Pinboard has been, as far as I know, the de facto online bookmarking tool for nearly a whole decade, which is why I’ve been baffled at how the Pinboard app marketplace has languished for so long. The two frontrunners — Pinner and Pushpin — were last updated 4 years ago and 1 year ago, respectively, and Pushpin has always been slow and unstable for me. Both seemed to have stalled on maintenance and the addition of any new features. I started to assume Pinboard was just too niche of a tool to warrant any serious app development, and that people had maybe just just moved on to a combination of Pocket and Chrome bookmarks.
Every few months, though, my frustration with Pushpin would lead me to search the App Store for alternatives, and finally this weekend I got some! They are both already huge improvements over their predecessors, have both iOS and macOS versions, and for all the tech blogs I read, I hadn’t heard anything about them.
Pinstachio (App Store) by Francisco Cantu is fast and capable, and feels very at-home on both iOS and macOS. Its feature set is relatively limited, and it charges a subscription fee (though an extremely modest one at $7 per year) rather than a one-time purchase, but it’s definitely one to try out and keep an eye on.
Pins for Pinboard (App Store, Twitter) (not to be confused with Pins for Pinboard.in) is by Quang Anh Do, maker of the (now-defunct?) Writing Kit. With clever, unique features — like browsing by domain, “On This Day,” “Random 20” — tag and metadata suggestions, preview images, a development blog and Twitter, and a one-time purchase price, Pins looks like the clear winner to me.
Here’s a quick comparison table:
| Pinstachio | Pins for Pinboard | |
|---|---|---|
| Mac app | Yes | Yes |
| Suggested tags / metadata | No | Yes |
| Preview images | Only on detail view | Yes |
| Token login | Yes | Yes |
| Price | $7/yr | $14 one-time |
| Data collection | Data not linked: – purchases – diagnostics | Data not linked: – purchases – diagnostics – usage data |
| Rating | 4.3 with 21 reviews | 4.9 with 192 reviews |
| First release | Nov 24, 2020 | Jan 22, 2021 |
| Latest release | Oct 28, 2021 | Dec 3, 2021 |
Let me know in the comments if I’m missing any feature comparisons or if there are any other Pinboard apps or tools you’d like to recommend.