Bookmarks, Lists and Contacts in One Account

The small things you want to keep are not all the same shape. A link, a phone number, a shopping list, a paragraph you did not want to lose, the address of a blog you follow. Each of them has an application built for it, and the usual result is five accounts, five passwords and five places to look before you remember which one you used. Bookmax puts them in one account with one folder tree, and the modules switch in the same window.

None of these modules is the best of its kind on its own. Together they cover the material that would otherwise be scattered, and that turns out to matter more than any single feature.

Bookmarks

The oldest part and still the centre of it. Bookmarks live in nested folders, carry tags, and can be dragged between folders one at a time or in a selection made with shift-click, like files in a file manager. Loading happens without a page reload, editing an entry is a double click. Folders can be split into a private and a public section, so a part of your collection can appear under your own address on the public pages while the rest stays out of sight. Details are on the page about online bookmarks and its subpages on searching, statistics and import and export.

Lists

A list is a small table you define yourself. Each column has a type: text, a longer text field, a number, a date, a time, a checkbox or a drop-down with your own options. That is enough for a to-do list, a shopping list, a record of what you lent to whom, a film list with a year and a rating, or the inventory of a cellar. Columns can be sorted and filtered, and Premium accounts export a list to CSV or Excel and read a CSV back in.

Contacts

Contacts are organized in groups and hold the fields you would expect: first and last name, nickname, company, email, website, mobile and two more phone numbers, fax, street, ZIP, city, state, country, birthday and a remarks field. Premium accounts import and export vCard, so a contact goes to and from a phone address book without retyping. This is an address list, not a CRM: there is no pipeline, no activity history and no email campaign attached to it.

Notes and documents

Two modules for text, separated by length. Notes are short: an idea, a serial number, the wifi password of a place you visit twice a year, sorted into groups. Documents are for longer text that you want to keep and come back to, also in groups. Neither is a rich text editor with collaborative cursors. They are plain text you can find again, which is what most notes actually need.

Feeds

The same account subscribes to RSS and Atom feeds and shows the articles in a merged stream. Since the sites you follow are usually the sites you bookmark, having both in one place saves a tab and a login. There is a separate page about the feed reader with its views, its OPML import and its limits.

Teams

Any of these folders can be shared. A Premium account creates a team and invites other Bookmax users into it; they receive an email with a confirmation link and can decline it. Each member has a role, administrator, editor or read-only, and the shared folders then appear in their folder tree next to their own, in whichever module they belong to. That way a team can share a bookmark folder, a list or a group of documents without anyone leaving their own account. Free accounts cannot create a team, but they can be members of one.

What a free account holds

Registration gives you the free account, and it is a working account, not a countdown. It holds up to 100 folders and 1000 bookmarks, ten lists with 100 entries, ten contacts, ten note groups with 100 notes, ten documents and ten feeds. Premium removes those limits and adds the import and export functions, the search across all folders, the duplicate finder and the favorites. Every limit is listed side by side on the account comparison, and the subscription terms are on the pricing page.

Where it fits

If you want the most polished bookmark app on the market, there are prettier ones, and some of them do a single job better than the corresponding module here. What they do not do is hold the contact, the list and the feed in the same account, on European servers without trackers, from a service that has been running since 2003. Look around first without registering by signing in as demo with the password demo on the login page, or open your own account. A short overview of every module is on the features page.