Book Tracker vs Bright Passages
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Book Tracker
Capture, organize, and revisit key passages from your books with advanced text recognition. Create collections, add tags and notes, and easily export your highlights. Stop forgetting what you read and make your reading more impactful.
- Text recognition
- Book collections
- Tags and notes
- Highlight export
- Page number detection
- Search functionality
- Photo highlighting
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Remember more of what you read. Turn the passages that matter into a personal library you can search, revisit, and share. Point your camera at a book page, select the text, and save it with your notes, tags, and page number. Keep your books organized, return to favorite ideas with reminders and widgets, and recap a book’s core ideas from your own highlights with Apple Intelligence. CAPTURE • Capture text with your camera or from photos in your library • Select sentences and paragraphs with smart text recognition • Automatically select text you’ve highlighted or underlined in a book • Save multiple highlights from a page at once • Detect page numbers and scan ISBN barcodes to add books • Import highlights from Kindle or CSV files • Import your book library from Goodreads or other CSV files • Drag and drop images to capture highlights on iPad ORGANIZE • Build your personal bookshelf with collections and reading status • Group highlights into chapters and browse them in reading order • Add notes, tags, page numbers, and favorites • Add emphasis with bold, italics, underline, and strikethrough • Find relevant tags faster with smart suggestions • Search your highlights and filter by book, collection, or tag REVISIT • Recap a book’s core ideas from your highlights with Apple Intelligence • Rediscover saved passages with recurring highlight reminders • Keep highlights on your Home Screen with widgets • Start highlighting with Siri Shortcuts • Capture and browse your highlights offline SHARE & EXPORT • Share highlights as beautiful quote cards • Publish a book’s highlights as a web page anyone can read • Export one book or your whole library • Choose PDF, Markdown, CSV, RTF, or plain text • Include notes, tags, and page numbers in your exports FREE TO START Capture and organize unlimited books and highlights for free. Highlighted+ adds automatic selection of marked text, Apple Intelligence recaps, Kindle and CSV highlight import, whole-library export, custom reminders, and more. Apple Intelligence features depend on device, language, and system availability. Selected as Apple’s App of the Day 6 times. Trusted by 160,000+ readers. ABOUT ME I'm Damir, an independent creator from Europe who loves to read. Say hello at damir.stuhec@gmail.com Privacy Policy: https://highlighted-app.webflow.io/terms-and-policies#privacy-policy-heading Terms: https://highlighted-app.webflow.io/terms-and-policies#terms-of-service-heading
Bright Passages
Capture and organize highlights from physical books using your camera. Automatically detects highlighter colors and allows manual text selection for unmarked passages. Creates a searchable, shareable digital library of your favorite book passages.
- Camera-based highlight detection
- Automatic highlighter color categorization
- Manual text selection
- Searchable digital library
- Customizable categories
- Add personal notes
- Export to CSV, Excel, Markdown
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Kindle readers have built-in highlight sync. Physical book readers have a highlighter and a problem. Bright Passages solves it. Point your camera at a highlighted passage in a real book. Bright Passages reads the page, transcribes it, and detects what color highlighter you used — automatically categorizing the passage before you tap save. Didn't highlight it? Just select the text by hand instead — perfect for library books, textbooks, or any page you didn't mark up. Your highlights become a searchable, shareable library in seconds. Finally, an app built for people who read physical books. Bright Passages is a digital commonplace book — the tradition of collecting passages from real pages that move, challenge, or clarify your thinking. Highlight detection that thinks with you. Bright Passages' camera detects six highlighter colors — orange, yellow, pink, blue, green, and purple — and maps them to your personal categories, renamed however you like. Answer one quick question when you first open the app — student, book club, fiction, nonfiction, or religious study — and your categories are already set up to match how you actually read. The colors you already use in the margins now mean something in your library too. Capture the highlighted words alone, or the full page with the marked passage bolded, italicized, or both. Need more than one page for a single passage? Take multiple photos and combine them into a single capture. One category system, two levels of control. Set your categories globally, then override them book by