Siftivo vs Goodreads: Which Should You Use in 2026?

Goodreads is where a lot of readers already keep their shelves, and for good reason. It’s the largest book community there is, with Kindle integration, the yearly Reading Challenge and reviews on almost every book. Siftivo is built for a narrower job, picking your next book from three books you love, with an everyday reading log around it. We make Siftivo, so weigh our view accordingly. Every claim about Goodreads below comes from its own help center, site and app listings.

Pick Goodreads if you want the record and the crowd. If you read on a Kindle and want your shelves to update themselves, if the Reading Challenge keeps you going, or if you like reading a stack of reviews before you buy, Goodreads is the stronger app, by a distance.

Pick Siftivo if your problem is the next book, not the last one. If you finish a book and then lose a week deciding what to start, or keep starting books you drop, Siftivo is built for that moment. It also gives you half stars, which Goodreads says it has no plans to add.

Millions of ratings describe everyone else

Goodreads says more than 75 million members have shelved more than 2.2 billion books. That scale is useful. Almost any book you look up has a pile of ratings and reviews behind it, and you can get a feel for a book long before you buy it.

What an average rating can’t tell you is whether you in particular will like the book. A 4.2 from a few hundred thousand strangers is a statement about them. Our piece on the most abandoned books on Goodreads looks at where readers give up on ten of them.

Goodreads does make personal recommendations. Its about page says its engine draws on 20 billion data points, and its most recent explanation on the help site, from 2019, says recommendations come from the books you’ve shelved and rated, your genre preferences and how books resemble each other. You can ask for recommendations from any one of your shelves, and a 2019 help post describes a Readers Also Enjoyed section on book pages. It’s a reasonable system, and it reads your whole shelf history. Siftivo starts from something much smaller.

How Siftivo chooses for you

Siftivo starts with three books you love, the three you’d most want a friend to read, and leaves the rest of your shelf and any genre checklist out of it. The bet Siftivo makes is that three favorites say more about your taste than a whole shelf of books you felt lukewarm about.

From there:

• Daily Picks gives you three books a day, each one naming the book of yours behind it.
• A match badge appears on picks, book pages and lists, saying how well a book fits you and which of your favorites it matches.
• Explore shows one book at a time, where a like steers the next card and a pass only removes that book.
• Today gathers rails like Because You Loved, New for Your Taste, Next in Your Series and From Authors You Love.
• Not for me on a book card keeps that book out of future Picks and Today, and your taste page lets you name up to three books to steer away from. We think a clear no is one of the most useful recommendations a reader can get.

Search takes a plain-language description of what you’re after, which Goodreads doesn’t advertise in its app store feature lists. There’s a weekly Reading Index of fiction and nonfiction, currently built on weekly bestseller lists, plus series pages in reading order, author pages, and pages for 24 award bodies and 10 bestseller lists.

At a glance

	Siftivo	Goodreads
Built around	Choosing your next book	Shelving, rating and reviewing, with a huge community
Where recommendations start	Three books you love	Your shelves, ratings and genre preferences
Recommendations	Three Daily Picks a day, Explore, Today rails, and a match badge naming the book behind it	Recommendations by shelf, and Readers Also Enjoyed on book pages per a 2019 help post
Search by description	Yes	Does not advertise mood filters or vibe search
Ratings	Half stars	Whole stars, with no plans for half stars
Progress tracking	Pages, percent or time, a private journal with a heatmap, and DNF with an optional reason	Page or percent, and a DNF shelf that keeps how far you got
Reading goals	No challenges or yearly goals	The yearly Reading Challenge, with achievements
Kindle	No sync	Shelves, progress and Notes & Highlights sync once linked
Community	Follow readers and see what they start, finish and review	Groups and book clubs, Giveaways and the Choice Awards
Platforms	Web and iPhone	Web, iOS, Android and Kindle
Price	No paid plan	Free
Export	None	CSV export from the desktop site

Where Goodreads wins

Honestly, on most of what people open a reading app for. Goodreads has been around since 2007, and its scale means the reviews you want to read before buying a book are almost always there. Its Kindle integration is the deepest of any tracker. The Kindle app can mark a book Currently Reading when you start and Read when you finish, and linked accounts sync Notes & Highlights and count Kindle books toward the Reading Challenge. If you read mostly on a Kindle, that alone may decide it.

The Reading Challenge is the reference version of a yearly goal, with achievements and your friends’ progress alongside yours. Siftivo has no reading challenges or yearly goals. Goodreads also has a real community layer that Siftivo doesn’t try to match. Groups host some of the biggest online book clubs, including Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine at roughly 179,000 members, the Choice Awards let every member vote across two rounds, and Giveaways let you enter to win print and Kindle copies.

There are practical wins too. Goodreads is on Android and Siftivo isn’t. It can scan a cover or barcode to look a book up, and on the US iOS app it shows where to buy or borrow a book, libraries included. You can export your whole library to CSV, which Siftivo can’t do.

A few limits worth knowing. Ratings are whole stars only. Import and export are desktop only, a file import needs an ISBN for every book, and it can’t pull from Audible, OverDrive or Libby. The DNF shelf and custom shelves don’t appear on Kindle e-readers.

Switching, or keeping both

You don’t have to leave Goodreads to use Siftivo. You can keep Goodreads for the Kindle sync and the Challenge and open Siftivo when you need the next book.

If you do bring your library over, export it as a CSV from the Goodreads desktop site and upload it in the Siftivo web app. Your read, currently reading and want to read shelves come across with your ratings and reviews. Custom shelves, your DNF shelf, start dates and date added stay behind. Once you’re in, Siftivo covers the everyday log too, with progress by pages, percent or time, a private journal, half-star ratings, one review per book, lists and follows.

If the hardest part of reading is deciding what’s next, give Siftivo your three favorite books at siftivo.com and see what it picks.