FolioStory vs Goodreads: an honest comparison

Published 25 October 2026

FolioStory is a small, independent reading tracker. Goodreads is the biggest book site on the internet, owned by Amazon since 2013, with a review database that has been accumulating for nearly twenty years. Those are not the same kind of thing, and pretending otherwise would waste your time.

So this page is written the way we'd want to read one: what Goodreads genuinely still does better, where a smaller tool has the advantage, and how to move across if you decide to.

Side by side

What Goodreads does better

Reviews, and it isn't close. Twenty years of ratings and written reviews is a genuine moat. When you want to know whether a book is worth your next fortnight, hundreds of strangers who have already read it are more useful than any feature we could build. If that's your main use, this page should probably end here.

Discovery. Lists, recommendations drawn from an enormous ratings graph, the annual Choice Awards, author pages, giveaways. All of it is powered by scale, and scale is the one thing a new site does not have.

Proper mobile apps. FolioStory is a website. It works well on a phone and you can add it to your home screen, but an App Store app it is not.

Everyone is already there. Whatever you think of it, your friends' shelves are on Goodreads. A reading site with none of your friends on it is a worse reading site, and that's simply true of us today.

What FolioStory does differently

The wishlist is built for other people to use. This is the real reason FolioStory exists. Your wishlist mirrors every book you've marked "want to read", and anyone you've connected with can see it and buy from it. When someone does, they mark it bought — and it quietly disappears as an option for everyone else, without telling you, and without revealing who bought it. Goodreads has a "Want to Read" shelf; what it doesn't have is a way for your mother and your sister to avoid buying you the same hardback. We wrote about why that keeps happening and what to give a reader instead.

Discussions that don't spoil the book. FolioStory works out which books you and a friend both own and gives each one its own thread. Mark a comment as a spoiler and it stays collapsed behind a tap until the other person is ready. It means you can start talking the moment you want to, rather than waiting for both of you to reach the same chapter — more on that here.

Bookshop.org alongside Amazon. Every buy link offers both, so the choice is in front of you rather than something you'd have to go out of your way to make. Given who owns Goodreads, that option isn't likely to appear there. We've written about what the difference actually amounts to.

A shelf you can look at. Switch your library from covers to spines and your books stand side-on the way they would on a real shelf — thickness follows page count, colour follows genre, and roughly three times as many fit on screen.

No ads, and no feed. There's nothing here trying to extend your session.

Moving your library across

Goodreads exports your entire library as a CSV file, and FolioStory imports one — so this takes a few minutes and nothing is retyped.

1. In Goodreads, go to My Books, then Import and export under Tools, and choose Export Library. It emails you, or offers the file directly, once it's generated.
2. In FolioStory, open your Library and choose Import.
3. Match the columns. Title and author are the only two that matter; ISBN, page count, your rating, date read and your review are picked up as well when they're there.
4. Check the preview, then import. Books already in your library are flagged rather than duplicated.

Nothing about this is one-way. FolioStory exports to CSV too, so if you'd rather go back, or keep both in step, you can.

Common questions

Is FolioStory a good Goodreads alternative? For tracking your own reading and sharing a wishlist, yes. For researching what to read next, no — use Goodreads, or use both.

Is it really free? Yes, with no ads. The buy links are affiliate links, which is how the site pays for itself. That's the whole model.

What happens to my data? It's yours, and you can export all of it to CSV at any time. We'd rather you stayed because leaving is easy than because it's difficult.

Why no reviews from other readers? A review section with few readers is worse than none — it looks abandoned and helps nobody. If FolioStory ever grows enough for that to work, it's worth revisiting. Until then we'd rather be good at a smaller number of things.

Goodreads is a trademark of its owner. FolioStory isn't affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Goodreads or Amazon. Everything above was accurate as far as we could check it in October 2026 — if something here is out of date, tell us and we'll correct it.