2 self-hosted Delicious alternatives

Last reviewed Oct 11, 2026 · 577 words

Delicious is gone, so the question is not whether to switch but where your links should live now. For anyone who misses what Delicious actually was, a public, tagged stream of links with a feed other people could follow, run Shaarli. It was built for that job, needs no database, and the directory estimates it at 128 MB of RAM. If you only ever used Delicious as a private tag store, Buku in a terminal or linkding in a browser fits better.

What you gain and what you give up

Gained: permanence. The service that held your bookmarks was sold and wound down; a self-hosted store lasts exactly as long as you keep it. Shaarli stores everything in flat files, so a backup is one folder copy. Each link can be public or private, and the public ones produce an RSS feed, which is the nearest thing to a Delicious profile page that friends could subscribe to.

Given up: the network. Delicious's popular pages, the "who else saved this" counts and shared tag clouds came from millions of users bookmarking the same URLs. No single-user tool can rebuild that, and Shaarli is single-user by design. If your use of Delicious was discovery rather than storage, nothing here replaces it; an RSS reader pointed at a few people's public Shaarli feeds is the closest substitute.

Which replacement fits which user

Shaarli (PHP, since 2013) is the Delicious-shaped option. Buku (Python, since 2015) suits people who live in a shell: one portable SQLite file, powerful tag search, scriptable from anywhere, and a web UI only through an add-on. Linkding is not on the card list above, but it is the tool I would hand a non-technical person: a fast, plain web UI and a good browser extension, though the catalogue notes it does not archive pages automatically.

Getting old bookmarks back in

If you exported from Delicious before it closed, the file is a Netscape-format bookmarks HTML file, the same format every browser exports. Shaarli's import tool and linkding's importer both accept that format, and both keep the tags that Delicious wrote into each link's TAGS attribute. Buku imports HTML bookmark files from the command line; check a sample of tags afterwards, because importers differ on how they treat that attribute. Expect a share of very old links to be dead. Import everything anyway and prune later, since a dead link with good tags still tells you what you were reading.

If you never exported, your Delicious data is not coming back. Start from your browser's own bookmarks export instead; the import path is identical.

What I'd do

Run Shaarli in Docker, import your old export, make the links you are happy to share public, and give the feed URL to the two or three people whose Delicious pages you used to read. If you find you never open the web UI and only ever search, the Buku vs Shaarli comparison is the next read, and the bookmarks category covers the archiving tools for when saving the link is no longer enough.