What Diigo does

Diigo is a privately held, bootstrapped software company founded in 2005 by Maggie Tsai and Wade Ren, headquartered in Reno, United States with a California-domiciled parent entity (Diigo, Inc.). It operates a social annotation and knowledge management platform that allows users to bookmark, highlight, annotate, archive, organize, and share online content. The core product centers on persistent highlights and sticky notes that reappear whenever a user revisits the original web page, multi-color highlighting, a personal cloud-based library, an outliner for structuring research, and group features for collaborative annotation and threaded discussion.

The platform is delivered through browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox via a bookmarklet called Diigolet), mobile applications for iOS and Android, a RESTful API v2 for third-party integration, and import tools that accept bookmarks from Pocket, Instapaper, Pinboard, Delicious, and major browsers. Premium features include permanent archiving of web pages with annotations intact and expanded storage. Diigo also offers an Education Edition with free teacher/student accounts, a Teacher Console, and a school-wide Education Domain deployment. Distribution is global and primarily product-led, relying on the freemium funnel, browser/app store discovery, and word-of-mouth among a 9 million+ user base.

Diigo monetizes through a freemium subscription model: the basic service is free with core bookmarking, tagging, and annotation features, while premium capabilities are gated behind a paid subscription whose pricing is not publicly disclosed. The company has no disclosed institutional funding, operates with a 12-person team, and has made one acquisition (Furl, in March 2009). No enterprise anchor customers or revenue figures are publicly disclosed, and revenue is treated as a single stream of aggregated premium subscriptions across a long tail of individual and SMB users.

Name

Diigo

Legal name

Diigo, Inc.

Website

https://diigo.com

Company type

Private

Founded year

2005

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

11–50 employees

Short description

Diigo is a bootstrapped social annotation and knowledge management platform that lets individuals, teams, and educators bookmark, highlight, annotate, archive, and share web content across browsers and mobile devices via a freemium subscription model.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Personal Knowledge Management Software

NAICS

Software Publishers (5132)

SIC

Services-Prepackaged Software (7372)

akta.pro primary industry

OER Authoring, Remixing & Publishing Tools/Platforms (EDAGAJAM)

akta.pro secondary industries

Open Educational Resources (OER) & Curriculum Repositories (EDAFACAJ), Assistive Reading & Writing Tools (Text-to-Speech, Speech-to-Text, OCR, Dyslexia Support) (EDAFAKAA)

Keywords

• Social bookmarking
• Web annotation
• Knowledge management
• Web page archiving
• Collaborative research

Headquarters

HQ city

Reno

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices2 records

Markets served

GTM type

B2B and B2C

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Personnel, Technology or R&D, Infrastructure, Operations, Marketing or Sales

Revenue model

1. Freemium Subscription Model: Diigo operates a freemium business model where the basic service is free with core features (bookmarks, tags, basic highlights, limited library), while premium features like archived web pages and enhanced storage require paid subscription. Paid subscriptions by users are the primary revenue source.
2. Premium Subscriptions: Premium features include archived web pages (stored forever with annotations intact), enhanced storage, and other advanced capabilities. Revenue generated from user subscriptions.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels6 records

Marketing channels6 records

Core offering

Diigo is a social annotation and personal knowledge management platform that lets users bookmark, highlight, and add sticky notes to any web page, with annotations persisting on revisits. It bundles bookmarking, tagging, a personal library, an Outliner, group collaboration/forums, permanent web-page archiving, browser extensions (Chrome, Diigolet bookmarklet), iOS/Android apps, an Education Edition for schools, and a Diigo API v2 for developers, delivered via a freemium model with paid premium subscriptions.

