Raindrop vs Pocket, now that Pocket is gone

One of the two is not in the running

Mozilla shut Pocket down in July 2025 and kept exports available until October 8, 2025. If you still have that CSV in your downloads folder, it is the whole of your Pocket archive and it is worth putting somewhere before it becomes another orphaned file.

So the honest version of this comparison is not Raindrop versus Pocket. It is: Pocket did a job for you, and you now need to work out which job it was. Most people skip that step, pick the tool with the closest-looking interface, and abandon it two months later because it was solving the wrong half of the problem.

Saving to read, or saving to keep?

These feel identical at save time and diverge completely afterwards. Saving to read is a queue: the item arrives, you consume it once, and it goes to an archive you will not open again. Saving to keep is a reference: the item goes in because you will need it repeatedly, possibly for years, possibly with other people.

A queue is measured by how fast it empties; a reference is measured by how fast you find something in it.Pocket blurred the two, which is why the answer differs per person. Look at your export: mostly articles you already read, or mostly tools, portals, docs and dashboards?

• Mostly articles, consumed once — you want a read-it-later app. See the Pocket alternative guide.
• Mostly visual saves you browse by thumbnail — Raindrop's collections and tags are the natural fit.
• Mostly links you return to, alone or with a team — a shared link hub.

What Raindrop is good at, and where the line is

Raindrop's strength is collecting at category level: visual collections, tagging, and a large personal library that stays browsable. If the thing you loved about Pocket was the hoard, that is the closest landing spot, and the Raindrop comparison covers the detail.

The line shows up when other people are involved. A personal collector is built around your library; a team's links need enforced view-only access, a required list an admin can push, and offboarding that keeps the links when a person goes. Linksley does that half: boards shared with people or groups, view-only caps that hold in the app and the extension, required boards members cannot remove, and one-action revocation with links staying in the workspace. Boards can be your new tab page, cached locally so they open instantly.

Linksley does not do the read-it-later job at all — no reader view, no article archive, no offline reading, and no mobile app. If your export is 900 articles you intend to read on a train, take them to a reader, not here. Plenty of people end up running both: a reader for the queue, a board for the references that outlive it.