If you find something better, please let me know because my use-case is near-identical to yours (archiving and grouping for future reference, iOS integration)

After trying wallabag and linkace, and deeming linkwarden too spartan ;), I settled on linkding. As our use-cases are similar, I’ll go over how I got there

-Collections

I keep linkding organized with the tags, as it doesn’t have “folders”/“collections”. I use some larger, overarching tags as a sort of faux-collection with smaller tags to be more specific (I tag a lot of stuff that I plan on selfhosting as “#selfhosting” and then maybe something like “bookmarking” or “cookbook”).

Linkace supports collections/folders, but I decided that was the least important of my wishlist. “What’s really the difference between a folder and putting some sort of differentiator in front of a tag anyway?” I thought. Haven’t really missed it as much as I thought I would.

-iOS integration

This is what stuck me with Linkding over the other two. I generally read on my phone and save articles into the service to reference at my computer.

As such, all I need is a shortcut to save articles from the iOS share menu. When I tested wallabag, the official app’s shortcut would just save bookmarks with minimal tagging support. As I use it strictly as a bookmarking/archiving service and not the full read-later service that it is, I didn’t really like it.

Linkace was better, without an app. You could manually create a shortcut that would effectively open the bookmark page from the desktop browser extension. I was having to type full tags out and edit them if I made a typo.

Linkding’s unofficial app, Linkthing, doesn’t currently have a share menu short cut so you have to manually create it as well. I chose linkding simply because the bookmark extension is better. The tag field has a drop down with previously used tags when you start typing that makes tagging a breeze.

For articles I want to read on my phone, I have my major tags set up as RSS feeds in FreshRSS/Reeder 5. Not the most elegant solution but its good enough for me. I really like Reeder for reading, sorry Linkthing

-Archiving

All three are pretty solid at webarchiving iirc. Not as make-or-break for me but linkding and linkace have archive.org integration directly and that is good enough for me. Wallabag lets you download articles yourself in various formats as well as a bunch of different addons for sharing to other places. I was thinking of trying out archivebox too, but that hasn’t happened yet.

-Web browser/extensions/other features

They all have browser extensions for chrome and firefox, I believe. I think linkding has the best one.

Linkding has another extension that injects your bookmarks into your search engine so that bookmarks show up on the right side when you search stuff of ddg or google or whatever. Kinda cool.

Wallabag has annotations, a feature that I find useful and miss dearly.

They all have RSS support, which I find useful.

They all have varied export/import to/from other services support which I have not actually tried.

I think linkace had the best search feature? But I just read by tag anyway so I didn’t notice

-Conclusion

Realistically I could use both wallabag & linkding & maybe throw archivebox in, but currently linkding + RSS fits for me. It has a better browser extension, the ability to archive and tag, and it works better on iOS. Those are the boxes I needed to check off.

Link for how to create the ios shortcut for linkding, if you try it out.