Self-hosted web archiving in HTML, PDF, and WARC
Free
- Open source
- App
Category — Self-hosted
Best Self-Hosted Web Archiving Tools (2026)
If Pocket's shutdown taught savers anything, it's that hosted services can vanish — along with your archive. Self-hosted archiving tools put the copies on hardware you control. ArchiveBox is the heavyweight: it snapshots every URL as HTML, PDF, screenshot, and WARC so pages survive even when the originals disappear. Shiori is a lightweight Go bookmark manager with offline article archiving that runs in a single binary. LinkAce is a PHP link archive with tags, lists, and automatic link-rot monitoring. All three are free, open source, and Docker-ready — the only cost is the server they run on.
How they compare
| Tool | Price | Free tier | Type | Saves to |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ArchiveBox | Free | Yes | Open source, App | Your own server (self-hosted archive folder) · SQLite database + on-disk snapshot files · Optional remote storage backends (S3, NFS, SMB) |
| Shiori | Free | Yes | Open source, App | Your own server (SQLite, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, or MySQL) |
| LinkAce | Free | Yes | Open source, App | Your own server |
All 3 tools
Simple Go bookmark manager with offline article archiving
Free
- Open source
- App
Self-hosted link archive with tags and monitoring
Free
- Open source
- App
FAQ
What is the best self-hosted alternative to Pocket or the Wayback Machine?
ArchiveBox comes closest to a personal Wayback Machine — it saves each page in multiple formats (HTML, PDF, screenshot, WARC) for long-term preservation. For a lighter Pocket-style reading archive, Shiori stores clean offline copies of articles with far less setup.
How hard is it to run a self-hosted archiving tool?
Easier than you might expect. All three tools here ship official Docker images; Shiori is a single Go binary, LinkAce runs on any PHP host, and ArchiveBox needs one docker-compose file. Basic comfort with a terminal and a spare machine or VPS is enough.
Do these tools detect dead links?
LinkAce does this best — it monitors your saved links and flags them when they go offline. ArchiveBox sidesteps the problem entirely by storing complete offline copies at save time, so link rot never costs you the content.