Calibre
E-book library manager that can view, convert, and catalog e-books in most of the major e-book formats and provides a built-in Web server for remote clients.
Description from awesome-selfhosted (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Still maintained? Yes: 886 commits in the last 90 days, latest release v9.17.0 (Oct 2026).
Also an alternative to Goodreads and Kindle.
At a glance
Calibre quick facts
- Health score
- 88/100 GOOD
- Stars
- 26,288
- Last commit
- today (Oct 2026)
- Latest release
- v9.17.0, Oct 2026
- Licence
- GPL-3.0
Top alternatives to Calibre
Full rankings: Goodreads alternatives, Kindle alternatives
In its own words
The project's README opens: "calibre is an e-book manager. It can view, convert, edit and catalog e-books in all of the major e-book formats. It can also talk to e-book reader devices. It can go out to the internet and fetch metadata for your books. It can download newspapers and convert them into e-books for convenient reading. It is cross platform, running on Linux, Windows and macOS."
Why it ranks here
Health score explained
Calibre scores 88/100, #6 of 16 in Document Management - E-books: 886 commits in the last 90 days earn 35.0 of 35 points, the latest release (v9.17.0, 7 days ago) earns 25.0 of 25, 26,288 stars add 17.7 of 20, an active, unarchived repository keeps 10 and no advertised Docker image leaves the final 10 unclaimed. That places it in the good band (70 and above). The biggest shortfall is Docker support, worth 10.0 more points.
Recomputed nightly from the GitHub API. How the score is calculated.
- Commit activity 35.0 / 35
886 commits in 90 days (30+ scores full marks)
- Release recency 25.0 / 25
v9.17.0 released 7 days ago
- Stars 17.7 / 20
26k stars on GitHub (logarithmic)
- Not archived 10.0 / 10
Repository is active
- Docker support biggest shortfall 0.0 / 10
No Docker support advertised
Commit activity
- 886
- Last 90 days
- 2,997
- Last 12 months
- today
- Last push
Ranked #6 of 16 tools in Document Management - E-books by health , between Kapowarr (#5) and BookLogr (#7) .
Details
| Licence | GPL-3.0 |
| Platforms | Python, deb |
| Latest release | v9.17.0 · 7 days ago |
| Stars | 26,288 |
| Open issues | 0 |
| Docker | Not advertised |
| Repository | kovidgoyal/calibre ↗ |
Calibre vs its top 5 alternatives
Active tools that share a comparison page or a category with Calibre (Document Management - E-books), scored on the same five terms.
| Tool | Health | Stars | Licence | Last commit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Audiobookshelf | 97 | 15k | GPL-3.0 | 7 days ago |
| Kavita | 96 | 12k | GPL-3.0 | yesterday |
| Calibre (this tool) | 88 | 26k | GPL-3.0 | today |
| BookLogr | 87 | 637 | Apache-2.0 | 18 days ago |
| Calibre Web | 87 | 18k | GPL-3.0 | 20 days ago |
| Bookwyrm | 84 | 2.8k | ⊘ Proprietary | yesterday |
Calibre: common questions
What does Calibre replace?
Repoly lists Calibre as an open-source alternative to Goodreads and Kindle. Each comparison page ranks every alternative by the same health score, so you can see where Calibre stands against the others.
Is Calibre still maintained?
Calibre had 886 commits in the last 90 days and its last push was today; the latest tagged release, v9.17.0, is from 7 days ago. Repoly recomputes this nightly.