Internet Archive Alternatives for Web Pages, Books and Media

The Internet Archive is still online in November 2026, and its Wayback Machine passed one trillion saved web pages in October 2025. The last two years were rough, though. Attackers stole account data and flooded it with DDoS traffic in the fall of 2024. A leak of 31,081,179 account records surfaced on October 9, and the Wayback Machine was back on October 13. The main site only returned read-only on October 21, still without uploads or borrowing.

The legal side shrank the library too. In December 2024 the Archive chose not to take Hachette v. Internet Archive to the Supreme Court, and it still pulls books from lending when publishers ask. Sony and Universal settled their suit over the Great 78 record project in September 2025 on confidential terms. Publishers are now shutting its crawlers out as well, mostly over fears of AI scraping, according to Nieman Lab. So it pays to know where else old pages, books and media live.

No single site copies all of archive.org, so the picks below split into web archives, free book libraries and media catalogs. Open Library is left out because the Internet Archive runs it. For narrower jobs, see our guides to seeing a cached copy of one page, searching many archives at once, Wayback Machine alternatives, UK Web Archive alternatives and downloading a whole site.

Prices below are as of November 6, 2026. Our method is on How we review tools.

Quick comparison

archive.today

Saving one page on demand is all archive.today does, and it has done it since May 2012 under domains such as archive.ph and archive.is. Every save produces two records: a copy of the page with live links, and a screenshot. It ignores robots.txt, arguing it acts as the user's agent, so it often has news articles that block the Internet Archive's crawler.

Treat it as a second copy, never the only one. English Wikipedia banned links to it in February 2026 after code on its CAPTCHA page sent DDoS traffic at a blogger's site from January 11, and editors found captures with altered text. Russian authorities blocked it and several mirror domains on March 23, 2026.

Best for: Grabbing a copy of one page right now, especially a news page that keeps the Wayback Machine out.

Pricing:

• Free to use, no registration
• No paid plan

Watch out for:

• It keeps text and images only, not XML, spreadsheets or other non-static files, and users cannot delete a capture once made, per Wikipedia.
• Visitors from Finland have faced a CAPTCHA they cannot pass since the early 2026 dispute.

Official site: archive.today.

Arquivo.pt

Portugal's national web archive comes closest to a Wayback Machine you can search by words, not just by URL. The January 2026 figures list about 23 billion files from 73 million websites, 1.6 PB compressed, with content back to 1996. Its Dionisius image search, launched in March 2021, finds archived pictures and the pages they appeared on.

The crawl centres on .pt domains and sites of national interest, but it also kept 197 million files from EU Horizon 2020 project sites. The API has run since 2012 and served 308 million requests in 2025. SavePageNow, built on webrecorder pywb, lets anyone record a page by browsing it.

Best for: Researchers who want full-text and image search over old web pages, plus an API.

Pricing:

• Free public service run by FCT, Portugal's science foundation
• Public API, no price listed

Watch out for:

• Pages appear in search only after an embargo of at least one year, per the access help page.
• Forms, database-driven pages and most embedded videos are not archived, and images above the crawl size limit can be missing.

Official site: Arquivo.pt.

HathiTrust

Readers who used archive.org for scanned library books will find the academic version at HathiTrust. Research libraries founded it in 2008, and it holds 18+ million digitized items, 51% in English and the rest in 400+ languages. Full-text search runs across the whole repository, so you can find a phrase even in books you cannot open.

About 6.7 million volumes, roughly 37%, were U.S. public domain in September 2024. Those are free to copy and redistribute under its access policy. Rights depend on where you sit: U.S. visitors can read foreign works from 1899 to 1928 that are closed to readers abroad.

Best for: Searching inside millions of scanned library books and reading the public domain ones.

Pricing:

• Free to search and read full-view items
• Full-PDF downloads need a login from a member library

Watch out for:

• Without a member login, public domain books download one page at a time, a university library FAQ explains.
• Google asks that its scans and OCR not be re-hosted or used commercially, per the access policy.

Official site: HathiTrust.

