Annotate any website — highlights and notes that don’t disappear
Select the words worth keeping on any page and they land in your notes as a quoted highlight, your comment underneath — searchable forever, next to everything else you know.
FREE FOR 1,000 NOTES · NO CREDIT CARD REQUIRED
Highlight and comment on any page
Annotating a website in Dexi is one gesture: select the passage, then save it. In Chrome, Brave, Arc, Orion and Vivaldi the Save to Dexi web clipperputs “Save highlight” in your right-click menu — the selection is clipped and you’re back to reading. In every other browser the bookmarklet does the same with nothing to install, which makes Dexi a genuine online annotation tool: highlight a website from any machine you’re sitting at.
Every highlight lands as a quoted passage in the one note Dexi keeps for that URL, with room for your own comment underneath. Highlight the same article again tomorrow and the new passage appends below the first — one page, one growing note, your commentary threaded through it. Tags you type in a comment (#methodology, #to-cite) become real tags on the note.
Your annotations, searchable forever
Browser highlighters have a dirty secret: the highlights live inside the extension, listed per page, on that one machine. Six months later the yellow marks are wherever you left them — scattered across a hundred pages you’ll never revisit.
In Dexi the highlight isa note, which changes what you can do with it. Full-text search covers every passage you’ve ever clipped; semantic search finds quotes by meaning, so searching “deliberate practice” surfaces the highlight about skill-building even when neither word appears in it. Tag highlights as you save them, connect them to your other notes with [[wiki links]], and watch them take their place in your knowledge base next to your bookmarks and typed notes.
One honest caveat: Dexi doesn’t re-paint highlights onto the live page when you return to it. Your highlights live in your knowledge base — where you can actually find them — not scattered across the pages they came from.
Annotate the articles and newsletters you’ve saved
Everything that flows into Dexi is a note you can annotate — RSS entries from the feeds you follow, newsletters forwarded to your email-in address, bookmarks imported from Pocket or your browser. Open any of them, quote the paragraph that mattered (the editor has a quote block for exactly this) and write your take under it. And when you’re reading the original article in your browser, the highlight flow works there like anywhere else. See all the ways to save.
Dexi vs Hypothesis vs browser highlighters
| Dexi | Hypothesis | Browser highlighters (Glasp, Liner) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free · $5/mo unlimited | Free, open source | Free tiers; limits vary |
| Where highlights live | In your notes — one growing note per page | Anchored on the page, in a public or group layer | In the extension’s own list, per page |
| Public / social annotation | No — private by design (share notes with your team) | Yes — its whole point: public margins, classroom groups | Varies; Glasp profiles are public by default |
| Search | Full-text and semantic search across highlights, notes and bookmarks | Search within your annotations | A list of your highlights, roughly |
| Connected to your notes | Tags, [[wiki links]], knowledge graph, digests | No | Export integrations at best |
| Works without installing | Yes — bookmarklet in any browser | Via its proxy (via.hypothes.is) | No — extension required |
Pricing and features as of August 2026 — check each product’s site for current details.
Honestly: if you want public, social annotation — comments pinned in the margins of the live page, visible to a class or the whole web — Hypothesisis excellent and open source. If you just want quick colored marks while you read, a browser highlighter is fine. Dexi’s slot is private research annotation: a web annotation tool where the highlight is the start of a note, connected to everything else you’re learning.
Frequently asked questions
How do I annotate a website without installing anything?
Drag the Dexi bookmarklet to your bookmarks bar — it works in Safari, Firefox and every desktop browser, nothing to install. Select the text that matters, click the bookmarklet, and the passage is clipped into the note for that page with room for your own comment. In Chrome-family browsers the web clipper does the same job from the toolbar or the right-click menu.
Is Dexi a free online annotation tool?
Yes to start: the free plan includes 1,000 notes with highlighting, comments, tags, and full-text and semantic search — no credit card required. Unlimited notes are $5/month.
Can I export my highlights?
Yes. Your whole workspace — highlights, notes, bookmarks — exports as a ZIP of markdown files or CSV from settings, so you can leave with your data any time. Highlights export as standard markdown quote blocks.
Do my highlights show up on the page when I visit it again?
No — and that’s deliberate. Dexi doesn’t paint an overlay onto the live page; your highlight lives as a quote in your note for that URL, where it’s searchable next to everything else you know. If you want annotations pinned to the page itself, in public or classroom layers, Hypothesis does that well.
Can I annotate PDFs?
Dexi annotates web pages, including the web-based articles, newsletters and feeds you’ve saved into it. It doesn’t mark up inside PDF files — if in-PDF markup is a core need, pair Dexi with a dedicated PDF tool.
Keep reading
Keep what you highlight
Install the clipper or drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar, and the passages that matter start compounding — free for 1,000 notes.
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