In the last year or so, I've started engaging with media very differently than how I used to; rather than being a passive consumer, I want to be an active participant in the art. A pretty important part of that, to me, is a good place to track, rate, and review said media.

I already found some pretty solid options for movies (Letterboxd) and video games (Backloggd), but books have been a bit of a struggle. In this post, I want to document this struggle a bit. Hopefully, this can help anyone in a similar situation.

My Needs

Comparing different solution is always kind of pointless when you don't know how you are comparing them or what exactly it is you want. Luckily, given my experience with other sites, I've got a pretty good idea as to what I want, namely:

No Big Tech
This immediately disqualifies the biggest option, Goodreads.
No Lock-In
I refuse to be a victim of enshittification (hence me also wanting to avoid big tech). Thus, I need do be able to relatively easily export my data so I can switch to an alternative.
Organize Ratings
I frequently go over my rating and reevaluate them. Not being able to sort them, especially by rating, makes this quite painful.
Social Features
I strongly dislike algorithmic recommendations; instead, I want to follow other people with similar tastes and get recommendations organically.
High-Quality Review Culture
This goes hand-in-hand with the previous point. I want to read actually interesting, relatively in-depth reviews. Some quips / micro-reviews are fine, but that shouldn't be all you find. A good way of achieving this is by letting users rate reviews and being able to sort them accordingly.
No Account Required
I want to be able to easily share my profile with other people, so they can see what my tastes are like / what I've already read.

The StoryGraph

The StoryGraph was, I think, the first site I went to after leaving Goodreads. It's also, from what I can tell, the most popular alternative, which is a plus. So let's go over each of my requirements and evaluate how fully they are realized.

No Big Tech
The site is run by a small group of independent creators. Definitely a plus.
No Lock-In
You can easily export your data. I actually made use of this feature before, by migrating to BookWyrm (more on that later).
Organize Ratings
This is where The StoryGraph truly shines; it lets you sort all of your lists in various ways and even allows you to filter them, e.g. by year read or genre.
Social Features
You can tell that this site wasn't really designed around a social experience. While it's get the basics like being able to follow other users and seeing their activities in a separate tab, this isn't the default experience. You have to go to a separate tab to see any of your friends' activities. Social interactions also appear to be limited to your interactions with books, with no ability to post thoughts or updates separately.
High-Quality Review Culture

Interestingly enough, this, in my opinion, where The StoryGraph is weakest. While, in theory, the building blocks are there (you can write reviews, they are shown to people, they can like them, and you can sort by most liked), this feature feels basically hidden.

On the front-page of a book, you can only see the average rating of the book; again, you have to go out of your way to see any more details, like the rating distribution or any written reviews. I have to assume that this is also why I haven't seen many reviews with more than five likes and none with more than ten – nobody reads them! Anecdotally, I can also confirm this because on both The StoryGraph and Fable, I posted the exact same reviews for two books. On the former, I have gotten absolutely no interactions from those, whereas on the second, I received three likes on one and a few follows within just a few days.

To make matters worse, The StoryGraph appears to have, on average, the least interesting, shallowest reviews of any of the sites I've tried. Again, I can only speculate as to why this is. Some of it must be my previous observation of reviews kind of being hidden. Maybe it's also because, philosophically, the site is very much designed to be "data-driven" (more on that later), so people that are more interested in organic interactions don't stick.

No Account Required
Weirdly enough, you can browse basically everything on the site except for user profiles without being logged in. Makes absolutely no sense to me.
Additional Observations

I already mentioned how The StoryGraph feels very "data-driven". By that I mean that it appears to try to make book ratings "more objective" by focusing on some select statistics, rather than individual reviews.

