with Keep going forward.
Many people will. Use SMRY for the one-off article on a site that throws ads or a paywall at you, and use Keep for everything you actually want to keep. They don't really conflict — SMRY is a reader, Keep is the library underneath it.