If you, like me, are trying to gradually move away from online services that are run by corrupt American megacorporations, then perhaps this overview of alternatives to Goodreads might help you find a new home for your reading journal. I have been using Goodreads since 2009, which was long before it was sold to Amazon. Back then it was the only website of its kind.

Goodreads is still the website with the most comprehensive functionality for everything I need to organize my books. The only problem (aside from it being owned by Amazon) I see is that recommendations focus immensely on new releases, whereas I prefer to read series that are finished – I hate waiting for the next book in a series. Also, a lot of new stuff is ridiculously hyped and not really worth it. This is where it really shows that Goodreads has basically become a marketing tool for Amazon to sell new books. Goodreads is also a weird amalgamation of new features and incredibly old code, which is why assume it sometimes has severe performance issues.

Advantages of Goodreads are without a doubt the very large user base and the social aspects. It has a sense of community with the friend’s feed, if that is an important aspect for you.

There are however, several alternatives to Goodreads, of which I tried 4 for a couple of weeks to evaluate them. One of these is literal.club. This site seems bare-bones at a glance, but it emulates the structure of Goodreads more closely than other alternatives, and seems to try to be a modernized version of it. The site is blazingly fast. As far as I understand, there are only ever two recommendations at a time that can’t be refreshed, or maybe I just didn’t find them (which would be bad usability). Pros are definitely the user profile, which is nicely structured, and unlike on Goodreads it’s very easy to find your own history of reviews. It also has book clubs and goals as features. The site is made in Berlin, Germany.

Another alternative is LibraryThing. This site looks straight from the 00s and reminds me a lot of boardgamegeek. Allover it has seemingly the best functionality aside from Goodreads to manage your own books with a large database, and recommendations seem really good. But figuring out how to use it is not particularly straightforward. Also, it does not have very many obvious social features, which can be good though IMHO if you don’t care about that. From what I understand, LibraryThing is an American company partially owned by Amazon.

There’s also the fediverse alternative, bookwyrm.social: I want to like it so much, and it looks a lot like Goodreads, but the functionality is still very bare-bones and it looks super unpolished. There are only very basic shelves, it didn’t import 7% of my books, it didn’t import my custom shelves, and the database needs some cleaning (duplicate authors, etc). No recommendations based on my shelves. Sadly, even though this would be really cool, it’s just not a good enough, viable alternative yet. The Fediverse is of course decentralized, but bookwyrm.social itself was made in the US.

Last but not least, there is The StoryGraph. I was a very early adopter and really excited for this a couple of years ago, but back then the functionality was very bare-bones and I still didn’t quite get the structure of the site. I tried again in 2024 and it was a huge improvement. The site shines most with its graphs, as the name would suggest. It has very comprehensive charts for your reading habits, and a very deep functionality for reading challenges, beyond “X books per year”. These are a bit hidden, and it took me a good while to actually find them. I’m currently reading a 16-book series, and I was pretty excited to find that there’s actually a challenge for it on StoryGraph.

On of my favorite hard to find features is the reading streak. This needs to be activated in your preferences, and once it’s active, you will see it on your dashboard and can configure it from there. You can set yourself if you want to read 1 page per day, or 100 pages per every 7 days, but regardless of your setting if you update your reading progress at your self-defined intervals, your reading streak will be counted. And it gives you a cool graph of how many pages you read per day. I feel like this is a great motivator to keep reading, and to read more.

Another cool feature on StoryGraph is that it separates your to-read into “to-read” and “up-next”, to easier manage your long and short list. On Goodreads I use a custom shelf called “to-read-maybe” for my long list, which is one way to do it, but StoryGraph’s feels a bit more natural.

The sense of community is probably one of the weaker points of StoryGraph, but that’s probably just my impression because I don’t know anyone else who uses it. It technically comes with a feed similar to Goodreads, if you do have friends there 🥲 I think it can be super cool as well if you have some friends there. The StoryGraph is a company made in the UK and the passion project of a female entrepreneur. It does have a pro version if you would like to support her and her team, but the free version is perfectly usable and feels whole.

Altogether, from my evaluation I have come to the conclusion that The StoryGraph is the Goodreads alternative that I like the most. It has so many cool features (once you find them), and it’s easy and simple to use. It also has really good recommendations, that so far were always pretty spot on for me. I have been using Goodreads and StoryGraph side by side for over a year now, and to be honest the only reason I still use Goodreads is for the social feed. StoryGraph is way better, and I can highly recommend it if you’re looking for a viable alternative to Amazon-owned sites. Find me there, if you want to give it a go 🙂