Best Apps to Track Books You've Read

Some readers just want the stories. Others want the stories and a record of them: what they read, when they finished it, how many pages they got through last month, which book they abandoned on page 80 and why. If you’re the second kind, you probably already use an app or website to track your reading, or you’re looking for one.

There are a lot of options, and they’re not built for the same reader. So here’s an honest roundup of the best apps to track the books you’ve read, with what actually sets each one apart, its trade-offs and its price. Yes, Sobuu is on the list (it’s our blog, after all), but I’ve tried to be fair with everyone.

Goodreads: the senior

Here are the people, here is the data, here is even Amazon. For most readers, that’s enough: you’ll find hundreds of reviews for almost any book and plenty of readers with your taste.

What sets it apart:

• Size. Goodreads is the largest book tracking platform, with more than 150 million registered users.
• Kindle integration. You can sync your Kindle and Goodreads Reading Challenge and Year in Books progress. No other app on this list has that, because Amazon owns both.
• Its yearly traditions: the Reading Challenge, the Choice Awards, Giveaways and Ask the Author.
• Recent changes. Goodreads added a Did Not Finish shelf in March 2026, something readers had requested for years.

Trade-offs: Amazon acquired Goodreads in 2013, and critics say innovation has largely stopped since then. Ratings still don’t allow half stars, and the platform stopped offering its public API in 2021.

Price: free, supported by ads and Amazon affiliate links.

The StoryGraph: the best

If you want to track your reading without Amazon or any other big company behind the app, you’re probably using The StoryGraph. It may not be the prettiest, but its versatility is unbeatable.

What sets it apart:

• Mood and pace. When you finish a book, it asks about its mood, its pace and whether it’s plot- or character-driven, and uses the answers for stats and recommendations.
• Content warnings. It has author-approved and user-submitted content warnings.
• Precise ratings with half and quarter stars.
• Spoiler-safe reading with friends. Buddy reads fit up to 15 people, and comments tied to specific pages only appear when others reach that part of the book. Readalongs fit up to 1,000 readers, with forums the host sets up as checkpoints.
• Recognition. The iOS app won a 2025 App Store Award, and the platform passed 5 million signups in January 2026.
• An independent team. Nadia Odunayo created it in 2019 as a side project, and co-founder Rob Frelow develops its machine-learning tools.

Trade-offs: the community is smaller, so if you have 200 friends on Goodreads, you’ll start with far fewer. The catalogue is also smaller, especially for non-English titles, academic presses and older backlist. Some users report occasional loading hangs in the app.

Price: free, with StoryGraph Plus at $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year.

Bookmory: the habit builder

Bookmory is less about the community and more about you and your routine. It focuses on remembering and reflecting rather than exploring or socialising.

What sets it apart:

• A reading timer, so you track time as well as pages, along with daily and yearly goals and a streak.
• Notes from photos. It extracts text from photos of book pages using OCR, and a random note feature brings back old insights.
• Lending tracking. It reminds you to return books you borrowed and records where you bought or borrowed each one.
• Privacy on your phone. You can lock the app with a password.
• A year-end recap. Its Annual Rewind arrives every December.

Trade-offs: there’s almost no social side, so it’s not the place to discover books through other readers. Adding notes from the camera or gallery needs a paid subscription or watching an ad. Some users say search struggles to find a book even when they type the exact title.

Price: free with ads; the paid tier removes them.

Fable: the nicest

Fable is the one that looks the best and feels the most social. It’s built to find, discuss and track books and TV shows. Since June 2025, it belongs to Everand, part of Scribd, and founder Padmasree Warrior moved to an advisory role.

What sets it apart:

• Book clubs at scale. Fable has about three million users and more than 100,000 book clubs, led by authors, BookTokkers, celebrities and ordinary readers.
• An in-app ebook reader. You can annotate with highlights, notes, comments and reactions and see other readers’ reactions in real time, connected to your club’s discussion rooms.
• Monthly Reading Wraps plus an annual wrap-up.

Trade-offs: users report two versions of almost every book, so marking one as read leaves the other unmarked. There are no author pages like on Goodreads, organising options are limited to lists, and some users say the app lags or doesn’t load.

Price: free, with an optional Fable Plus subscription.

Reado: the German

If you live in Germany or another German-speaking country, you probably already know Reado.

What sets it apart:

• Emotion-based recommendations. Reado analyses reader reviews for emotions and moods instead of recommending based on what others bought. It also added “Booklyn”, a ChatGPT-powered recommendation assistant.
• BuddyReads, where you read with friends, chat and comment on quotes.
• Page-based comments that stay hidden until you’re ready for them.
• Size. Reado says it had over 500,000 active users in 2025.
• Its story. Reado is a Frankfurt startup founded in 2019 that launched in December 2020, appeared on Die Höhle der Löwen (the German Dragons’ Den) and was named Content Startup of the Year at the 2021 Frankfurt Book Fair.