And I kind of hate it. The spectrum of what books can offer is WAY too vast as to be captured by a few tags, moods, genres, and six weird metrics. I especially dislike the metrics – "Pace", "Plot or character driven?", "Strong character development?", "Loveable characters?", "Diverse cast of characters?", and "Flaws of characters a main focus?". They feel like they were specifically designed for one or two genres (namely genre fiction and romance) that focus way too much on the "plot". Like, why is there nothing about the prose? Or whether the book is trying to say something or just wants to be entertaining? And they are really vague! For example, a "diverse cast of characters" can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

But if you think about it, this plot / story focused approach makes a lot of sense for a site with "story" in its title. Guess it's just not for me.

Final Thoughts
Even though the library management features of The StoryGraph are sufficient for my needs, I don't think I will be sticking around on this platform, simply because it kind of gives me the ick.

BookWyrm

During my exploratory phase with Mastodon around two and a half years ago, I also moved from The StoryGraph to bookwyrm.social, the flagship, and largest, instance of BookWyrm. Just like Mastodon (or E-Mail), it is federated, meaning anyone can set up an instance for people to join whilst being able to interact with people from other instance.

Unfortunately, the fact that BookWyrm is a volunteer-run open-source project means that it doesn't have nearly as much funding as many other options, which in turn means fewer features.

No Big Tech or Lock-In
Decentralized services like this are essentially designed to be proofed against lock-in and big tech. You can easily export all of your data and even migrate between instances. This is by far the best option if you are serious about owning your data.
Organize Ratings
Probably one of the weakest points of BookWyrm; its organizational features are extremely rudimentary. You can create custom lists, but you cannot sort or meaningfully group their contents. They are always sorted anti-chronologically.
Social Features
BookWyrm very much feels like "Mastodon, but for books". The homepage consists of an anti-chronological feed of all of your friends' activities, which you can interact with by commenting, sharing, or liking. However, just like with The StoryGraph, the feed is limited to user's interactions with books; you can't freely post about something.
High-Quality Review Culture

Unsurprisingly, given that this is one of the most niche ways to track your books, you'll find few to no reviews on any given book, especially if they are a bit older and/or less popular. However, I did find that, on average, the reviews that do exist are very high quality. They tend to be quite long and detailed, and you don't have to sift through "reviews" with no text to get to those that actually contain a human's thoughts.

Unfortunately, liking reviews doesn't appear to really do anything(?) – you cannot, for example, sort a book's reviews by rating. You can't even see how many people liked one.

Also, you cannot see the distribution of rating; you are only shown the average. This makes that number pretty much useless – a 3.5 / 5, for example, could indicate a mediocre book or a divisive one (with both very positive and very negative reception). Without a distribution, you're basically back to guessing.

No Account Required
From what I can tell, you can browse an instance's entire contents, including user profiles, without needing to create an account. So that's another plus.
Additional Observations

bookwyrm.social can, at times, be pretty slow to load and react. I assume that is due to running on volunteer-run hardware with minimal budget. Maybe other instances are better, though.

Also, there are lots of paper-cuts to be found; this is definitely not a very polished product. For example, the search is really finicky with basically no optimization (searching for the way of igs will get you no results). Also, there are lots and lots of duplicates, both for books and authors. Annoyingly, different copies of the same book will usually link to different copies of the same author and some of the latter may only have a small subset of their works linked.

Final Thoughts
BookWyrm is honestly pretty close for me. I especially like the fact that it is open-source and federated. However, there are just so. many. paper-cuts. Maybe I'll have to look into contributing to the project myself.

Fable

I'll break with the formula here and cut this short: Fable seems like a really promising option with a heavy focus on social reading. However, there are some pretty glaring issues that make me not want to use it. Namely, it feels like a walled garden (with impressively high walls at that). There is no option to export your collection, and apparently, there are no plans of adding one. There is absolutely no way to interact with anything on the site without an account; can't even browse books. And, to add insult to injury, essentially the only way to interact with the service is through their app – the website version is extremely bare-bones and allows you to do little more than view your own profile.

So yea, no thanks. The entire point of this exercise was to avoid closed ecosystems like this.