Product overview

Diigo is a multi-tool for personal knowledge management offered as a unified platform with multiple integrated modules. The core Diigo platform provides bookmarking, annotation (highlights and sticky notes), personal library, outliner, and group collaboration features. Browser access is available via Diigo Extension (Chrome) or Diigolet bookmarklet (all browsers). Mobile access through Diigo Mobile App for iOS and Android. Premium add-on features include Archived Web Pages and extended storage. Additional tools include Save by Email, Social Media Aggregation, Import/Export (Pocket, Instapaper, Pinboard, Delicious, Kindle, browsers), PDF Export, Blog Publishing, and Diigo API for developer integration. Education Edition provides specialized teacher/student accounts and school domain deployment. The platform supports cross-device access with cloud-based storage and is monetized through a freemium model.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Diigo (Core Platform) Multi-tool personal knowledge management platform that lets individual users and teams collect, annotate, archive, organize, and share online information via bookmarking, highlighting, sticky notes, a personal library, an Outliner, and group collaboration, accessible across PC, tablets, and mobile devices.
• Diigo Extension for Chrome Browser extension for Google Chrome that enables one-click bookmarking, highlighting, and sticky notes directly on web pages with full Diigo feature support.
• Diigolet Bookmarklet Bookmarklet tool that works across all major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE, Edge) by being dragged to the bookmarks bar, providing core Diigo save, highlight, and annotate functionality on any web page.
• Diigo Mobile App Mobile application for iOS and Android that allows users to access, browse, and search Diigo bookmarks, highlights, and annotations on mobile devices, with offline file download capability for offline browsing.
• Outliner Built-in organization tool within the Diigo platform that structures research through automated streamlining or personal customization, allowing users to create structured research bases with lists, sections, and tags.
• Archived Web Pages (Premium) Premium feature that permanently archives webpages saved by users, preserving content with annotations intact even if the original source becomes unavailable. Archived pages are fully searchable and stored in multiple format versions.
• Diigo Groups Collaborative platform for building group knowledge repositories, supporting public, private, and semi-private groups with group bookmarks, group sticky notes, group forums (threaded), group tag dictionaries for consistent tagging, group widgets for website integration, and shared caches/archives.
• Diigo Education Edition Education offering that provides free teacher/student accounts with a Teacher Console for managing student accounts, plus a Diigo Education Domain option for school-wide deployment that automatically creates student accounts for school email domains.
• Diigo API v2 RESTful HTTP-based API (v2) at https://secure.diigo.com/api/v2/ that enables developers to build applications interacting with Diigo services, supporting fetching and posting of bookmarks and user data, returning JSON, and using HTTP Basic authentication with an API key.
• Import/Export Tools Tools for importing bookmarks from Pocket, Instapaper, Pinboard, Delicious, and various browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, IE), as well as exporting the Diigo library and annotations to PDF and providing library backup.

Quantifiable outcome

• 9 million+ users have adopted the platform

Named customers8 records

Segments3 records

Ideal customer profiles3 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration14 records

Feature11 records

Partnerships

One partnership is on record.

• Educational InstitutionscoreStrategic or Co-development PartnerDiigo provides free education edition upgrades for teachers and students, including a Teacher Console for managing student accounts. School IT administrators can implement Diigo Education Domain for school-wide deployment with automatic student account creation for school email domains. Partnership focuses on supporting educators in using Diigo for classroom instruction, collaborative learning, and professional development.

Scale indicators1 record

Recent moves5 records

Expansion highlights5 records

Direct peers

• Raindrop.io: Raindrop.io is a bookmark manager and read-later service with tagging, highlights, and full-text search across saved content. It is the closest modern direct competitor to Diigo's bookmarking-and-annotation core, serving individual knowledge workers and teams with similar freemium pricing.
• Hypothes.is: Hypothes.is is an open-source web annotation platform that overlays highlights and sticky notes on any web page, with strong adoption in academic and education settings. It competes directly with Diigo's persistent-annotation feature set and education use cases, with an open-standards angle.
• Matter: Matter is a modern read-later and highlighter app with strong newsletter and article queueing workflows. It directly competes with Diigo's premium read-later/annotation positioning for individual knowledge workers.
• Readwise: Readwise aggregates highlights from Kindle, articles, and podcasts into a searchable personal knowledge base with spaced-repetition review. It overlaps directly with Diigo's annotation archival and review workflows and competes for the same knowledge-worker premium segment.
• Pinboard: Pinboard is a paid social bookmarking service with archival and full-text search across saved bookmarks. It is a direct functional peer to Diigo's bookmarking-and-archiving core, targeting individual power users with a one-time-fee model.
• Instapaper: Instapaper is a read-later and annotation service that lets users save web articles and highlight passages. It directly overlaps Diigo's read-later and highlight features, though with a narrower feature set and no group-collaboration capabilities.

Broad incumbents

• Notion: Notion is a broad workspace platform combining documents, databases, and web clipper features. It competes for the same individual knowledge-worker and team use cases Diigo addresses but as part of a much wider productivity suite rather than a focused annotation tool.
• Evernote: Evernote is a long-established note-taking and web-clipping platform with cross-device sync and team workspaces. It competes with Diigo across personal knowledge management and team research workflows as part of a broader note-taking portfolio.

Emerging players

• Obsidian: Obsidian is a markdown-based knowledge management app with bidirectional linking and graph view over personal notes. It overlaps with Diigo's outliner and personal-library use cases for individual researchers, though it does not annotate live web pages.
• Kami: Kami is a document annotation and collaboration tool widely adopted in K-12 and higher-ed classrooms. It competes directly with Diigo's Education Edition for teacher and student use cases, particularly PDF and web annotation workflows in classroom settings.

Market position

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat5 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/diigo
• Facebookfacebook.com/diigosoftware
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/diigo-inc

Compliance2 records

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles2 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A1 record

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Diigo