Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Lurnby, a tool for better learning, is now open source
I've been working on Lurnby for 2 years. It's kind of like a mix of pocket + kindle + anki. It lets you => add add epubs, pdfs, and web articles to the app => highlight and add comments => tag and organize highlights => review them with a spaced repetition system Today I made the decision to open source the project. I'm passionate about helping other people learn to learn better and hope that this will allow a lot more innovation in the tool and the space. I'm very new to open source and development in general really, but looking forward to receiving the guidance of the community.
Lurnby is an open-source learning tool that combines features of read-it-later services, e-readers, and flashcard apps. It allows users to import EPUBs, PDFs, and web articles, then highlight passages and add comments.… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Lurnby, a tool for better learning, is now open source launched in 2022; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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- 2IS
Hi everyone, For the past couple months I've been working on a website with two main features: - https://book.sv - put in a list of books and get recommendations on what to read next from a model trained on over a billion reviews - https://book.sv/intersect - put in a list of books and find the users on Goodreads who have read them all (if you don't want to be included in these results, you can opt-out here: https://book.sv/remove-my-data) Technical info available here: https://book.sv/how-it-works Note 1: If you only provide one or two…
Nov 2025 · book.sv · its alternatives →
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Alternative search engines are neat, as are RSS feeds. OpenOrb is a self-hosted app which allows visitors to search over a list of blogs you love. If you put your 10 favourite blogs in there, it'll search just those blogs and not show you any sponsored content or machine-generated garbage (unless... you follow blogs written by machines?) Personal RSS feed readers can usually do this sort of thing, but RSS readers aren’t meant to be shared, so you can think of the search engine as a 'curated feed list as a public service'. I wrote a longer blog post about OpenOrb here:…
2024 · openorb.idiot.sh · its alternatives →
- 5IM
The idea is actually quite simple. As a Japanese learner and a coder, I've always wanted there to be an open-source, 100% free for learning Japanese, similar to Monkeytype in the typing community. Unfortunately, pretty much all language learning apps are closed-sourced and paid these days, and the ones that are free have unfortunately been abandoned. But of course, just creating yet another language learning app was not enough - there has to be a unique selling point. And then I thought to myself: why not make it crazy and do what no other language learning app ever did by adding a gazillion…
2025 · kanadojo.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, cofounder of Readwise here. We've been working on this cross-platform reader app for about 2 years, excited to finally share it in public beta. Probably the most notable thing that makes Reader unique is that it supports almost any content type you could want to save/read/highlight: * web pages * emails/newsletters * PDFs * ePubs * twitter threads * youtube videos (with transcripts) * RSS feeds With all of your knowledge content in one place, we built powerful reading and highlighting, as well as a bunch of novel triage/organization features, so you can actually…
2022 · readwise.io · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, maker here. It was a serious 4-6 months of effort to build this. I have never poured as much love, attention and detail into a project before. So I really appreciate you having a looksie! The homepage has a fresh list of articles every hour and is open to all. Still, I recommend signing up so you can add stuff to your reading list and follow blogs. My initial plan was to monetize this with subtle ads, but that didn't work out as the traffic to the site isn't nearly enough for that. That said, I have a fair bit invested in this and I need your help figuring out a way to make this…
2023 · boredreading.com · its alternatives →
- 8LO
Hello HN, Over the last 12 months, I have been building https://learnawesome.org This idea came from Danny Hillis' 2012 talk at OSCON, which itself was inspired from Neal Stepehenson's _The Diamond Age : A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer_ The dream is to build a tool that matches the right learning material to the right student at the right time. Wikipedia is great, but it doesn't do a good job of leveraging the rich variety of learning resources that exist on the Web. Same applies to GoodReads - which is focused only on books, whereas these days we actually learn from videos,…
2020 · its alternatives →
