Siftivo vs Hardcover: An Honest Comparison for 2026

Hardcover and Siftivo both recommend books, but they start from opposite ends. Hardcover is a full reading tracker and social network, independent and ad-free, with a public API and a recommendation engine called Vibes that you can tune by hand. Siftivo does one thing first, which is picking your next book from three books you love, and keeps a lighter reading log around it. Siftivo is ours, which is worth keeping in mind as you read. Every fact about Hardcover below comes from its own site, FAQ, docs and monthly team reports.

Pick Hardcover if you want a tracker you control. If you track everything, care where your data goes, read on Android, or like the idea of an API you can build on, Hardcover is the better home for your reading life. For most readers leaving Goodreads for a better log, it’s the app we’d point to first.

Pick Siftivo if you want the next book chosen for you. If you’d rather name three favorites and get three picks a day, each one naming the book that earned it, without setting a single dial, that’s what Siftivo is for.

Dials or three books

Hardcover’s Vibes is a control panel, and a well-made one. You can ask for books set in a fantasy world, at a particular place in a series, at a chosen level of popularity, for a particular audience or format, or like a book or author you name. For a reader who knows exactly what shape of book they’re after, that’s a lot of control. Its team also reports benchmarking recommendations against LitRPG and progression fantasy.

The catch is that dials assume you know where to set them, and plenty of nights you don’t. You finished something wonderful, you want more of whatever that was, and you couldn’t name its world, audience and popularity tier if someone asked. Hardcover does have a preset for this, a Vibe built on your last five 5-star reads, which is close in spirit to how Siftivo starts. Siftivo makes that the whole product rather than one option among many, and puts three new picks in front of you every day.

How Siftivo works

Siftivo asks for exactly three books you love when you sign up, and everything grows from those.

• Daily Picks are three books a day, and each one names the book of yours behind it.
• The match badge shows up on picks, book pages and lists, with how well a book fits you and why.
• Explore is one book at a time. Liking one shapes the next card, and passing removes only that book.
• Today builds rails from your taste, including Next in Your Series and From Authors You Love.
• Not for me on a book card keeps it out of future Picks and Today, and the taste page takes up to three books you want to steer clear of, because knowing what to skip is half of choosing.

When you do have words for it, search takes a description in plain language. The rest of the app covers the basics of a log, with progress by pages, percent or time, a private journal with a heatmap, DNF with an optional reason, half-star ratings, one review per book, lists and follows. There are also pages for 24 award bodies, and for readers who use an AI assistant, a twelve-tool MCP server that can search the catalog and, with your account linked, add books to your library.

At a glance

	Siftivo	Hardcover
Built around	Choosing your next book	Tracking your reading, with social and discovery around it
Recommendations	Three Daily Picks a day from your three books, Explore, Today rails, a match badge	Vibes tuned by world, series position, popularity, audience and more, plus the Discover page
Steering away	Not for me on book cards, plus up to three books to avoid	Filter Lists that hide or label books and authors across the site
Statuses	Read, currently reading, want to read and DNF	Want to Read, Currently Reading, Read, Did Not Finish and Paused
Goals	No yearly reading goals	By books, pages or hours
Series	Series pages in reading order and a Next in Your Series rail	A series tracker, plus a Similar tab recommending related series
Privacy	Private reading journal	A public, followers-only or private setting on every book
Developer access	MCP server and OpenAPI spec	Public GraphQL API on the free plan, plus OAuth apps
E-reader sync	None	Kobo and KOReader through community-built tools, no direct Kindle sync
Book clubs	None	In team alpha testing as of October 2026
Platforms	Web and iPhone	Web, iOS and Android
Price	No paid plan	Free, or Supporter at $4.99 a month or $49.99 a year
Imports	Goodreads, on the web	Goodreads, StoryGraph and CSV

Where Hardcover wins

On most of what a tracker does, Hardcover is ahead, and it’s worth saying plainly. It’s independent and self-funded, built by a team of around ten people who’ve taken no startup funding, and it was started in 2021 after Goodreads announced it was shutting down its API. It’s ad-free, doesn’t sell reader data, and promises that reader data never goes to outside AI companies. Vibes runs on Hardcover’s own servers and sends nothing to outside AI providers.

It’s also the most open book app we compared. The public GraphQL API is included on the free plan at 5,000 requests a day, developers can build OAuth apps on it, and the community has already built Kobo and KOReader sync and an Obsidian plugin. Siftivo has no export at all, so if owning your data matters to you, Hardcover is the safer place to keep your log.

For power users the tracking runs deep. There are Paused and Did Not Finish statuses, a series tracker that marks read books across all your series, goals by books, pages or hours (with pages read before a DNF counted), a reading journal you can browse across every book, and a privacy setting on each title. Its lists go further than ours too, with ranked lists, grouping by genre, mood or content warning, community Prompts, and collaborative lists for Supporters. And it runs on Android, which Siftivo doesn’t.

A few honest caveats. Creating your own Vibes, the personalized For You view and stats for any date range are Supporter features. There’s no direct Kindle sync. Book clubs and buddy reads are coming but were still in team testing in October 2026.

Switching, or using both

Both apps take a Goodreads import. Hardcover brings over your books, ratings, reviews, lists and owned books, and it notes that start dates and repeat reads go missing because Goodreads’ export only carries the latest finish date. Siftivo’s import, on the web, brings in read, currently reading and want to read with your ratings and reviews, and skips custom shelves, a DNF shelf, start dates and date added. Hardcover also imports from StoryGraph if that’s where your library lives now.

Using both is a reasonable setup. Keep your detailed log in Hardcover, and open Siftivo when you’ve finished a book and want the next one chosen from the books you love.

If choosing is the part you’d hand off, start with your three favorites at siftivo.com.