Karakeep

Last reviewed Aug 26, 2026 · 746 words

Pocket shut down in July 2025, and Karakeep, called Hoarder until early 2025, is the self-hosted replacement that most resembles what people lost: save from a phone share sheet or browser button, get a full-page archive, get tags without typing them. The caveats are that it is 3 containers and 1 GB of RAM where Linkding is one container and 100 MB, and the automatic tagging needs either an OpenAI-compatible API key or a local model server to do anything.

Three containers, and Chrome is the heavy one

The compose file runs the Karakeep web app, a headless Chrome for fetching and archiving pages, and Meilisearch for full-text search. Chrome is the one that sets the RAM floor; a page render can spike it well past the app itself. Three environment values are required:

NEXTAUTH_URL=https://keep.example.com
NEXTAUTH_SECRET=$(openssl rand -base64 36)
MEILI_MASTER_KEY=$(openssl rand -base64 36)

The app listens on 3000, keeps everything under /data, and the first account you register becomes admin; disable signups in the admin settings after that. Search works offline from day one because Meilisearch indexes the extracted text of every page, not just titles, which is the feature that makes a 2,000-bookmark archive usable at all.

AI tagging without paying per bookmark

Tagging is done by a language model reading the page text (and a vision model looking at images) and proposing tags, which Karakeep then attaches automatically. With OPENAI_API_KEY set it uses OpenAI, and the cost is small: a few cents per 100 bookmarks with a small model at current pricing. The self-hosted route points it at Ollama instead:

OLLAMA_BASE_URL=http://ollama:11434
INFERENCE_TEXT_MODEL=llama3.1:8b
INFERENCE_IMAGE_MODEL=llava

An 8B model on a CPU-only box takes 10 to 30 seconds per bookmark and produces perfectly good tags, because the task is easy; nobody needs a frontier model to decide that a Rust blog post is about "rust" and "programming". If you save 10 things a day, a modest GPU-less server keeps up in the background. Tags are suggestions you can edit, and a tag once corrected on a few bookmarks tends to be reused sensibly.

Archiving costs disk, and you decide how much

By default Karakeep stores a screenshot and the extracted text. Turn on CRAWLER_FULL_PAGE_ARCHIVE=true and it also saves a single-file HTML copy of the whole page, images inlined, so the article survives the site's paywall, redesign or death. Budget 1 to 3 MB per page for full archives, meaning 5,000 bookmarks is somewhere around 10 GB. That is the difference between a bookmark manager and a personal Wayback Machine, and it is the mode I run, but put /data on real storage rather than the root partition of a small VPS.

Linkding, Linkwarden or Karakeep

Linkding is the minimalist: one container, tiny, fast, tags by hand, no archiving beyond an optional snapshot. Linkwarden sits in the middle with archiving, collections and a clean UI, on Postgres. Karakeep is the heaviest and the most complete: notes and images alongside links, RSS feed ingestion, mobile apps for iOS and Android, browser extensions, and the AI layer. If you want a list of links, take Linkding and be done in 5 minutes. If you want a scrapbook that reads your saves for you, this is the one.

Getting your Pocket export in

Pocket allowed a CSV export before it closed, and Karakeep imports it directly from the settings page, along with the Netscape HTML format every browser produces and Omnivore's JSON. Imports queue each URL for crawling, so 3,000 links will keep Chrome busy for an evening; let it run overnight rather than watching. The Pocket switching guide covers what the other replacements do with the same file.

What I'd do

Karakeep on a 2 GB box with /data on a proper disk, full-page archiving on, signups off after the first login. For tagging, Ollama with an 8B model on the same host if it has 8 GB spare, an API key with a cheap model if it doesn't; the tags are the reason to pick this over Linkding, so don't run it without one. Nightly copy of /data and the Meilisearch volume, and the phone app installed the same day, because a read-later tool you cannot save to from the sofa is one you stop using.