Perma.cc Alternatives for Citations and Legal Evidence

Perma.cc saves a copy of a web page and gives you a short Perma Link to put in a footnote, a brief or a story. The Harvard Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School Library builds and runs it. It is still open on November 6, 2026. Students, faculty and staff use it free when their library is a registrar, and so do state and federal courts. Everyone else pays: $10 a month for 10 links, or $15 for a one-time pack of 10.

The problem it solves is real. Pew Research Center found that 38% of pages that existed in 2013 could no longer be reached in October 2023, and that 11% of Wikipedia reference links were dead. People leave Perma.cc for three main reasons: the price for writers without a member library, its one-page-at-a-time capture, and the need for evidence a court will accept, which a citation link was never designed to be. Two names you may find in old guides no longer help. WebCite stopped accepting new archives in July 2019, and Rhizome's Conifer closed new accounts in December 2025 and planned a read-only "tombstone" site for June 2026.

The first two picks give you a public link like Perma's, for free. The next one saves a file you host yourself. Three are paid tools for lawyers and investigators, then a self-hosted archiver, and last a free archive we would only use as a backup copy. For finding old pages rather than saving new ones, see our Wayback Machine alternatives and Internet Archive alternatives.

Our method is on How we review tools.

Quick comparison

Wayback Machine

When English Wikipedia dropped archive.today in February 2026, its guidance told editors to switch to the original source or another archive such as the Wayback Machine. Save Page Now stores one page plus its images and CSS and hands you a permanent web.archive.org address on the spot. The same button sits in the Internet Archive's extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Safari and in its iOS and Android apps.

There is no link quota and no account tier, which is the main gap with Perma.cc for an unaffiliated writer. The trade is control over removal. Site owners can ask the Internet Archive to take pages out of public view. Perma's FAQ says that when a site opts out, Perma stops displaying the page but keeps it in its library archives. A Wayback link in a 2026 paper may be dark by 2030 for that reason alone.

Best for: Academics, Wikipedia editors and freelance journalists who want a free archive link anyone can open.

Pricing:

• Free to save and to view. The Internet Archive runs on donations and shows no ads.

Watch out for:

• Save Page Now captures a single page and cannot crawl a site; some sites block it and some SSL setups break it.
• The service has gone down for days: after the October 2024 breach it returned on October 13, and visitors saw a "temporarily offline" notice again on November 20, 2025.

Official site: Wayback Machine. Our listing: Wayback Machine.

Ghostarchive

Ghostarchive's homepage invites you to "archive a webpage for scholarly or research purposes". Video is where it earns a place on this list. Lost Media Wiki users rely on it for YouTube uploads, and AlternativeTo lists Facebook posts among what it saves.

You paste a URL, get a ghostarchive.org link back, and cite that. No account is needed and there are no ads. Its search takes keywords, a domain, wildcards such as *.github.io/ or a URL prefix, which helps when you need to check if a source was already saved by someone else. Keyword search is case sensitive, so try both spellings of a name.

Best for: Researchers and reporters who need to cite a video or a social post, not only a text page.

Pricing:

• Free. The site lists no prices or paid plans, and AlternativeTo describes it as free, ad-free and without registration.

Watch out for:

• Some video captures hang on "Archiving in progress" and never finish, per a Lost Media Wiki thread.
• Support is a Google form, with no browser extension, so there is no one to call if a cited capture breaks.

Official site: Ghostarchive.

ArchiveWeb.page

Webrecorder's tool records pages while you click, scroll and log in, so the copy holds what you saw, not what a crawler fetched. It runs as an extension for Chrome and other Chromium browsers, or as a desktop app for macOS 10.15 and later, Windows and Linux. Version 0.16.2 shipped on April 30, 2026.

Captures stay private on your machine until you export them as WARC or WACZ files. Perma's own downloads are WARC files too, so a law review or a newsroom can keep both in one format. To make a copy readers can open, upload the WACZ to your site or a data repository and play it back in ReplayWeb.page, which needs no extension.

Best for: Journals, labs and newsrooms that would rather host their own citation copies than rent links.

Pricing:

• Free. No price is listed on archiveweb.page, and the source is open under AGPL-3.0 on GitHub.

Watch out for:

• You get a file, not a link. Someone has to host it and keep it online, which is the job Perma's libraries do for you.
• Autopilot, which scrolls feeds for you, "is not always guaranteed to work as expected".

Official site: ArchiveWeb.page.

Page Vault

Litigation teams use Page Vault when a page is going into an exhibit, not a footnote. The browser software comes in four annual tiers: Solo with one login, Team with three, and Professional and Enterprise with unlimited logins. Affidavits and batch capture of videos are included from Professional up and cost extra below it.

If no one on the team has time to capture, Page Vault On Demand does it for you. Its website captures cover live pages, full sites, marketplaces and Wayback Machine snapshots, which helps when you must prove what an archived page showed on a given date. Rush jobs, affidavits and eDiscovery load files are add-ons.

