If you’re leaving Goodreads, someone has probably already told you about StoryGraph. It’s a good app, and there’s a reason it’s the default answer whenever someone asks for a Goodreads alternative. Before you move your whole library anywhere, though, it’s worth asking which app will help you pick a great book to start when you finish the one you’re reading tonight.
That question is the whole reason Siftivo exists, and it’s where the two apps split. StoryGraph is built to record and chart your reading after the fact. Siftivo is built to get the next book right before you open it. We make Siftivo, so weigh our view accordingly, but every fact about StoryGraph below comes from their own site and app listings.
Why the next book matters more than the last one
A novel asks somewhere between six and fourteen hours of you, and a bad pick rarely costs only the hours. It costs you the next few weeks, a reluctant chapter at a time, and it makes starting anything after it feel like a worse bet. We’ve written about where readers actually quit, and enough bad picks in a row is how a person stops reading without ever deciding to.
A tracker can show you those mistakes in a chart at the end of the year. Siftivo is built to keep you from making them in the first place.
How Siftivo picks your next book
You don’t fill out a profile or choose moods from a list. You tell Siftivo three books you love, and it works backward from them. Most readers can’t describe their taste in adjectives, but almost everyone can name the books they’d press into a friend’s hands, and those books say more than any stack of filters. Lonesome Dove, A Gentleman in Moscow and The Poisonwood Bible tell us something about you that “literary, emotional, character-driven, historical” never quite does.
From there, the app is built around getting you to the next good book:
- Daily Picks gives you a short set of books each day, ranked against your taste.
- A match badge on picks, book pages and lists marks the books that fit you and tells you why, in a line like “Because you loved Lonesome Dove,” so you see the reasoning instead of a mystery number.
- Explore shows you one book at a time, and every book you like changes the next card.
- Your Today page fills with rails like Because You Loved, New for Your Taste, Next in Your Series and From Authors You Love.
- Not for me sits on every book card, and once you mark a book it stops coming back to your picks. Your taste page also lets you name a few books you want to steer away from entirely, because the most useful recommendation is often no.
Around all of that, Siftivo does the editorial digging a reader would otherwise do alone. The Siftivo Reading Index is a weekly chart of fiction and nonfiction. Alongside it are lists from outlets like NPR and the New York Times and from public figures like Oprah Winfrey, and pages for the major book awards.
StoryGraph is at its best after you’ve finished a book. Siftivo is built for the moment before you start one.
How StoryGraph approaches the same problem
StoryGraph does recommend books, and its suggestions learn from your reading history. Its discovery, though, leans on you describing what you want. You choose from fourteen moods, a pace, a set of genres and a page count, and it searches inside those bounds. That works on the nights you already know you want something dark, tense and fast, and it helps less on the nights you have no idea what you want, which, if you’re anything like us, is most of them.
At a glance
| Siftivo | StoryGraph | |
|---|---|---|
| Built around | Choosing the next book | Tracking and charting your reading |
| Where it starts | Three books you love | Mood, pace and genre filters, plus your reading history |
| Recommendations | Daily Picks, Explore, Today rails, and a match badge that names the book behind it | Personalized suggestions, similar books, and books that similar readers loved |
| Steering away | Not for me on book cards, plus books you want to avoid | Content warnings and browse filters |
| Editorial | A weekly Reading Index, lists from outlets and public figures, and award pages | Custom tags and shareable lists |
| Progress tracking | Pages, percent or minutes, a reading journal, and DNF | Pages, listening goals, a journal, DNF, and Kobo sync |
| Ratings | Half stars | Half and quarter stars |
| Reading stats | Profile counts and a journal heatmap | Extensive charts and graphs, with more in Plus |
| Community | Profiles, following and an activity feed | Buddy reads, readalongs, book clubs and reading challenges |
| Goodreads import | Read, currently reading and want to read, with your ratings and reviews | Read, currently reading, to-read and DNF, with custom shelves kept as tags |
Where StoryGraph still wins
If what you want from a reading app is a detailed record of everything you’ve read, StoryGraph is ahead today. Its charts are its signature feature, with more in the paid Plus tier ($49.99 a year), and it has reading challenges, buddy reads, readalongs, book clubs, quarter-star ratings and automatic Kobo progress sync, none of which Siftivo offers. If those are the reasons you open a reading app, StoryGraph will serve you well.
Switching from Goodreads
Siftivo covers the everyday tracking too. You can log progress by pages, percent or minutes, keep a reading journal, mark a book as did-not-finish, write reviews, build lists and follow other readers, so moving over doesn’t mean giving up your log. Upload your Goodreads export from the web app and your shelves, ratings and reviews come with it, and the books you’ve finished and rated start shaping your recommendations straight away.
If the hardest part of reading for you is deciding what to read, start with the three books you love most at siftivo.com and see what it hands you for tonight.
