booksense vs Hardcover: The Amazon-Free Goodreads Alternatives Compared

TL;DR: Both apps are Amazon-free, and that is where the similarity ends. Hardcover is a genuinely free, ad-free catalogue with the best open API in the category, a web app, and per-object privacy controls, run by a tiny team that publishes its own revenue. It has no reading timer and no session tracking. booksense is the other thing: a timer, streaks made of real sessions, goals in minutes, leagues, and live reading rooms, on iOS only. Pick Hardcover if your problem is where your data lives. Pick booksense if your problem is that you are not reading.

Most people arriving at this comparison are not really choosing between two apps. They are leaving Goodreads, they have decided they do not want to hand another decade of reading history to Amazon, and now they are staring at a shortlist.

We build booksense, so weigh what follows accordingly. Our answer to that bias is to be precise about what Hardcover does better, because on its own ground it is not close.

What Hardcover actually is

Hardcover launched in 2021 as a deliberate response to a specific injury. In December 2020, Goodreads retired its public API and stranded an entire ecosystem of reader-built tools overnight. Hardcover rebuilt the thing that was taken away.

It is an ad-free, independent, Amazon-free tracker with the shelving basics done cleanly: reading statuses including did-not-finish, half-star ratings, reviews, custom lists, tags, series tracking, a year-end Wrapped, and a barcode scanner. It imports from Goodreads, StoryGraph, and generic CSV, and independent reviewers report the Goodreads import works when other services fail.

Four things make it more than another shelf app.

The API is the real product

Hardcover’s GraphQL API is free, public, and (in their own words) “exactly the same API used by the website, iOS and Android apps.” That last clause is the part that matters. This is not a marketing endpoint with a thin slice of data behind it. It is the actual application interface.

The documented terms are honest about the limits: it is in beta, calls are capped at 60 requests per minute, queries time out at 30 seconds and are limited to a depth of 3, tokens expire yearly, and queries must run from a backend rather than a browser. The docs also state the ownership position plainly: “You own your data. This means you can’t use the API to access and use someone else’s data.”

Nothing else in this category comes close. If you want to build your own year-in-review page, a widget, an Obsidian integration, or a spreadsheet that updates itself, Hardcover is the only mainstream tracker that will let you. One clarification worth making, since other roundups blur it: Hardcover’s documentation repo is open source under MIT, but the app itself is not fully open source. Open API, not open codebase.

Privacy is granular, not a single switch

Hardcover’s own schema shows privacy as a per-object setting with three values: public, followers, or private. That applies to goals, reviews, and books individually, rather than the all-or-nothing profile toggle most apps ship. If you want your ratings visible but your DNF shelf hidden, that is a supported configuration, not a workaround.

Goals are more flexible than you would expect

Hardcover’s goals carry a metric (books, pages, and others), a target number, a start and end date, and filter conditions. So “read 30 books of translated fiction this year” is expressible. That is well past the single annual number Goodreads has offered since 2011.

The team publishes its own books

Hardcover runs a public roadmap, a public changelog, monthly development reports, and an income transparency page showing revenue, expenses, and subscriber counts. You can watch what shipped and what it cost. In a category full of acquisition surprises, that is worth something real, and it is a large part of why the community trusts them.

Pricing and platforms

Hardcover is free with no caps on core tracking. The optional Supporter plan is listed on its App Store page at $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year, and it buys librarian editing access, priority support, Discord channels, and a profile badge. It does not gate tracking. Note what that means: unlike almost every competitor, Hardcover does not paywall your own statistics.

It runs on the web, iOS, and Android (plus macOS on Apple silicon and visionOS). The web app is the primary surface and it is good. booksense has nothing to answer that with, which we will get to.

If your problem with Goodreads is ownership, ads, or a dead API, Hardcover solves it completely, and it does so for free. Genuinely: go get it.

Where Hardcover stops

There is no reading timer and no session tracking. Progress in Hardcover is something you report after the fact, from memory, when you remember. You tell it you reached page 148 and it records page 148.

That means no minutes read, no reading pace, no “you read best at 9pm,” no honest projection of when you will finish, and no record of the twenty minutes you did read on a bad Tuesday. There is an open feature request on Hardcover’s roadmap asking for exactly this: a play button that saves a session with time and pages. It has not been built.

Hardcover did ship reading streaks in 2026, and it would be dishonest to write this post as though it had not. The feature request is marked released, delivered inside the Reading Activity widget on the dashboard, and it is optional and disabled by default. But look at what feeds it: logging pages read or audio listened on a given day counts as one day of the streak. A streak built on self-reported progress is one you can keep by typing a number. A streak built on timed sessions is one you can only keep by reading. Both say “12 days” on the screen. Only one is load-bearing. We wrote about when streaks help and when they backfire separately.

The other honest limits: the catalogue has gaps that librarian-minded users fill by hand, and the community is the smallest of the major Goodreads replacements. Its App Store listing sits at 4.2 stars from around 59 ratings, which tells you the scale.

What booksense adds

booksense starts after the shelf. The question is not “what did you finish?” but “are you reading tonight?”

The core loop is a reading timer. Pick a book, start a session, read. When you stop, booksense logs minutes and pages, and every session feeds real numbers: pace per book, minutes per week, and a projected finish date calculated from how you actually read rather than how fast you hope to. When you end a session, it suggests the page you probably reached based on your measured pace.

Around that loop:

• Streaks made of sessions, not self-reported updates. Elite adds a streak freeze and vacation mode for the weeks life wins.
• Goals in books, pages, or minutes, per period, filled in automatically from your sessions rather than typed in.
• Notes that come back. Every note is anchored to the page you took it on, can be shared as an image card, and returns later through spaced note review. The reasoning is in how to remember what you read.
• Competition, not just cataloguing. Challenges and tournaments, leaderboards, and leagues with promotion and relegation. A 70-level reading journey gives the multi-year arc.
• Live reading tables. You sit down with other readers and read at the same time, quietly, together, with whispers if you want to talk. It is the feature neither Hardcover nor StoryGraph has an equivalent for.
• Your Goodreads history, imported properly. booksense parses the CSV on your phone rather than uploading it, keeps your ratings, reviews, and read dates, and backdates imported reads so fifteen years of history arrives as history instead of flooding the feed. If you have not pulled the file yet, here is how to export your Goodreads library.

Readers on booksense have logged over 480,000 minutes of reading, taken more than 16,000 notes, and finished over 12,000 timed sessions. Small next to the veterans, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. They are also minutes, not memberships.

booksense is free on iOS, and the habit loop is free to use.

Where booksense honestly loses

• iOS only. Hardcover has web and Android. If you read on Android or live in a browser, this comparison ended before it started.
• No public API. Hardcover’s open API is a real, principled advantage and we do not have an answer to it today.
• No Kindle sync. Neither app has one, but it is worth saying plainly.
• Smaller catalogue and community, and a younger app. Hardcover has years of librarian work behind its data.
• We do not publish our revenue. Hardcover does.

Feature by feature

Feature	booksense	Hardcover
Reading timer and timed sessions	Yes, the core loop; every session logs minutes and pages	No; progress is self-reported after the fact
Minutes read and reading pace	Yes, per session, per book, per week	No
Reading streaks	Yes, earned through timed sessions; freeze and vacation mode for Elite	Yes, from days you logged progress; optional and off by default
Reading goals	Books, pages, or minutes per period, free	Books, pages and more, with date ranges and filters, free
Notes	Page-anchored, shareable as image cards, resurfaced via spaced note review	Reviews and reading journal entries
Per-book stats	Pace, session history, projected finish date, charts	Progress and yearly stats, all free
Challenges and tournaments	Yes, against friends and the community	No
Leaderboards and leagues	Yes, with promotion and relegation	No
Long-term progression	70-level reading journey	No
Live reading tables	Yes, read together in real time with whispers	No
Open API	No	Yes, free public GraphQL, the same one its own apps use
Privacy controls	Private profiles	Per-object: public, followers, or private
Goodreads import	Yes; CSV parsed on-device, keeps ratings, reviews and dates, backdated as history	Yes; Goodreads, StoryGraph and generic CSV
Ads	None	None
Platforms	iOS only	Web, iOS, Android, macOS, visionOS
Price	Free download; optional Elite membership	Free, uncapped; optional Supporter at $4.99/month or $49.99/year

Hardcover vs StoryGraph, briefly

The third app in this conversation is The StoryGraph, and the split is clean. StoryGraph is much larger, with mood and pace based recommendations and the deepest charts in the category, but its data is closed and its advanced stats sit behind a subscription. Hardcover is smaller, free all the way down, and open where StoryGraph is closed. Neither has a timer.

Roughly: StoryGraph is the analyst, Hardcover is the archivist, booksense is the coach. Our StoryGraph and Goodreads comparison goes deeper on the first, and the best book tracking apps roundup puts all of them side by side.

The verdict

You want out of Amazon’s orbit with your data intact. Hardcover, without hesitation. Free, ad-free, uncapped, open API, granular privacy, and a team that shows you its accounts. If the thing that pushed you off Goodreads was the ownership question, our post on who owns Goodreads and why readers are leaving explains the receipts, and Hardcover is the cleanest answer to it.

You want to read more books. Hardcover will not move that number, because it has no instrument that touches it. It is a superb record of reading that already happened. A timer, a streak made of real sessions, a goal measured in minutes, and a league table with your friends in it are what change the number, and that is what booksense is. The features page lays out the mechanics, and the wider Goodreads alternatives roundup puts both apps in context.

Both, which is what we would actually do. One CSV seeds both libraries. Let Hardcover be the permanent, queryable, scriptable archive of everything you have read, exactly the thing Goodreads refused to be. Let booksense be tonight: the session, the streak, the note anchored to page 148. The apps barely overlap, which is precisely why the pairing works.

The assumption worth pushing back on is that a better-owned bookshelf produces a better reader. It produces a better-owned bookshelf, and that is a real and worthwhile thing to want. Minutes read moves for entirely separate reasons.

FAQ

Is Hardcover really free?

Yes. Hardcover has no ads and no caps on core tracking: shelves, ratings, reviews, lists, goals, and imports are all free. The optional Supporter plan is listed on its App Store page at $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year, and it buys librarian editing access, priority support, Discord perks, and a profile badge rather than unlocking tracking features. It exists to fund the project, which is an unusually honest way to run a paywall.

Does Hardcover have a reading timer?

No. Hardcover logs progress as pages or percentage after the fact, so it records what you read but not how long it took. It did ship reading streaks in 2026 as part of the Reading Activity widget (optional and off by default), but the streak counts days you logged progress, not timed sessions. There is an open feature request for a session timer. booksense is built around that timer, which is the main functional difference between the two apps.

Hardcover vs StoryGraph: which should I pick?

StoryGraph is the bigger platform with roughly 5 million users, mood and pace based recommendations, and deeper stats, but its data is closed. Hardcover is smaller and its advantage is the open GraphQL API, per-object privacy controls, and a team that publishes its revenue publicly. If you want the best charts, StoryGraph. If you want to own and script your data, Hardcover. Neither has a reading timer.

Can I use Hardcover and booksense together?

Yes, and it is a sensible pairing. Both take the same goodreads_library_export.csv, so you can seed both libraries from one file. Keep Hardcover as your permanent, queryable catalogue and reviews archive. Run the actual reading through booksense with a timed session, a streak, and page-anchored notes. The overlap is small because one app is a library and the other is a habit loop.