Hardcover

I should preface this with noting that I have used Hardcover only for a little bit in order to get a feel for them. However, I tried simulating relatively realistic usage by intentionally not import my data from anywhere and instead adding a subset of my read books and reviews manually.

Apart from BookWyrm, Hardcover is definitely has the smallest community of the options I have explored so far. Going by their 2025 recap, they grew from 25 thousand users to 60 thousand in that year, which is definitely an impressive growth rate. But in comparison to The StoryGraph, which just recently surpassed 5 million users, that is still tiny. But 60 thousand is still plenty, I think.

No Big Tech
Another website run by independent creators. Yay.
No Lock-In
You can easily export your data to csv.
Organize Ratings
While not as extensive as The StoryGraph, Hardcover's organizational features seem pretty full-fledged, at least for my needs. Apart from the default lists, you can create custom ones and you can sort entries by various metrics, including your rating.
Social Features

All of the essentials appear to be present. You can follow people, which puts them in a feed that shows you their recent activities. This feed is also pretty central to your home-page, giving you an overview of the most recent activity at a glance.

I quite like the prompt feature they've got, which lets you answer a shared prompt with a collection of books and an explanation as to why you put them there. As a software engineer, I love a good abstraction and this is an awesome way of taking the "what are your favorite books" section of the profile and extend it to other applications.

A particularly fun feature of user profiles is that you can sort other people's lists by your ratings. I've never seen that feature before but I will definitely be making use of it here.

High-Quality Review Culture
At first glance, the review culture on Hardcover seems to be pretty solid. One of my go-to books for evaluating reviews is Authority, a) because I love it, b) because it's relatively old and niche, and c) because it's pretty divisive. While there seems to be basically no interactions with the reviews for it, I found a few pretty solid once quickly, which is encouraging. I also looked at the reviews for Project Hail Mary and there, there was a lot more traction on popular reviews.

On that note, reviews are sorted by the number of their likes by default, which I appreciate, but there doesn't appear to be any other way to sort them; you can just filter by a specific rating range. Still, this is a sensible default and probably good enough for me.

No Account Required
From what I can tell, everything, including profiles, is publicly available (assuming the profile is set to public, of course).
Additional Observations

As an aspiring blogger, I love the fact that you can add a canonical URL to your review. I haven't seen any reviews using that feature though, so it's either not used much or really not all that visible.

Also, as probably became obvious from the section on The StoryGraph, I despise recommendation algorithms. Thus, I was pleasantly surprised when I found out that the Explore section consists of a bunch of different ways of browsing books, lists, users, etc.

Another pleasant surprise was the fact that Hardcover appears to be low on trackers and web nonsense. I've got set up my uBlock to block all third-party JavaScript scripts and the site works just fine without me needing to allowlist anything. Kudos!

Final Thoughts
I am a bit shocked to find that I have absolutely no issues with Hardcover. In fact, I keep on being pleasantly surprised whilst exploring the site. So, I think I found a new home for my book ratings! You can find as @josi_

Final Final Thoughts

I am honestly a bit shocked that this journey / rabbit hole appears to have come to an end, especially so soon. I still had quite a few other options on my list to check out, like LibraryThing, Tome, Oku, Literal.club, Papertrail, or BookSloth. But after checking out what all these sites have to offer, and how they don't fit my needs (apart from Hardcover), I am honestly getting a bit tired of this topic and am definitely quite satisfied with Hardcover.

This may not be the "optimal" choice; there may be another service out there that does everything that Hardcover does and more and / or better. But there is this little saying you may have heard: Perfect is the enemy of good. Admittedly, looking at my past actions and decisions, I certainly don't appear to have heard of it, or, if I did, I must be choosing to ignore it.

I hope this silly overview of book rating websites that was somehow both way too detailed and also way too narrow may be of help to someone else. It was definitely helpful for me. See you on Hardcover! :)