book — so "Quote" in one book can mean "Premise" in another, without changing anything else. Add your own thinking. After capturing a passage, add a note — your reaction, a connection you made, a question it raised. Edit any transcription with a built-in formatting toolbar for bold, italic, underline, and undo. Notes are saved alongside the passage and included in every export. Your physical library, finally organized. Every passage lives inside its book. Add a chapter number for citation-ready passages. Filter by chapter, category, or reading status. Search across every physical book you've ever read. Share a passage as a beautiful card. Export your library as CSV, Excel (formatting preserved), or Markdown. Your data is always yours. No subscription. No account. No cloud you don't control. One purchase. Your data syncs through your own iCloud — private, automatic, no third-party servers. The words you've marked in real books deserve better than another monthly fee. FOR READERS WHO: Highlight passages in physical books and want them saved permanently Read library books, textbooks, or any book they'd rather not mark up Use multiple highlighter colors, each with its own meaning Keep a commonplace book — or always meant to start one Read as a student, in a book club, or for serious nonfiction Finish a book and want to actually remember what mattered WHAT YOU CAN DO Photograph a highlighted page, or select text by hand if it isn't highlighted Combine multiple photos into a single passage Capture the highlight alone or the full page, emphasized Automatic highlighter color detection and categorization A one-time reader-type quiz sets up your categories for you Add personal notes to any passage Built-in formatting toolbar — bold, italic, underline, undo Chapter numbers for citation-ready passages Rename categories globally or per book Filter passages by chapter, category, or search Share passages as designed image cards Export as CSV, Excel (formatting preserved), or Markdown Reading status tracking (Reading, Want to Read, Finished) Bright Ideas — a random past passage on a schedule you set The best physical books leave marks. Bright Passages remembers which ones.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is price: Book Tracker at Free against Bright Passages's $4.99. Book Tracker also leads on ratings volume (751 vs 4) and iOS requirement (18.4 vs 26.5). Bright Passages's advantage is in-app purchases (none vs 6) and update cadence (every 2 days vs every 5 weeks). On rating, review sentiment, ads and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Book Tracker is free to download; Bright Passages costs $4.99 up front. Book Tracker sells 6 in-app purchases, starting at $2.99 per month. Bright Passages asks for nothing beyond the download.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 4.9 for Book Tracker against 5.0 for Bright Passages. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Book Tracker has 751 ratings behind it against 4, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews are what separate them: 93% of Book Tracker's written reviews are positive against 100% of Bright Passages's.
Book Tracker ships an update every 5 weeks, Bright Passages every 2 days. The most recent releases landed on November 11, 2026 and October 31, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Book Tracker | Bright Passages |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free — better | $4.99 |
| Rating | 4.9 (751 ratings) | 5.0 (4 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 92.8% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 751 — better | 4 |
| Update frequency | Every 5 weeks | Every 2 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases — better | Paid |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad — better | iPhone |
| Requires iOS | 18.4 — better | 26.5 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 72 MB | 5 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Damir Stuhec | Nathan Perry |
Customer experience
Book Tracker
Bright Passages
Bugs and requests
Book Tracker
Reported bugs
3 issues- Occasional crashes or freezes
- Issues with recognizing text from curved pages
- Problems with losing previously saved highlights
Requested features
5 requests- Add ability to highlight and annotate PDFs
- Integrate with ebook readers like Kindle
- Implement cloud sync and backup
- Add more customization options for highlights
- Improve search and filtering functionality
Bright Passages
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
Book Tracker
- Highlighted Club Monthly$2.991 Month
- plus weekly$4.997 Days
- plus yearly3 Days trial$44.991 Year
- Small tip$9.00
- Medium tip$25.00
- Large tip$49.00
Bright Passages
No in-app purchases
Questions
Is Book Tracker free?
Is Bright Passages free?
Which has better reviews, Book Tracker or Bright Passages?
Do Book Tracker or Bright Passages have ads?
Which is updated more often, Book Tracker or Bright Passages?
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