Trade-offs: the app focuses on the German-speaking market, so English speakers may run into a mix of languages. The team has acknowledged a bug with adding books manually and imprecise search.

Price: free, with an optional subscription.

Hardcover: the indie challenger

Hardcover is what many people picture when they say “Goodreads, but modern”, built by a small team without investors.

What sets it apart:

• Born from a Goodreads decision. Founder Adam Fortuna says he started it after Goodreads announced it was discontinuing its API in 2021.
• An open API. It offers a free public GraphQL API, the same one that powers its apps, so you can build your own reading dashboard.
• No investors. It’s a bootstrapped project, started in 2021, that hasn’t taken funding.
• Volunteer librarians who edit book, edition, series and author data.
• Match percentage on books, and a year-end Wrapped.

Trade-offs: the community is much smaller than Goodreads’, counted in the tens of thousands of readers according to its founder. Some of the more advanced stats have moved behind the paid plan.

Price: free with no limits on core tracking; the Supporter plan costs $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year and mainly exists to fund the project.

Literal: the minimalist

Literal is calm and clean, built by Literal GmbH in Berlin, around the idea that the best recommendations come from people you trust.

What sets it apart:

• Highlights first. You keep an archive of your highlights and notes and share them to other platforms, and you can scan highlights directly from the page with your camera.
• Flexible progress: track by pages, percentage or minutes read.
• Organised clubs with moderator tools, club reading goals and built-in chat.
• A chronological feed of people you chose to follow.

Trade-offs: the catalogue is smaller and the recommendation engine less developed than StoryGraph’s. Some users report edition and ISBN inconsistencies and books with blank covers or no description. It’s also less suited to readers who want deep stats.

Price: free core features, with premium options.

Sobuu: the newest

And finally, the youngest on the list. Sobuu started from a simple idea: when you read something that shocks you, you want to talk about it right there, not three hundred pages later.

What sets it apart:

• Page-by-page comments without spoilers. You update the page you’re on and can comment on any page you’ve already read, and you only see comments from pages before yours. StoryGraph and Reado have spoiler-protected comments too, but in StoryGraph they belong to a buddy read you set up. In Sobuu they belong to the book itself, so every reader of that book shares the same conversation, no group needed.
• Four languages, one reading community. Sobuu is available in English, German, French and Spanish, and you’ll find books, comments and shelves in all four. Whether you read in one language or switch between several, your library, conversations and shelves come with you.
• Your reading past. Add books you read before Sobuu to “Already read” or to the ones you gave up on, with the dates you started and finished them.
• Streaks you can hide. They keep counting quietly in the background, so you never lose them.
• Pages read per day, week, month and year, in an optional panel on the home screen.
• Shelves. Public or private, open to other readers’ books or not, and followable, plus curated shelves in every supported language.
• Tier lists of the books you read in any period, ready to share.
• Guest mode, so you can start without creating an account.
• A kids mode. Users the Play Store considers under 13 get no comments, reviews or public shelves.
• Privacy. Private comments and profile data are encrypted.

Trade-offs: Sobuu is small, so the community and the number of reviews per book are still modest. It’s only on Android (Google Play and F-Droid) for now, with iOS on the way. It doesn’t import from Goodreads or StoryGraph yet, and book search is still being improved.

Price: free.

Quick comparison

Frequently asked questions

What is the best app to track books you’ve read? It depends on what you want: The StoryGraph for stats, Goodreads for community size and Kindle, Fable for book clubs, Bookmory for timing your reading, Hardcover for an open, indie alternative, and Sobuu for commenting page by page without spoilers, in English, German, French or Spanish.

Which book tracking apps aren’t owned by Amazon? All of them except Goodreads. Note that Fable belongs to Scribd, while StoryGraph, Hardcover, Literal, Bookmory, Reado and Sobuu are independent.

Which book tracker works with Kindle? Goodreads, because Amazon owns both.

Can I track books I read before using an app? In most of them, yes. In Sobuu, you add the book to your “Already read” shelf and pick the dates you started and finished it.

Which reading tracker is best for German readers? Reado has the biggest German-speaking community. Sobuu is also fully available in German, with books, comments and shelves in German.

So, which one should you pick?

There’s no single winner, and you don’t have to pick only one. Plenty of readers use Goodreads or StoryGraph for discovery and a smaller app for their day-to-day reading. Try two or three, and keep the one you actually open every day.

And if you want to talk about that twist on page 214 with people who’ve already reached it, you know where to find us.

Enjoy the read!