Best Markdown web clippers for Obsidian, compared.

What changed in 2025

The Markdown-web-clipper market quietly reorganized in 2025. Three structural shifts:

• MarkDownload was removed from the Chrome Web Store. The long-standing community default — built by deathau, then forked many times — was pulled in 2025 for "not following best practices," and the project hadn't seen a substantive commit in over two years. A generation of users is now searching "MarkDownload alternative."
• Obsidian shipped a first-party clipper. The official Obsidian Web Clipper, built by Kepano, crossed from "nice side project" to "default tool" — 300K+ Chrome installs and a 4.81-star rating. For most Obsidian users, this is now the right starting point.
• The AI-handoff niche split off. A new tier of clippers — Web2MD, BigIdeasDB Clipper — pivoted away from "save the article" toward "ship clean Markdown straight to ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor." For people whose primary use is paste-into-LLM-window, this is a real category now, with its own conventions.

That's three different audiences, with at least three different right answers. The honest comparison is "for whom," not "which one is best."

How I tested

I ran each clipper against five reference pages and looked at what came out:

1. Wikipedia, First Lord of the Admiralty. The "UK (1801–1964)" infobox uses heavy rowspan/colspan. It's a known graveyard for Markdown clippers — the GFM table syntax can't express row spans, so the output either flattens to a wall of text, drops cells, or invents column counts that won't render.
2. A long GitHub README with fenced code. Specifically tested for: language hints preserved (```ts, not ```), indentation intact, no stray HTML entities.
3. A math-heavy article using KaTeX. Inline $E = mc^2$ and display $$…$$ blocks. Plenty of clippers strip these into Unicode glyphs that don't survive a re-render.
4. A ChatGPT conversation. The DOM is a mess of nested divs, role tags, and shifting class names. Tests both extraction and whether the clipper recognizes the page type.
5. A Reddit comment thread. Inline images, nested replies, and the eternal question of "do you keep the structure or flatten it?"

I also looked at five non-extraction features that decide whether a tool fits a workflow: where it can save to, whether it works offline, the pricing model, whether the source is open, and what the maintenance posture looks like.

Obsidian Web Clipper (official)

The current default. Built and shipped by the Obsidian team; MIT-licensed; free, no Pro tier; available on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari.

Best at: clean articles destined for an Obsidian vault. Highlights and annotations are built in. Templates are first-class. The vault integration is what you'd expect from the people who make Obsidian — there isn't a single seam between "I clipped this" and "it's in my vault."

Where it falls short: the extractor under the hood is Mozilla Readability — the same engine behind Firefox Reader View. Readability is excellent on news-shaped articles, weaker on SPA-shaped pages. The community itself has reported that the generic extractor produces sub-par output on Reddit, X, and Xiaohongshu; for those you pair it with a specialized extractor or accept the loss. No GitHub Gist destination. No batch-clip-many-tabs flow.

Pricing: free.

Pick this if: you live in Obsidian, you clip mostly article-shaped content, and you want the tightest possible vault integration. It's the right default.

MarkDownload (R.I.P. 2025)

Including this for context. MarkDownload was the community default for years — open source, Turndown-based, configurable. It was removed from the Chrome Web Store in 2025, last meaningful commit in 2023, and there is no maintained successor under the same name. Forks exist but none have momentum.

Where it shines: the configuration surface area was genuinely good. You could tweak almost every output rule. Its absence left a real gap.

Where it falls short, retrospectively: the dependency on a single maintainer was the bus-factor that ended it. Modern SPAs broke the extractor and there was no one to fix it.

Pricing: N/A (delisted).

Pick this if: you can't, anymore. If you're searching "MarkDownload alternative," what you probably want is open-source + configurable + actively maintained. Skip to the bottom — that's roughly the niche we tried to fill.

Web2MD

Web2MD is the cleanest of the AI-handoff-first clippers. Free Chrome extension, no signup; Pro adds direct Obsidian vault export, batch processing, and "one-click AI integration" — the click sends your clip straight into a ChatGPT or Claude window. It's the only one in this list whose primary design question is "what makes good LLM input."

Best at: piping articles into LLM context windows. The output is shaped for tokenization (concise frontmatter, predictable Markdown structure) rather than for long-term vault storage. They actively maintain a comparison blog of their own.

