Best Wayback Machine Alternatives

Wayback Machine is one of the most interesting websites on the Internet. It used by millions of people to check how a website looked in the past. It keeps a snapshot of websites over time. So, you can go back in time to check the look of a website in the past.

In simple words, Wayback Machine is the digital archive of the World Wide Web. It is operated by the nonprofit organization, based in San Francisco, California, United States. The website was launched back in October 2001, it started keeping archive much before the launch. I am sure you will try to see how Amazon.com looked when it was launched or the initial look of Twitter and Facebook. Yes, you can go ahead and try. For Amazon.com, I found the record as old as of December 12, 1998. So, you know how old data you can check on Wayback Machine.

But Wayback Machine is not the only website offering the past looks of a website. There are some good Wayback Machine alternatives that also let you see how a website looked in the past. Wayback machine is currently blocked in China and was blocked in its entirety in Russia in 2015. And your country may also block it someday for some reason. So, it is a good thing to know its alternatives.

Also see: Best Paypal Alternates

I also want to make it clear that alternates of Wayback Machine are rare. So, I am just listing two alternates. Many people have prepared a long list of Wayback Machine alternates with 5-10 alternatives. They just listed websites that capture a screenshot or show information about a domain. I am not sure how people can see Alexa as an alternate of Wayback machine while Alexa is just a tool to check traffic-related information. Few people even added WHOIS, Page Freezer, and Competitor Screenshots. These websites are nowhere related to Wayback Machine. Few people added tools that start making an archive of a website on request. That is also not related to the Wayback Machine. So, I recommend you to avoid those articles and focus on what you are actually looking for.

Wayback Machine is a website that automatically makes a copy of all the websites of the Internet. The frequency depends on the authority of the website. In this article, I am listing those websites that automatically make an archive of Internet websites and you can look for a look at a website in the past.

Wayback Machine Alternatives

Here are the best Wayback machine alternates. Even if these alternates are not as good as the Wayback machine, it is a good idea to know about these alternatives. Even if you are not using any of these, you still have a name in your knowledge to tell other people about these alternatives.

1. Screenshots

Screenshots is an alternative to Wayback Machine for checking how a website actually looked in past. Just like Wayback Machine, It captures websites screenshot over time and makes a record to check. It just captures screenshots and does not keep a copy of the webpage.

You just need to visit a website and enter the URL. It will show you the current screenshot of the website with a gallery of thumbnails to go and check the records of the past. In the screenshot, you can see the first row with small thumbnails. For past records.

This website is still much behind that Wayback Machine. As per the records available, Screenshots have been able to capture over 250 million snapshots while the Wayback Machine has already collected over 350 billion pages. I also checked the previous snapshot of UseThisTip but could only find very few. It seems they capture screenshots less frequently, so the time gap between two consecutive screenshots is much higher.

This website just keeps screenshots while the Wayback Machine saves the whole page. So, you can get a lot of information on the Wayback machine that this. But you can easily have an idea of the look and feel of a website in the past with a screenshot.

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2. Archive.is

Archive.is is another alternative to Wayback Machine. Just like Wayback Machine, it keeps both screenshot and web page. The look and feel of this website are very ordinary. You just need to visit the website and enter the URL that you want to check back in history.

This website is also not as good as the Wayback Machine. When I searched for my websites, it was showing 4 years of screenshots. So, it is very hard to get copies of the website from the desired time frame. It keeps frequent copies of popular websites. If you are looking for websites with a good reputation, you will not be disappointed.

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3. ArchiveBox

ArchiveBox is a self-hosted web archive script that you can use to make your own hosted alternative to Wayback Machine. ArchiveBox imports a list of URLs and then saves it to a local archive folder. It can save a web page as PDF, image, TXT or HTML. You can use it to preserve access to websites offline. It is really easy to install and set up this one.

The only issue with this is that it is a hosted script and will start working the day you make it online. So, it won’t be able to show you page copies of older dates.

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Final Words

I could only find these websites that are similar to the Wayback Machine and can be seen as alternatives to the Wayback Machine. But trust me, there is no one in this list that is as good as Wayback Machine. WayBack machine frequently captures screenshots of a website and keeps a copy of the HTML page. If you check any web page, you will see many copies of the web page in a single year.

These two websites also focus on popular websites more than less popular websites. While the same is done by the Wayback machine, but that still has a much higher frequency of capturing a web page. With the alternates, you are less likely to get results of the desired time frame. For example, I wanted to see how UseThisTip looked last year and I could find the snapshot of 2014. The same case was with my website Techlomedia.

So, there is nothing as good as the Wayback machine. But I made this list just for the knowledge.

I hope the article was useful and you find it interesting. Do not forget to follow UseThisTip on Twitter. We made the Twitter account of UseThisTip a bit late. But that is a good thing to get all the latest updates we make. Now I am regular and try to publish interesting articles. If you also want me to write about anything specific. You can either use the contact page or comment section to request.