PagePocket vs the Wayback Machine
The Wayback Machine is the web's public memory — free, run by a non-profit, and irreplaceable. PagePocket is a private Wayback Machine for the pages you personally care about. What each does best, stated plainly, with sources.
What the Wayback Machine is great at
The Wayback Machine, run by the Internet Archive (a 501(c)(3) non-profit), preserves the web for everyone. Its Save Page Now captures a page — including images and CSS — and instantly gives it a permanent web.archive.org URL that anyone can cite, share, and link to, free of charge [1]. Saved pages become part of a public collection that researchers, historians, and the curious can access at no cost [2].
- Free for anyone — Save Page Now gives you a permanent public URL in seconds [1]
- Contributes to the public record: saved pages can be cited, shared, and linked to [1]
- Decades of crawl history for popular URLs — history no personal tool can reconstruct [2]
Feature comparison
| Feature | PagePocket | Wayback Machine |
|---|---|---|
| Saves the full page — text, layout, images | Included | Included |
| Save Page Now saves the page you enter including its images and CSS, and gives it a permanent URL. It captures a single page, not a whole site [1]. | ||
| Free | Free plan: 50 pages/mo · 500 MB. Pro: $2/mo (billed yearly). | Free — run by a non-profit [1] |
| The Wayback Machine is an initiative of the Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit. Its subscription service for organisations building curated collections is Archive-It [1]. | ||
| Keeps your archive private | Included | Not included |
| The Wayback Machine is a public archive — anyone can access the collections [2], and site owners can request that pages be excluded or removed [2]. PagePocket pages are private to your account unless you share a link. | ||
| Contributes to the public record | Not included | Included |
| Every Wayback save helps preserve the open web for everyone — a genuinely unique strength no private tool offers. | ||
| Private, organised library of your saves | Included | Not included |
| Signed-in Save Page Now can list your captures in a personal 'my web archive' [3], but saved pages join the shared public archive — there are no private collections. | ||
| Full-text search across everything you save | Included | Not included |
| The Wayback Machine helps you locate archived URLs; there is no private per-user index of your own captures' contents [2]. | ||
| Share with a clean link | Included | Included |
| Wayback gives every capture a permanent public URL [1]. PagePocket links are private-by-default, with optional expiry and revocation. | ||
| Works offline | Not included | Not included |
| Both need a connection — Wayback captures live on web.archive.org, PagePocket is a cloud app. For fully offline copies, a tool like SingleFile is the better fit. | ||
Sources
- [1] Save Pages in the Wayback Machine — Internet Archive Help
- [2] Using the Wayback Machine — Internet Archive Help
- [3] Save Page Now — web.archive.org
PagePocket claims on this page come from our own features and pricing pages.
Straight talk
When the Wayback Machine is the better choice
The Wayback Machine is the better tool in real situations. If any of these describe you, use it with confidence — we mean it.
The save should be public
A Wayback save is a citable public URL in a non-profit's archive that anyone can visit [1]. For transparency journalism, fact-checking, or anything in the public interest, being public is the point.
You are researching a page's history
The Wayback Machine holds years of captures of popular URLs made by broad crawls [2] — history no personal archiving tool can reconstruct.
You need it free, with no account at all
Save Page Now works for anyone, free of charge [1]. For a single capture of a single page, nothing beats it.
The PagePocket angle
Where PagePocket fits
PagePocket is a private Wayback Machine for the pages you care about: full-fidelity copies land in your own library — not a public archive — organised in collections, full-text searchable across everything you have saved, and shareable with a link you can expire or revoke.
The two tools complement each other. Use the Wayback Machine when the save should be part of the public record; use PagePocket when it should stay yours. The Free plan (50 pages/mo, 500 MB) needs only an account to start.