Glasp
by Glasp
Getting-started guide
A highlighter for everything you read — and a decision about who gets to see it.
Current prices: Free · See all plans
Last reviewed 2026-09-15 · for Glasp
You install a small add-on in your browser, then select text on any page the way you would to copy it, pick a color, and it is saved. A sidebar shows what you have marked on that page, and everything lands in one library you can read back later.
Glasp is a highlighter for the web. It saves the passages you mark on articles, PDFs and YouTube transcripts into one searchable library, so the good bits of what you read stop vanishing into closed tabs.
What makes it unusual is the social layer. Glasp is built on the belief that highlights are worth sharing — its stated mission is "to democratize access to other people's learning" — so you get a profile page other people can visit, and you can see where other readers stopped on the same article.
There is AI on top of the highlighting: summaries of pages and YouTube videos, a chat box for questioning a PDF, and an "AI Clone" that answers from your own saved highlights instead of the open web.
The first thing to do is not to highlight anything. Open Settings and find the visibility control for highlights — and the separate one under AI Clone & Hatch — before you mark a single passage. Which way those switches start is genuinely unclear from outside Glasp (see Privacy below), and they decide whether your reading is public.
Free to use with a sign-up and no card. The thing you would pay for here is privacy, not capability: Pro — a monthly plan, cheaper if you pay for a year, with a student discount — is what adds unlimited private highlights. Whether a free account gets any private highlights at all is not something Glasp's own pages settle either way.
Highlighting itself is unlimited and unmetered, but the AI features are rationed on the free plan: a small monthly allowance of chat credits (the platform's unit of spend — each thing you ask costs some), a daily cap on basic YouTube summaries, and a cap on PDF uploads. Chatting with a PDF is metered too, on a separate allowance Glasp's pages do not describe consistently, so check the current limits in the app rather than planning around fixed numbers.
It is a browser add-on, so it lives in a browser: Chrome, Safari, Edge and Firefox have published versions, and Brave and Opera install the Chrome one. Phone browsers cannot run add-ons at all, which is why there are separate iPhone, iPad and Android apps with their own built-in reader.
You are not locked in. Glasp states plainly that export is not a paid feature — "your highlights are yours, and we would rather you could leave than feel stuck."
Glasp is a publishing tool wearing a highlighter's clothes, and that is the single most important thing to understand before you use it. Its mission statement is about sharing what you read, and its free plan is sold on public highlights. Some of that is not optional: Glasp's privacy policy (last updated 31 August 2026) says it will publicly share your profile picture, name, user handle and any social media handles you have added to your profile. Anything marked public "can be indexed by search engines."
The one genuinely reassuring thing here is where Glasp refuses to run. The extension is switched off entirely on online banking, sign-in pages, password managers, tax and immigration portals, health records and adult sites, and on your own network's router and storage pages — so those never produce anything to save in the first place.
Deletion is partial rather than instant. Deleting an item removes it from view while Glasp keeps a limited record of it to enforce usage quotas; deleting your account removes your content and profile but keeps billing records and a snapshot of account and usage facts for up to two years.
Set both switches — highlight visibility, and the separate one under AI Clone & Hatch — then open your profile page, where an already-saved highlight can be flipped between public and private one at a time.
Why this one: Readwise gives you no public profile at all and nothing a stranger can query; Glasp ships you both by default, so your first five minutes here are spent switching things off rather than on.
Pick a long article you were going to read anyway. Select a passage, choose a color, and add a tag while you are there. Open the sidebar to see everything you marked on that page in order.
Why this one: Glasp captures the color and the tag at the moment you select the passage, not at an import step afterwards, so the reason it mattered is recorded while you still know it — which is the part you have forgotten by evening.
Tweak: Turn on the crowd-highlights view on the same article to see where other readers stopped.
Across everything I've highlighted, what are the three ideas that keep coming back? Quote the passage behind each one and tell me which article it came from.
Why this one: The AI Clone answers only from passages you saved, so this question hands your own reading back to you — something ChatGPT cannot do unless you paste the material in first.
Tweak: Name a topic you highlight a lot to narrow it down.
Summarize this PDF in ten bullet points, then list every claim it makes that it doesn't back up with a citation.
Why this one: Glasp keeps the chat box and the highlighter on the same file, so an answer worth keeping becomes a highlight in the same library — rather than a screenshot in a second app, which is what a standalone tool like ChatPDF leaves you with.
In Settings → Integrations, connect Notion, Obsidian, Readwise, Roam, Zotero, Tana, Workflowy or Anki — or just run Export All Highlights and take a Markdown or CSV file.
Why this one: Re-running an export only sends the pages that changed since the last one, so this behaves as a backup you repeat weekly rather than a one-time escape hatch — which is the reason to wire it up on day one instead of the day you leave.
Want the full picture first? See the Glasp overview for pricing, the free tier and related tools.