Where it falls short: it's not local-first in the same way the other tools are. The AI integrations route through their UI flows, which is exactly the right design choice if AI is your job-to-be-done, and exactly the wrong one if you want everything on-device. Closed-source.

Pricing: free with limits; Pro is a recurring subscription.

Pick this if: 80% of what you clip ends up pasted into an LLM. You'll be happier than with a general-purpose clipper.

MarkSnip

MarkSnip is the closest peer to the post-MarkDownload, post-Readability, "just clip pages well" niche. Solid code-block accuracy, math support, a built-in editor (you can tweak before saving), themes, and image handling. Active development.

Best at: "I want clean Markdown, with a chance to tweak before it lands." The built-in editor is the differentiator — none of the others give you a single-keystroke "fix this one word" loop.

Where it falls short: closed-source; the destination set is narrower than the official Obsidian clipper or ours; no Gist; no vault-folder write.

Pricing: free, with a Pro tier.

Pick this if: you regularly want to edit the clip before saving it — caption an image, fix a heading, drop a paragraph — and the inline-edit loop matters more to you than the destination matrix.

LLMFeeder

The closest peer to "free, open-source, do-one-thing-well." LLMFeeder copies clean Markdown to clipboard with a token counter visible upfront. No AI integration, no destination set beyond clipboard, no built-in editor.

Best at: the keystroke-to-clipboard loop. The token counter is a small touch that the AI crowd appreciates.

Where it falls short: single destination. If your workflow is "clip and paste into ChatGPT," it's enough. If it's "clip and save to a folder," it isn't.

Pricing: free.

Pick this if: all you ever do is clip-then-paste-into-an-LLM, you don't want a Pro tier in the mix, and you want the smallest possible tool that does that.

Markdown Web Clipper (this one)

Disclosed up top — I built this one. I'll try to describe it the way the others described themselves: what it's best at, where it falls short, what it costs, and who it's for.

Best at: high-fidelity extraction of the hard cases (rowspan tables, KaTeX math, fenced code with language hints, footnotes) plus a real destination set. The pipeline is Defuddle for extraction (which handles SPAs Readability misses) plus Turndown with the Joplin GFM plugin for conversion. Five destinations: local folder (via the File System Access API — direct write into an Obsidian vault, no sync server), clipboard, .md download, Obsidian via obsidian:// URI, and (Pro) GitHub Gist with revision history via PATCH /gists/{id}.

Where it falls short: the community is small. No built-in highlight/annotate (the official Obsidian clipper wins this one). No AI handoff. The "Pro" tier exists for sustainability — that's a feature for some people and a friction for others.

Pricing: free for everyone, with no time-limit or feature degradation. Pro is one-time, lifetime: $9 launch / $19 standard. No subscription. Full Pro FAQ here.

Pick this if: you want the fidelity-first, privacy-first, lifetime-pricing combination — clean rowspan tables, real KaTeX math, the FSA vault write, and ownership of the file you saved. If you want subscription-style AI handoff, Web2MD will serve you better. If you want the tightest possible Obsidian integration, install the official one.

At a glance

Verdict by use case

If you've gotten this far, you probably want a recommendation. Mine:

• You live in Obsidian and clip articles all day: install the official Obsidian Web Clipper. It's free, it's MIT, the vault integration is unbeatable, and Kepano isn't going anywhere.
• You clip pages mostly to feed ChatGPT / Claude / Cursor: install Web2MD. The category is real, they own it, and the AI integration is the difference.
• You want to edit clips before saving them: try MarkSnip. The inline editor is unique.
• You want the smallest free open-source tool that just copies to clipboard: LLMFeeder.
• You want lossless tables, KaTeX math, local-folder write, the option of a Gist destination, lifetime pricing, and a privacy-first / no-telemetry posture: install ours. Free does everything except Gist and co-located images; Pro is a one-time $9 (launch) or $19 (standard).
• You're searching "MarkDownload alternative": the closest spiritual successor on the open-source + maintained + configurable axis is, honestly, ours. The closest replacement on the "just download a Markdown file" axis is the official Obsidian Web Clipper.

None of this should be controversial. There are five honest answers because there are five honest user populations. Pick the tool that matches yours.

Last updated 2026-06-07. Spotted a factual error? support@markdownwebclipper.com.