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Obooko▲269Hey HN, I'm George. I spent few months rebuilding Obooko, a free ebook platform that's been around since 2010 with 11 million downloads. Reading is losing to scrolling, but BookTok has 370B+ views. People want book content, they're just not reading books. I think that’s because modern reading hasn’t kept up with the pace of the internet. What I built Obooko is ad-supported like YouTube. No paywall, no subscription, no account required. 4,000+ books across 30+ genres. You can read in the browser, sync across devices, or download as PDF/EPUB/Kindle. The reader is built on EPUB.js…
Feb 2026 · obooko.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, I made Browser-Use, an open-source tool that lets (all Langchain supported) LLMs execute tasks directly in the browser just with function calling. It allows you to build agents that interact with web elements using natural language prompts. We created a layer that simplifies website interaction for LLMs by extracting xPaths and interactive elements like buttons and input fields (and other fancy things). This enables you to design custom web automation and scraping functions without manual inspection through DevTools. Hasn't this been done a lot of times? Good question, as a general…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN! I've been working on BookWith, an open-source e-book reader that integrates AI as your reading companion. The problem: Traditional e-readers are passive. When you encounter something unclear, you have to context-switch to search for it. Your highlights and notes remain isolated, and you can't easily connect ideas across different books. My solution: BookWith embeds an AI that maintains full context of what you're reading. It features: - Context-aware AI chat: Ask questions about the current page/chapter and get instant answers - AI podcast generation: Automatically converts book…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Wiby Search Engine. Contribute to wibyweb/wiby development by creating an account on GitHub.
2022 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 14
Code is still in pre-alpha but is perfectly usable, what do you think we can do better ?
2023 · learnhouse.app · its alternatives →
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An open source tool for context-aware digital textbooks
2015 · hypersay.com · its alternatives →
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Hey HN, I’ve built Open Codex, a fully local, open-source alternative to OpenAI’s Codex CLI. My initial plan was to fork their project and extend it. I even started doing that. But it turned out their code has several leaky abstractions, which made it hard to override core behavior cleanly. Shortly after, OpenAI introduced breaking changes. Maintaining my customizations on top became increasingly difficult. So I rewrote the whole thing from scratch using Python. My version is designed to support local LLMs. Right now, it only works with phi-4-mini (GGUF) via…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18IB
Quizlet, a popular tool among high schoolers and college students used to study for tests recently made it's core functionality paid. In an era where Autodesk, Adobe, and Microsoft hold their proprietary software to their chests, it's exciting to see opensource alternatives come to compete with them. I'm 15, and I'm excited to do my part to keep education free for everyone. https://openlearn.vercel.app
2022 · its alternatives →
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Edunin▲96Open-source problem-solving platform to learn how to learn
2023 · edunin.notion.site · its alternatives →
- 20IM
Hi HN, Since 2019, I’ve been working on a writing platform designed for creating complex documents (e.g., theses). I personally use it for everything as it also allows to classify documents in categories so you can organize them efficiently. As of a few months ago, the app is also available in the browser, and you can now invite coworkers to collaborate on a document in real time. The app is somewhat inspired by LyX. It offers an intuitive, modern editor, but users don’t need to know any LaTeX. When it’s time to export, they can choose from a range of templates (IEEE paper, thesis, etc.). A…
2025 · its alternatives →
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Hi HackerNews, Lately, I have seen an explosion in posts offering paid APIs/services to get unstructured data into LLMs (i.e. langchain extract, ragflow, unstructured, unstract, just to name a few) and I have been largely disappointed by them, either because they fail to implement multimodal support, fail to give good context for "really tricky" PDFs / Word docs / Powerpoints, or are just plain difficult to use. In light of all these posts I figured I'd share my solution that has been working smoothly for me and my clients. I put it up on GitHub for free so you can check it…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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- 24MS
I have finally convinced my son to take a step forward to publish something in public domain. As he is learning Python these days, he made a scraper to download Cambridge past papers (GCSE / IGCSE). If you like it, encourage the kid by pressing the Star button :) https://github.com/UsamaKashif/CambridgePastPapersDownloader
2019 · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →