Annotate a web page: The 5 best tools for your research in 2026

Dernière mise à jour le 9 March 2026

You know the situation. You prepare a course, you come across an exciting article, you say to yourself "I'll find him later" … and you never find him again. Or you find him again, but without remembering what passage had marked you or why.

Annotating the web is not just highlighting sentences in fluo yellow. It has become a real way of working. Whether you are doing pedagogical monitoring, preparing a sequence of courses or accompanying students in documentary research, having a good hand-held annotation tool is a game changer. We're saving time. You structure your thinking. And most importantly, we don't lose track anymore.

Since my first selection in 2018, the landscape has moved quite a bit. Some tools have disappeared, new ones have appeared, sometimes doped with AI. So I started all over again to keep only the best tools to highlight and annotate a web page in 2026.

Here is my top 5, followed by some alternatives for those who would like to explore further.

How to choose your web annotation tool?

Before diving into the list, a quick word on the criteria that count when looking for a good web highlighting tool:

• The medium: Does the tool only work on web pages, or also on PDFs, YouTube videos?
• The organisation: Can you classify your annotations by folders, tags, colors? Find them easily?
• Collaboration: Can colleagues or students be invited to annotate the same document together?
• Export and portability: What happens if the tool closes tomorrow? Is it possible to recover your data?
• Respect for privacy: mandatory account? Data hosted where? Open source?
• The business model: free, freemium, subscription? And what limits in the free version?

Keep these criteria in mind. They will help you choose the one that best suits your use.

Hypothesis. Collaborative, free and open annotation

Hypothesis remains for me the absolute reference when it comes to annotating the web in an educational setting. And it is no coincidence: this tool has been designed from the beginning for active reading and collaborative work.

The principle is simple. You install the extension (available for Chrome, and compatible with other browsers via a bookmarklet), and an annotation layer is overlaid on any web page. You highlight a passage, you add a comment, and it is saved. Until then, nothing revolutionary.

Where Hypothesis really stands out is in collaboration. You can create private groups, For example, a group for your third class or for a research project between colleagues, and everyone annotates the same document. The comments of some are displayed for others. We can answer, we can talk, we can bounce. It is a real conversation in the margins of the text.

Since my last tests, Hypothesis has added the possibility to annotate YouTube Videos (via transcripts) and even images in PDF. For an art history or SVT course where you work on diagrams, this is a real plus.

What makes the difference:

• Open source and free, without advertising
• Private groups for class or team
• Possible integration into LMS (Moodle, Canvas…)
• Data compliance: no resale, no profiling
• Active community and sustainable tool, the project exists since 2011
• Annotation of images in PDFs and annotation of YouTube videos (via transcripts)

What gets in the way:

• The interface is not the most intuitive for young students (college)
• No built-in AI function
• Taking charge requires a little time to adapt

Ideal for: teachers who want to actively read their students, collaborative research projects, reading groups between colleagues.

Link: Hypothesis

Glasp. Smart watch with a social touch

Glasp is a tool that I use regularly for my own monitoring. Its operation is quite different from Hypothesis: here, we are more in a logic of personal curation, with a social dimension that can seduce or reject according to usage.

Concretely, you highlight passages on any web page (and also on YouTube, which is convenient for video capsules). You can add comments, tags, and organize everything in your personal library. The extension runs on Chrome and Safari.

What has changed recently: Glasp now offers Artificial Intelligence Functions. You can request a summary of a page you have annotated, or ask questions about the highlighted content. For a quick watch, when you have twenty tabs open and no time to read everything in detail, it is frankly useful. Moreover, while the day before is at the heart of your concerns, I have also listed 5 free monitoring tools which complement this type of tool well.

Be careful though: the model has evolved towards freemium. The free version limits YouTube summaries to 3 per day, PDF files to 5, and private highlights require the Pro plan (10 $/month).

The ‘social’ dimension of Glasp is that your highlights are public by default. You can see what other users highlighted on the same article. It is interesting to find out what others find relevant, but beware: If you work on sensitive documents or with students, you must set confidentiality.

Strengths:

• Web and YouTube highlighting
• AI functions (summary, questions)
• Easy export to Notion, Obsidian, Readwise
• Clear and pleasant interface

Limits:

• Default public annotations (to be configured)
• No private groups for the class
• In English only (interface)
• Free version increasingly limited

Ideal for: personal watch, teachers who collect resources, those who want to take advantage of AI to speed up their reading.

Link: Glasp

Web Highlights. Sober, efficient, no fuss

Web Highlights is a more recent discovery for me, and I must say that I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of this extension. It is a web and PDF highlighting and note-taking tool, available on Chrome and Edge.

No need to create an account to start. You install the extension, you highlight, you take notes, and everything is stored locally. If you want to synchronize between several devices, you will have to go through an account (free or paid).

What I particularly like about Web Highlights is the simplicity of organisation – and I am obviously not the only one, given the growth of the tool in recent months. You can tag your annotations, filter them, do a full-text search in everything you have highlighted. The extension also offers a ‘read’ mode that cleans the page of advertisements and visual noise – very convenient to focus on a long article.

The free version is already well provided. The Pro version (from around €2-3 per month) adds cloud synchronization, backups and some additional export functions.

Advantages:

• Works without account (local mode)
• Compatible with Chrome, Edge and Firefox
• Zen reading mode to focus on a long article
• Full text search in its annotations
• Export possible (Markdown, text)

The downsides:

• No collaboration (strictly individual use)
• Advanced functions (sync, export Notion) are reserved for the paid plan

Ideal for: teachers who want a simple and reliable tool to organize their personal monitoring, without a gas factory.

Link: Web Highlights

Raindrop. Much more than just a bookmark manager

Raindrop.io is not, strictly speaking, a ‘pure’ annotation tool. It is first and foremost an online bookmark manager. But he has evolved so much in recent years that he deserves his place in this selection.

Raindrop now makes it possible to highlight passages on the web pages you save, add notes to them, and find all this in a very well-thought-out visual interface. Collections (equivalent to folders) can be customised with icons and colours. You can tag, filter, and even search the full text of archived pages.

For a teacher who accumulates dozens of links every week – articles, tutorials, classroom resources – this is a real time saver. I have long used classic bookmarks in the browser. The day I switched to Raindrop, I understood that I would not go back.

And the icing on the cake: Raindrop works everywhere. Browser extension, mobile application (iOS and Android), desktop application. Your annotations follow you on all your devices.

Strengths:

• Careful and intuitive visual interface
• Multi-platform (web, mobile, desktop)
• Full text search in saved pages
• Collection sharing possible

Limits:

• The annotation remains basic (highlighting + notes), no drawing or advanced marking
• Highlighting is free and unlimited, but the annotations (notes) and full text search require the Pro plan (approximately 3 $/month)
• Less suitable for fine or collaborative annotation in class

Ideal for: teachers who want to combine favorite management and annotation in a single tool, with mobile access.

Link: Raindrop.io

Weava. The ally of major research

Weava is a tool that I have been recommending for several years, and which remains a safe bet for students and researchers. If you supervise memoirs, VSEs or research projects in high school, it is probably the most suitable tool on this list (well, I have a weakness for this one, I must admit).

Weava makes it possible to highlight web pages and PDFs in different colours, to add comments, and above all to organize everything in research files. Each folder can correspond to a theme, a chapter, a research question. We drag his quotes in, and Weava keeps track of the source (URL, date, exact passage).

For the drafting, this is a considerable asset: the Weava sidebar allows you to find and copy and paste your quotes directly into a working document, with the reference already formatted. Students who adopt it save a lot of time when writing their bibliography. For those looking for an even more advanced AI tool for research and documentary writing, Logically is also worth a visit.

The model is freemium. The free version allows a completely correct use, but it displays advertising. The Premium plan (approximately 4 $/month, with offers for students) removes ads and unlocks additional features.

What makes fly:

• Organization by folders and colors, perfect for research
• Management of citations and sources
• Works on the web and PDFs
• Designed for the academic world

What is missing:

• Advertisements in the free version
• Interface a little loaded at the beginning
• Collaboration (file sharing) exists but is reserved for the Premium plan – no real-time work on the free version

Ideal for: high school students, students, and teachers who supervise research.

Link: Weava

Comparative table

This table is deliberately simplified – each tool would deserve one more column. 

Three alternatives to keep under the elbow

My selection of five tools doesn't cover every need. Here are three other avenues that I have tested and that deserve a look at depending on your situation.

Diigo, the veteran of collaborative annotation

Diigo is a tool that many teachers are already familiar with. It is one of the oldest social bookmarking and web annotation services still in operation. We highlight, we add sticky notes, we tag, and we organize everything in groups. Perfect for a class or team project.

The interface has aged somewhat, but the tool remains robust and offers a Free Education Offer rather generous for the teachers. If you are looking for a proven tool to make your students annotate without going through a recent solution whose sustainability remains to be proven, Diigo deserves a look.

Liner, AI-enhanced annotation

Liner positions itself as a research assistant with built-in highlighting. You can annotate web pages, but also Google results directly. The tool offers AI summaries and one organisation per theme. The free version is quite limited (the Pro plan starts around 18–20 $/month), but for those looking for an "all-in-one" tool combining annotation and artificial intelligence, it's worth a look.

Obsidian Web Clipper, for those who already have their knowledge base

If you are already using Obsidian as a note-taking tool (there are teachers among them), the Obsidian Web Clipper allows you to capture and highlight web pages and then send them directly to your feed. No cloud imposed, no third-party account, everything stays at home. This is the ideal option for those who want to keep full control over their data.

Which tool to choose?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer. It all depends on what you do with it.

• Do you want to have your students annotated in class? Start with Hypothesis. It is free, open and the only tool on this list that is really designed for collaborative annotation in school contexts. To go further in the collaborative work, also take a look at Collabwriting.
• Do you watch a lot and like to go fast? Glasp and its AI functions will save you time.
• Are you looking for a discreet and effective tool for your personal use? Web Highlights does the job without complicating your life.
• Do you juggle dozens of links every week? Raindrop.io It will help you to lose nothing.
• Do you supervise research work? Weava is made for that.

One last piece of advice: Whichever tool you choose, always check that it allows you toexport your data. Digital tools come and go. Your notes and annotations must be able to follow you.

What tool do you use to highlight and annotate your web pages? You are rather individual annotation for your personal monitoring, or collaborative use in class? Tell me in comment, I'm always curious to discover new nuggets.