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JayBoard vs Karakeep
Both save what you find on the web, and they are not the same tool. One keeps a library you read; the other keeps one you look at.
People who try JayBoard have often tried Karakeep first, and the question that follows is fair: they both save things off the web, so what is the difference?
The short answer is what happens after the save. Karakeep gives you a library you read. JayBoard gives you one you look at.
What Karakeep is#
Karakeep — formerly Hoarder — calls itself "a self-hostable bookmark-everything app with a touch of AI for the data hoarders out there". It saves links, notes, images and PDFs, archives the page so the bookmark outlives the site, tags everything with an LLM, and puts it all behind a very good search. It is open source, it runs on your own machine with Docker, and it is built around reading: a reader view, highlights, feeds, a phone in your pocket.
What JayBoard is#
JayBoard is a private visual library. What you keep in it is media and bookmarks — images, videos, links and whole pages saved offline — and the assumption is that you will want to look at them again rather than work through them as a queue. It is built to be quick at every step of that: the capture, what gets stored, how fast the grid comes back, and what you can arrange out of it afterwards.
That assumption changes the shape of the app. Capture is an overlay you aim at a page: AltShiftS to pick several images at once, AltShiftD to send whatever you click straight to a project with no form in the way. Clicking five images on a page should not be five forms, and in JayBoard it is five clicks.
The AI pass then writes tags and a description of the thing itself — what the image shows, what the video is, what the page says — so a screenshot of a dark navigation bar comes back for the words you would actually think of a month later, not for whatever the page it came from happened to be called.
And the library has a second half that a bookmark manager has no reason to have: infinite moodboards, where the things you saved become cards you can drag around, group into frames, annotate and connect, then export as PNG or SVG. That is the dividing line. Lists and tags are the right structure for a queue of things to read. For a pile of references they are not enough — the pile only becomes useful once you can lay it out next to itself.
Side by side#
| JayBoard | Karakeep | |
|---|---|---|
| Picking several things off one page | ✅ Aim the overlay at images and videos, or one click each | ❌ A page at a time |
| An infinite canvas to arrange them on | ✅ Cards, notes, frames and connectors, exported as PNG or SVG | ❌ Lists and tags |
| AI tagging | ✅ Tags and a description written for what was saved — the image, the video, the page — at four levels of detail | ✅ Tags and summaries, and it will use a local Ollama model |
| Search | ✅ Full text over titles, tags, descriptions, your notes, URLs, filenames, and the text of pages saved offline | ✅ Full text over everything it stores, plus semantic search and OCR inside images |
| Saves video | ✅ With yt-dlp | ✅ With yt-dlp |
| Whole-page archive | ✅ The whole page, saved as one self-contained HTML file | ✅ The whole page, saved as one self-contained HTML file |
| Sharing | ✅ A read-only link to a board | ✅ Lists, with editors and viewers |
| On a phone | ❌ The library is a web app; capture is desktop Chrome | ✅ iOS and Android apps |
| Self-hosting | ❌ Hosted by us | ✅ Docker, free forever |
Which one#
Take Karakeep if you want to run it yourself, on your own disk under your own domain — JayBoard is hosted, and if that is the deciding factor there is nothing more to weigh. Take it too if you read on a phone, or if most of what you keep is prose.
Take JayBoard if what fills your saves is images and video, if you want them on a board rather than in a list, and if the part that has beaten you before is the saving itself.
Everything above about Karakeep was checked against its own site and README when this was written. It is an actively developed project and this will go out of date; if we have got something wrong, tell us and we will fix it.