Glasp

Freemium

Glasp is a browser extension for capturing web highlights. You select text on articles, PDFs, YouTube videos, or Kindle books. Each passage saves with its URL, author, and date attached. You build a searchable personal library and use it with ChatGPT or Claude for drafting.

Glasp sits in the space between reading and writing. It is a highlighting tool first, with AI layered on top for summaries and drafting.

You install it in Chrome, Safari, Edge, Brave, Firefox, or Opera. Mobile apps exist for iOS and Android, though highlighting is limited on mobile.

The core idea is keeping source material traceable. You highlight, tag, organize, and export to Notion, Obsidian, Roam, Markdown, CSV, or JSON.

Open it if you need to keep track of where ideas came from. Skip it if you want fully private notes or simple one-click summaries.

It helps most when you are working across many sources and need to get back to them later.

• Researchers who need to retain and revisit source material: You get a searchable library with every highlight linked to its original page. You stop losing quotes in browser tabs.
• Students building study guides from lecture transcripts: You pull key moments from YouTube lectures and keep timestamps intact. Review becomes faster than rewatching.
• YouTube-heavy learners who want quick summaries: You generate AI summaries from transcripts without leaving the video page. Models include GPT-4o, Claude, Mistral, and Gemini.
• People building personal knowledge libraries: You curate across articles, PDFs, and videos in one place. Exports keep your workflow in Obsidian or Notion.
• Researchers who need source traceability: Every highlight keeps its citation data attached. You know exactly where a quote came from months later.
• Teams wanting visible shared reading without manual link-sharing: You follow what colleagues highlight and discover content through their selections.
• Writers who want highlighted quotes exportable to Obsidian or Notion: You send organized passages directly to your writing tool without retyping.
• Anyone tired of read-later piles they never revisit: You highlight while reading instead of saving whole articles. The barrier to action is lower.
• Students and researchers managing academic video content: You work with dense material where transcripts matter more than entertainment value.

These are the parts you notice after using it for real work.

• Multiple AI models for summaries: You pick GPT-4o, Claude, Mistral, or Gemini depending on the content. Dense academic material gets better treatment than a one-size-fits-all model.
• Social discovery of others' highlights: You see what other users marked on the same article or video. Sometimes you find angles you missed.
• YouTube transcript highlighting with timestamps: You mark moments in long videos and keep the exact minute attached. No more scrubbing through playback.
• Strong export flexibility: You send highlights to Obsidian, Notion, Roam, Logseq, RemNote, Markdown, CSV, or JSON. Your research moves where you work.
• Free tier with unlimited public highlights: You build a substantial library without paying. The limit hits on PDF uploads and AI credits, not core capture.
• Desktop YouTube summarization is free: You get unlimited summaries on computer browsers. Mobile summaries require the paid plan.

The workflow is deliberate, not instant.

1. Install the browser extension and create an account.
2. Open an article, PDF, or YouTube video and select text to highlight.
3. Choose a color and add tags or notes to the selection.
4. Send highlights to an AI model for summary or draft using your selected context.
5. Export organized passages to your note-taking tool of choice.

These limits matter for some workflows.

• Free plan limits are tight: You get only 30 PDF uploads and 20 AI credits per month. Heavy use pushes you to paid quickly.
• Highlights are public by default: You must manually change settings for private capture. Sensitive research stays exposed if you forget.
• No mobile highlighting app: You view on iOS and Android but capture on desktop. The workflow breaks if you read mostly on phone or tablet.
• Summaries need transcripts to exist: YouTube videos without captions give you nothing. Auto-generated captions vary in quality.
• Login issues reported: Some users hit broken Google login with unhelpful error messages and no fallback method.
• Feature bloat concerns: New additions arrive while core bugs wait. You may find rough edges in daily use.