Project Gutenberg

Michael Hart typed the Declaration of Independence into a computer in 1971, and Project Gutenberg grew from that. The homepage now lists 79,737 free ebooks. You get files, not page scans: the reading options page recommends EPUB3 for Kobo, Nook and Send-to-Kindle, plus a KF8 file for older Kindles over USB.

Audio is covered too, with 662 human-read titles produced by LibriVox and almost 5,000 computer-generated ones. The permissions page sums up the deal as no fees, no registration and no ads.

Best for: Classic books in clean ebook formats for a phone or e-reader.

Pricing:

• Free, no registration

Watch out for:

• It only carries older works whose U.S. copyright has run out, so recent books are absent.
• It follows U.S. law. Readers elsewhere must check local rules, and books by Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann and Alfred Döblin stay blocked in Germany after a 2021 settlement.

Official site: Project Gutenberg.

Digital Public Library of America

DPLA is a Boston nonprofit that puts U.S. libraries, archives and museums behind one search box. Its homepage counts 53,365,391 images, texts, videos and sounds. It went live on April 18, 2013 and collects records through state and regional hubs.

Primary Source Sets bundle material for teachers, and My Lists saves what you find. DPLA describes itself as a discovery tool, or union catalog, so many items open on the contributing institution's own site.

Best for: Finding U.S. photos, letters, maps and recordings spread across local collections.

Pricing:

• Free to search; funded by foundation grants and donations

Watch out for:

• Image size and record detail vary by contributor, because DPLA indexes rather than hosts most files.
• Its ebook program, Palace Marketplace, is for libraries buying e-content, not free public reading.

Official site: Digital Public Library of America.

Europeana

Paintings from the Rijksmuseum, British Library manuscripts and Louvre objects sit side by side in Europeana. The EU-backed portal draws on around 4,000 institutions and claimed more than 50 million objects in 2024. Collections span art, books, music, film, newspapers, fashion and sport.

The about page points developers to an open-source API. The European Commission has funded much of the work since the 2008 prototype, so there is no paywall.

Best for: European art, newspapers and recordings from national museums and libraries.

Pricing:

• Free to search and view
• Open API for developers

Watch out for:

• Europeana holds metadata and a small preview, and the full object stays on the museum's own site.
• The site is midway through a redesign it calls the new Europeana experience, so older links and features may move.

Official site: Europeana.

Library of Congress Web Archives

The Library of Congress began saving the web with the 2000 U.S. presidential election. Twenty-five years on, its archive tops 5.7 PB across 203 collections, 83 of them still growing, in 137 languages from 218 countries.

Curators choose the sites, so you get themed sets such as elections and the September 11 archive rather than a crawl of everything. Over 100 collections were online at the end of 2025. You can browse them or search by URL for captures not yet described.

Best for: Curated U.S. government, campaign and news-event websites.

Pricing:

• Free public and research access

Watch out for:

• All content sits under a one-year embargo, and full-text search is not available.
• Sites whose owners did not allow offsite display show only a catalog record and thumbnail.

Official site: Library of Congress Web Archives.

Common Crawl

A 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Common Crawl gives away the web as raw data. The homepage claims over 300 billion pages and adds 3 to 5 billion a month. One crawl alone, CC-MAIN-2026-34 from August 7 to 20, 2026, holds 2.14 billion pages and 360 TiB uncompressed.

The files sit in Amazon public datasets, so you can run jobs in AWS or download what you need. The URL index answers CDX queries by URL pattern, and over 10,000 research papers cite the corpus.

Best for: Developers and researchers who need web pages in bulk rather than one old page.

Pricing:

• Free, including the Amazon-hosted corpus

Watch out for:

• There is no Wayback-style viewer. You get index records and WARC files, so reading a page takes code.
• The index server asks users not to overload it and sends bulk filtering to downloads or the Columnar Index.

Official site: Common Crawl.

How to choose

When to stay with Internet Archive

Keep archive.org as your first stop. None of these eight puts a trillion-page web archive, books, audio and video behind one search, and the Wayback Machine's Save Page Now still works. Add archive.today as a backup for pages you cannot lose, and check HathiTrust or Gutenberg when a lending copy has been pulled.

Frequently asked questions