CHMate vs Hedgehog reader
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
CHMate
This app offers a robust reading experience for EPUB and CHM eBooks. Organize your library, add bookmarks and notes, and customize your reading environment. Share passages and easily search within your books.
- Organize eBooks into collections
- Add bookmarks and notes
- Customizable fonts and line height
- Fast scrolling and pagination
- Highlight favorite passages
- Built-in search functionality
- Share quotes with friends
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Most e-readers are bloated with monthly subscription traps, intrusive ads, and clumsy formatting. CHMate brings the quiet focus and tactile elegance of a real book back to your screen. Native EPUB and CHM reader with rich typography customization, instant search, and paper themes. Trusted by readers for over a decade, now rebuilt natively for modern iOS. Download free. Unlock unlimited bookshelf with a one-time purchase. CHMate is a local EPUB and CHM reader for iPhone and iPad. Import the books and documents you already own, arrange them into a library you enjoy, and read each one in the way that suits it best. CRAFTED FOR FOCUSED READING • Paper Texture & Themes: Curated paper backgrounds, customizable fonts, line spacing, margins, and dark mode • Distraction-Free: Clean interface designed to put nothing between you and the text • Tactile Gestures: Smooth chapter transitions and fluid page-turning that respect your reading rhythm DUAL FORMAT POWER: EPUB & CHM • EPUB: Perfect for literature, novels, and reflowable publications • CHM & MHT: Read technical documentation, programming references, and compiled help manuals with structured tables of contents POWERFUL, PRIVATE UTILITIES • Instant Search: Lightning-fast full-text search across chapters • Highlights & Notes: Capture the quotes that move you and review annotations easily • iCloud Theme Sync: Seamlessly sync your typography themes across your devices via CloudKit • Local Wi-Fi Transfer: Drop books directly from your computer browser to your device over Wi-Fi without cables HONEST PRICING • Free to download and read • Pay once to unlock the unlimited bookshelf forever • No subscriptions. No ads. No tracking.
Hedgehog reader
This app allows you to read a wide variety of e-book and audiobook formats, organize your personal library, and even translate text offline. It offers features like full-text search, typo correction, and text-to-speech functionality.
- Supports multiple e-book and audiobook formats
- Organize library with shelves, search, and filtering
- Offline text translation
- Full-text search and notes
- Typo correction
- Text-to-speech with adjustable speed
- Import from local devices and cloud storage
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An app for reading books and organizing a personal library. The supported formats are FB2, MOBI, EPUB, DOCX, CBZ, CHM, RTF, HTML, MHTML, WebArchive, PDF, MD, TXT, and MP3, M4A, M4B for audiobooks. Import from local devices, iCloud, and Dropbox, as a single book and as a batch. An ability to create an internal shelves structure with search and filtering by genre, keywords, languages, series, and ratings. An ability to translate (even when there is no Internet connection) selected words and phrases to the chosen language, by presetting the list of languages to translate from. An ability to perform a full-text search throughout the entire library and the notes added to books. An ability to quickly correct typos in a book. Reading the text aloud (even when there is no Internet connection) with different variants of speed and operating from the music control. Bookmarks and notes with the ability to upload the latter as a file. An ability to directly download books from servers that support OPDS.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is rating: Hedgehog reader at 4.9 against CHMate's 3.9. Hedgehog reader also leads on update cadence (fortnightly vs every 2 months) and review sentiment (67% vs 55%). CHMate's advantage is ads (none vs shown). On price, ratings volume, in-app purchases and monetization model 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
Both are free to download. CHMate sells 1 one-off in-app purchase and Hedgehog reader sells 2 one-off in-app purchases. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
Hedgehog reader holds the better App Store score, 4.9 against 3.9. Both are backed by a comparable volume of ratings — 20 and 16 respectively. Written reviews point the same way: 55% of CHMate's written reviews are positive against 67% of Hedgehog reader's.
CHMate ships an update every 2 months, Hedgehog reader fortnightly. The most recent releases landed on September 25, 2026 and September 22, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | CHMate | Hedgehog reader |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 3.9 (20 ratings) | 4.9 (16 ratings) — better |
| Positive reviews | 55.3% of reviews | 66.7% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 20 — better | 16 |
| Update frequency | Every 2 months | Fortnightly — better |
| Ads | No — better | Yes |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | Free with in-app purchases |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 18.0 — better | 18.7 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 48 MB | 61 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 9+ |
| Developer | 贤安 陈 | Anna Diubina |
Customer experience
CHMate
Hedgehog reader
Bugs and requests
CHMate
Reported bugs
13 issues- App crashes when searching CHM files
- Crashes when using tap-hold for bookmarking
- Highlighting functionality broken after iOS updates
- Notes and bookmarks not saving properly
- Highlights disappear or move between chapters
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- App crashes on startup or when opening files
- Table of contents index expansion broken
- Custom fonts blocked after iOS 14.5 update
- Files not accessible via iCloud or Dropbox
- Missing icons after updates
- Images display as half-dark or missing
- Text formatting changes not visible without page reload
- First line spacing issues
Requested features
12 requests- Dark mode and additional color themes (Sepia)
- Book cover display instead of text-only library view
- PDF support
- Text-to-speech functionality
- Better pagination options
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- iPad Pro resolution support
- iOS multi-window support
- Better bookmark functionality
- Separate highlighting and annotation tools
- Support for Cyrillic and Arabic text encoding
- Collection/folder organization for multiple files
- Zip file support for documentation sets
Hedgehog reader
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
CHMate
- CHMate+$9.99
Hedgehog reader
- Advertisement free mode$5.99
- Book export$14.99









