Pocket vs SMRY

Compare Pocket and SMRY side by side on features, pricing, and the workflows each one is designed for.

Pocket

Shut down

Save articles, videos, and stories from any publication.

Free, paid from $4.99/mo

  • Simple, polished reading experience
  • Strong native apps across iOS, Android, and web
  • Defined the read-later category for over a decade

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 Pocket and SMRY compare across the features people actually look for. They share 3 core capabilities; the differences show up in what each tool focuses on.

FeaturePocketSMRY
Capture and save
Browser extension
Mobile apps
Save from email
Save tweets
Save YouTube videos
Save GitHub stars
Save PDFs
Save files (docs, spreadsheets)
Save audio files
Save via API
Auto-sync sources
RSS auto-sync
YouTube channel sync
X bookmarks sync
GitHub stars sync
Newsletter inbox sync
Library and reading
Reader view
Offline reading
Full-text search
Semantic / AI search
Highlights
Notes
Tags
Collections
Public sharing
Full-text RSS extraction
AI and agents
Markdown export for AI agents
Bulk markdown export
MCP server
CLI tool
Claude Code skill
AI summaries
Public API
Import and export
OPML import / export
Pocket import
Instapaper import
CSV / JSON export
Send to Kindle
Import Kindle highlights

Pricing

Pocket has shut down, so pricing below is for reference only. SMRY is free, paid from $6/mo.

Pocket

  • Free

    Save unlimited items, basic offline reading.

    Free
  • Premium

    Permanent library, full-text search, unlimited highlights, suggested tags, premium fonts, ad-free.

    $4.99/mo

SMRY

  • 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.

    Free
  • 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).

    $6/mo

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 Pocket did well

  • Simple, polished reading experience
  • Strong native apps across iOS, Android, and web
  • Defined the read-later category for over a decade
  • Clean text extraction for most articles

Where it fell short

  • Pocket was shut down by Mozilla on July 8, 2025
  • Limited search and organization without Premium
  • No structured export for AI tools or LLM workflows
  • Proprietary lock-in; RSS and bulk sync workflows are limited

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

Which one should you pick?

Pocket is no longer an option

Pocket has shut down and is no longer available. Any of the active alternatives is a safer bet.

About Pocket

Pocket launched in 2007 as Read It Later, pioneered the modern read-later category, and was acquired by Mozilla in 2017. For nearly two decades it was the default way to save web articles and read them later on any device, with a clean reader view and optional offline access. Mozilla shut Pocket down on July 8, 2025. All user data was permanently deleted on November 12, 2025. The apps and extensions no longer work, and any integrations built against the Pocket API have stopped. If you still have an export file from before that date, most modern alternatives (Instapaper, Readwise Reader, Raindrop, Matter, Keep) can import it.

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.

Keep exploring