You click through a lot while browsing that you don't have time to read now but plan to later, which is why services like Instapaper and Read It Later have skyrocketed in popularity. Here's a quick look at the two popular tools.
Photo by Abby.
Both services work in the browser, on iOS devices, on third-party Android apps, and a few other places. Here's what sets them apart.
Instapaper
Instapaper is dead simple. You add a Read Later bookmarklet to any browser (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, your mobile browser, etc), click it when you're looking at something you'd like to read, you know, later, and then visit Instapaper, either in your browser or a device with an Instapaper app, to read a stripped down, primarily text-only version of the article you bookmarked to read later.
Instapaper's biggest following is likely due to its minimal iOS application, where you can download your to-read items for browsing offline in adjustable and attractive text. It's like a newspaper filled with only things you want to read, to-go.
Read It Later
Read It Later is a lot like Instapaper at its basic level: You mark web items to read later, then you can read them when you're ready to catch up, either in your browser or favorite mobile device.
Unlike Instapaper, Read It Later is a bit more tightly integrated with your browser (if you want it to be) through its browser extensions (either the official Firefox extension or third-party extensions for browsers like Chrome), but like Instapaper, you can also just use a bookmarklet. And where Instapaper focuses primarily on text, Read It Later is much more focused on multimedia. Text, images, and video. Its iOS app has a feature called Digest that creates a sort of virtual newspaper front page, which you can see above.
Which Do You Prefer?
To a large extent, both tools accomplish very similar tasks, with just a few differences—some purely aesthetic differences, some small feature differences. We'd recommend kicking the tires on either to decide which works best for you, but out of curiosity, we'd like to hear which you like best:
Let's hear more details behind your preference in the comments.