A look inside
See it in the app
Real screens from a running Alcove — your whole catalogue, every format, on one quiet server.
Point Alcove at a folder or an existing Calibre library and read everything you own — anywhere.
Free account on our server · track everything you read · no card, no cap.
No re-tagging, no lock-in, no cloud. Alcove reads your files where they sit and turns them into a fast, private server.
Add plain folders of ebooks and comics, or mount your existing Calibre libraries read-only. Alcove never touches the originals. On a Calibre source the first ingest of 428,523 books completes in about 14 minutes, inside a single container.
Calibre custom columns are auto-discovered and shown as browse facets and detail fields — the thing other apps make you beg for.
Books, light novels, manga, comics, and magazines each get their own browse surface with facets tuned to that medium — not one generic list. Saved web articles get a section too.
A 428K-item catalogue ingests, serves, and sits idle under a hard 3 GB memory cap with no OOM-kill — no external database, one all-in-one container.
Alcove splits your library into sections — each with its own codename in the app — so a manga reader and a magazine reader aren't the same compromise.
Where you stopped on one device is where you pick up on the next — reconciled across the web app, Android, and your e-readers. One library, no silos.
Real screens from a running Alcove — your whole catalogue, every format, on one quiet server.
Every figure below comes from Alcove's own benchmark harness, which replicates a public book-apps benchmark. Alcove runs with no external database, so its RAM figures are the whole app.
| Calibre ingestion | Time | Books / sec | RAM peak |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 books | 0:04 | 2,500 | 117 MB |
| 50,000 books | 0:08 | 6,173 | 282 MB |
| 100,000 books | 0:16 | 6,173 | 406 MB |
| 150,000 books | 0:24 | 6,148 | 656 MB |
| 428,523 books — real 6-library catalogue | 13:51 | 516 | 2.5–4.3 GB* |
*The 428K run is a real, richer-per-book library read over a Docker bind mount (two sources on a spinning disk) — a scale demonstration, not a like-for-like against the synthetic tiers. Peak is 2.5 GB under a 3 GB cap; with headroom the on-demand Stats build briefly touches 4.3 GB, then releases.
Source: Alcove benchmark harness vs. BookOrbit's published reference numbers (M4 / 8 GB / 6 CPU, incl. PostgreSQL sidecar).
Four self-hosted book servers, one machine, the same 10,000-book corpus. Fresh throwaway Docker instances, volume-staged, run one at a time. Ingestion is scan-start to scan-complete through each app's own API.
| App | Ingest 10K | Books / sec | App RAM peak | Separate database |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Alcove | 0:10 | 1,000 | 146 MB | None |
| Grimmory | 2:47 | 60 | 1,620 MB | MariaDB (extra container) |
| Kavita * | 6:50 | 7.4 | 719 MB | None |
| BookOrbit | 11:23 | 14.6 | 713 MB | PostgreSQL (extra container) |
10,000 books, identical synthetic EPUB corpus, identical machine (Core i9-13900HK; Docker 20 CPUs / 15.5 GB), fresh Docker instances, volume-staged (no bind-mount tax for anyone), sequential runs. RAM shown is each app's own container — Grimmory and BookOrbit additionally run a separate database container; Alcove and Kavita have none. * Kavita indexed 3,051 of the 10,000 before its run ended; Alcove, Grimmory and BookOrbit each finished all 10,000. Source: Alcove benchmark harness, 2026-08.
They are the same app wearing two hats. Start with an account on our server; move to your own when you want your files on your own machine.
Sign up and keep track of everything you read — progress, ratings, shelves, and the history behind them. Browse the library, follow a series, keep a list. Nothing to install and nothing to pay.
The app on your own machine, pointed at your own files. Everything below this line — the six sections, the readers, Kobo and KOReader sync, the Android app — needs a library, so it lives where your library does.
No subscription, no per-seat billing, no phoning home. One purchase, your hardware, your data.
One payment. No subscription, ever.
Your license key appears right after checkout — Alcove asks for it once, on first setup.
Download the installer → (free — it activates with your key).