Best for: Law firms that need web pages, videos and social profiles captured for court, with an affidavit when asked.

Pricing:

• Browser software: Solo, Team, Professional and Enterprise on annual contracts, no public price. Capterra lists a start of $195 per user per month.
• On Demand: websites from $199, social media profiles from $349, video projects from $299, documents from $199. Quotes are free.

Watch out for:

• On Solo and Team, affidavits and batch video capture are priced separately.
• A senior litigation paralegal on Capterra wrote in August 2022 that it is "sometimes slow with large searches on Facebook". There are only four reviews there.

Official site: Page Vault.

WebPreserver

Pagefreezer sells WebPreserver to investigators, law firms, regulators and insurance fraud units. The browser plug-in captures public pages and posts from Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, X and YouTube. It expands collapsed comments and replies on its own, and it can record live streams on Twitch and YouTube Live.

A Perma Link proves a page existed. A WebPreserver capture is built to prove it was not changed. Each one carries a SHA-256 hash, a digital signature, an authenticated timestamp and a collection report, and exports as searchable PDF, MHTML, WARC or MP4 for video. The claim that captures "stand up in court" is Pagefreezer's own, so check the rules in your jurisdiction.

Best for: Investigators and legal teams who preserve social media threads, comments and live video.

Pricing:

• No public price. Capterra says pricing is available on request, and Pagefreezer offers demos.

Watch out for:

• Capterra lists no free trial and no free version, so you cannot try it before a sales call.
• The product page describes capture of public pages and posts only, so do not assume it covers private groups or messages without asking sales.

Official site: WebPreserver. Our listing: WebPreserver.

Hunchly

Reporters rarely know which page will matter until weeks later. Hunchly saves every page you load during an investigation without a click per page. Selectors flag names, emails or IP addresses across everything captured, tags sort pages, and reports export as DOCX or PDF.

The Classic licence keeps all data on your own computer and works offline. That suits sources you cannot send to a third-party server, which Perma.cc requires by design. A Cloud edition exists, sold through the sales team. Licences activate with a key file, and trial keys are available.

Best for: Investigative journalists and OSINT researchers who need a private record of everything they read.

Pricing:

• Classic: $169 a year or €149 a year.
• Free trial with no card; the page description gives 30 days.
• Cloud and bulk licences: contact sales.

Watch out for:

• System needs are steep for a browser add-on: Windows 10 x64 or macOS 11, 8GB RAM and 80GB of free disk, with Chrome as the named browser.
• Nothing it saves is a public link. To cite a page in print you still need a second tool from this list.

Official site: Hunchly.

ArchiveBox

Give ArchiveBox a list of URLs and it saves each one several ways: a SingleFile HTML page, a PDF, a PNG screenshot, a WARC and media through yt-dlp. It also reads browser history, bookmarks exports, RSS and Pocket. A journal can feed it every URL cited in an issue in one run, which Perma handles one link at a time.

By default it also submits each URL to archive.org, so you end up with a private copy and a public one. You can turn that off for sensitive lists. The project recommends Docker Compose and also ships an Electron app for Windows, macOS and Linux, and archivebox schedule re-runs a list on a timer.

Best for: Law clinics, journals and libraries that want bulk copies of every cited link on their own server.

Pricing:

• Free and open source under the MIT licence. You pay for the machine and the disk.

Watch out for:

• The 0.9 line, released in September 2026, moves the data folder to a new layout, so back up an older install before upgrading.
• Archiving pages behind a login means giving it your cookies, and the project lists security caveats for that.

Official site: ArchiveBox. Our listing: ArchiveBox.

archive.today

Pages that block the Internet Archive often still save here. archive.today ignores robots.txt and meta-noindex, and it stores the page plus a 1024x768 screenshot. It is free and needs no sign-up.

For a citation, the record is the problem. TechCrunch reported on February 21, 2026 that English Wikipedia editors agreed to remove all links to the site, after evidence that its operators altered archived pages to insert a blogger's name and that its CAPTCHA page sent traffic at his blog from January 11. Its owner is largely anonymous, with no institution behind it. Use it as a second copy next to a Wayback or Perma link, never as the only one.

Best for: A backup capture of a page that refuses other archives.

Pricing:

• Free, with no paid features. It is privately funded and asks for donations.

Watch out for:

• PDFs, Office files, audio and most video are not preserved, and pages over 50 MB are rejected.
• Russia blocked the site on March 23, 2026, so links in your work may not open for readers there.

Official site: archive.today. Our listing: archive.today.

How to choose

When to stay with Perma.cc

Stay if your library or court is a Perma registrar. It costs you nothing, and your records sit in library collections that keep a copy even when a site later opts out of public display. Paying writers lose little by cancelling, since links made under a plan stay preserved and readable after the subscription ends. If you cite only a few pages a year, the one-time packs are the cheaper route, because unused monthly links do not roll over.

Frequently asked questions