# Jina Reader

5 Hacker News commenters recommended Jina Reader and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 13 months.

**Verdict:** People recommend it as a quick way to turn web pages into clean Markdown for AI agents and LLM pipelines, cutting token counts sharply. Critics say it struggles with JavaScript-heavy pages.

## Why people recommend it

- Cuts tokens when feeding AI agents (2 comments): "stripping to markdown with Jina Reader or Trafilatura before passing to the agent cuts that 68k down to ~3-5k for most Wikipedia pages" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48868207)) "Firecrawl and Jina Reader are better on token count but they convert to markdown" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47048097))
- Strips pages to clean Markdown (2 comments): "stripping to markdown with Jina Reader or Trafilatura before passing to the agent cuts that 68k down to ~3-5k for most Wikipedia pages" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48868207)) "Firecrawl and Jina Reader are better on token count but they convert to markdown" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47048097))

## What people warn about

- Weak on JavaScript-heavy pages (1 comments): "It's pretty good, until you hit JS heavy pages." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46934568))
- Converts to Markdown, not raw text (1 comments): "Firecrawl and Jina Reader are better on token count but they convert to markdown" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47048097))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Firecrawl](https://hackerapproved.com/p/firecrawl.md): 17 recommend
- [Bright Data](https://hackerapproved.com/p/bright-data.md): 10 recommend
- [Apify](https://hackerapproved.com/p/apify.md): 5 recommend

## Where to get it

- [Visit the official site](https://jina.ai/reader/)

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Jina Reader", https://hackerapproved.com/p/jina-reader/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).