Muse vs GoodLinks: a visual library or a reading app

GoodLinks and Muse both exist because saving something is easy and finding it again is not. They answer that in two different ways, for two different kinds of saving. GoodLinks is a read-it-later app: a clean queue of articles, stripped of ads, waiting on whichever device you pick up. Muse is a visual library on your Mac, where a link sits next to a screenshot, an image or a note and everything is found by search rather than by reading down a list.

Plenty of comparison pages exist to make one app look silly. This is not one of those. GoodLinks is very well made, it costs a third of what Muse costs, and it does several things Muse does not do at all.

What is GoodLinks good at?

Reading. That is the whole point of it, and it is built properly around that one job. GoodLinks pulls the article text out of a page and throws away the ads and the clutter, so what you get is the words at a size and a font you chose. You can highlight passages, attach notes to them, and export the lot as Markdown with a template you control.

It also goes where you go. GoodLinks is a universal App Store purchase, so buying once covers iPhone, iPad and Mac, kept in step through iCloud sync with no account to create. Save something on your phone at lunchtime and it is there on your Mac in the evening, with your reading position intact.

Then there is the part people underrate until a page disappears on them. GoodLinks keeps the full text of every article it saves, which its App Store listing describes plainly: the rich text of each article is stored in the app, so your history is a natural archive. So the article survives a site being redesigned, or a plane with no wifi. It is the most useful thing a read-it-later app can do, and GoodLinks does it.

Where does Muse do a different job?

Muse is not a reading app and does not try to be one. It is a library for everything you collect, where the format does not decide which tool it goes into. Images, screenshots, GIFs, video, PDFs, plain notes and links all sit in the same collections, filed the same way and searched the same way. If a set of research is half saved articles and half screenshots, Muse is built to hold both halves together rather than splitting them across two apps.

Search is the other half of the case. Muse reads the words inside a picture, so a screenshot of a pricing table is findable by typing part of what it says. It reads the colours, so you can look for the dark green thing you cannot name. With the optional Pro AI pack it matches on meaning, which is how a search for a quiet room with warm light returns photographs nobody ever labelled that way. GoodLinks searches the title, author, description and content of your articles, which is the right search for a pile of text and the wrong one for a pile of pictures.

The honest gaps: sync, reading and the article itself

Three things GoodLinks does that Muse does not, stated plainly because you will find them out in week one otherwise.

Muse is Mac only. There is no iPhone app, no iPad app, and no sync of any kind. One library, on one machine. GoodLinks runs on all three of Apple's platforms off a single purchase and syncs between them. If you save mostly from your phone, that difference decides this comparison on its own and nothing further down the page will change it.

Muse has no reading mode. A saved link in Muse shows the site's own preview image, the title, the icon, your tags and any note you added, so it looks like the thing it points at. What it does not do is give you the article, laid out for reading, with your highlights on it. That is exactly what GoodLinks was built for.

Muse does not archive web pages. If the site behind a saved link goes down, the page is gone, and what survives is the preview, the title, the tags and the note. GoodLinks keeps the text, so it survives. This is not a small caveat and it is not being buried here: for saved reading specifically, GoodLinks is the safer place to put it.

One more, on platform. Muse needs an Apple Silicon Mac running macOS 14 Sonoma or later. On an Intel Mac it will not run at all, and GoodLinks will.

Price, side by side

Both are a single payment, which makes this a rare like-for-like comparison in a category full of subscriptions. GoodLinks is $9.99 once on the App Store, covering iPhone, iPad and Mac together, with an optional Annual Feature Upgrade at $4.99 a year if you want features released after your first year of ownership. Anything already in the app when you buy it stays yours regardless. Muse is $29 once, with every update included and no optional tier at all. A few third-party roundups still quote a lower one-off figure for GoodLinks. Check the App Store listing itself: $9.99 is what it shows.

GoodLinks takes five of those rows. That is what an honest comparison of a $9.99 reading app against a $29 visual library looks like, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

Can you run both?

Yes, and for a lot of people that is the sensible answer rather than a diplomatic one. The two libraries barely overlap. Articles you intend to read go to GoodLinks and get read there. Reference material goes to Muse: the packaging shot, the layout worth copying, the page you saved for what it looked like rather than what it said.

If you do want to move some of it across, GoodLinks exports an article as PDF, plain text or Markdown, and there is a wider route worth knowing about too, set out in the full guide to getting your data out of GoodLinks. Muse has no dedicated GoodLinks importer, so links come across by hand, pasted in one at a time, with Muse fetching its own preview and title for each.

Which one should you buy?

Buy GoodLinks if what fills your saved list is articles you genuinely mean to read, if you save from a phone as often as from a Mac, or if you want the words to still be there when the site is not. It is cheaper, it covers more devices, and it is better at that job than Muse will ever be, because Muse is not attempting it.

Buy Muse if your saving habit is mostly visual. Screenshots that pile up faster than you can name them, images pulled off the web, links kept for the picture on the page. A grid you can scan beats a list you have to read once the thing you are looking for is something you would recognise on sight. Muse is also worth a look if you want a single place for the mixed pile rather than a reading app, a screenshot folder and a bookmarks bar, which is the case made in a bookmark manager for Mac that actually works.

Muse gives you 30 days with everything unlocked and no card required. When the trial ends the app locks until you buy a licence, and Export My Library still writes your collections out as ordinary folders if you decide it is not for you.