Curation is a judgment job: out of everything published on a topic, you pick the pieces worth someone’s time and present them so the selection itself carries value. The tooling problem is that most of what you’d use for it is either a private bookmark pile nobody else can see, or a publishing platform that demands your audience create yet another account.
Marqly covers the middle: save the best of what you find, group it into boards by topic, and share any board as a public page that anyone can view — no signup required. Collection to publication, one tool.
Build boards around topics, not folders around chaos
A Marqly board is a curated set: the links and highlights you’ve grouped around one subject. “Onboarding flows done well.” “Reading list: pricing strategy.” “Best essays on local-first software.” Each board holds exactly what you’ve chosen to put there, in one place, separate from the rest of your library.
That separation is what makes boards curation rather than storage. Your library is everything you save; a board is the subset you’d put your name on. The full mechanics are in what boards are.
Highlights make the curation opinionated
Anyone can compile a list of links — an RSS feed does that much. What a reader wants from a human curator is the extra signal: which part of this 5,000-word piece justified its place on the list.
Marqly’s highlighter provides it. Select text on any page, highlight it in one of six colors, attach a note if you have something to say. Since boards hold highlights alongside links, your curation ships with the receipts: the pulled quote, the key statistic, the paragraph that made the piece worth including. A board built this way reads like an annotated bibliography instead of a link dump.
Share as a public page — no account wall
When the board is ready, share it as a public page. Anyone with the link can view it. They don’t create an account, don’t hit a signup wall, don’t get nagged into an app they didn’t ask for. For anything audience-facing — a resource page for your newsletter readers, a source list for clients, a starter kit for a community you run — that zero-friction view is the difference between a link people actually open and one they abandon at the login screen.
Public boards also have a home beyond your own distribution: Marqly’s discover directory is a public collection of shared boards, where curation from across the product is browsable.
Curation is a volume job — the AI handles the volume
Good curation means reading far more than you publish, and the intake side is where Marqly’s automation earns its place. Every save is tagged by AI automatically, so the raw material organizes itself while you focus on judgment. AI summaries let you triage a large backlog fast — scan the summary, decide if the piece earns a full read. And when you know you saved the perfect piece three months ago but can’t remember its name, semantic search finds it by description: “the essay comparing design systems to legal codes” works without the title. That retrieval layer is covered in how to search bookmarks with AI.
For the organizational philosophy underneath — why automatic tags scale where folder taxonomies collapse — see how to organize bookmarks.
Video belongs in curation too, and it’s usually the awkward format. In Marqly, saving a YouTube video from the bookmark button in YouTube’s action row brings the transcript along with it, which means video content is searchable by what was said, not just by its title — so the talk you half-remember from six weeks ago is as retrievable as any article.
If you already have years of curation trapped in another tool, imports cover Pocket exports, Raindrop.io collections, and standard browser bookmark HTML files — the existing archive comes in and gets tagged like everything else.
Getting started
Create a free account at app.marqly.com (no card — plan details in is Marqly free) and install the extension for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Safari. Pick one topic you already know well and build a single board: ten links, each with at least one highlight explaining its inclusion. Share the public page with one person whose taste you trust.
That’s a complete curation pipeline, and it took an evening — not a platform migration.
Who this is not for
Marqly is not a distribution tool. It won’t schedule posts to social media, send your board as an email newsletter, or auto-publish to an RSS feed — pair it with your newsletter or social tooling for that half of the job. There are also no team features: boards are curated by you, not co-edited by a group, so an editorial team wanting shared workflows should look at multi-user tools.
The fit: you’re a person with taste — a writer, builder, or community runner — whose audience trusts your selection, and you need the path from “found something great” to “shareable page” to be nearly effortless. Boards plus public sharing is exactly that path.
Frequently asked questions
Can people see my curated board without signing up?
Yes — that's the point of public boards. You share a board as a public page, and anyone with the link can view it without creating a Marqly account. No signup wall between your curation and your audience, which matters when you're sharing with clients, readers, or a community.
What can I put on a board?
Links and highlights. A board can hold the articles, videos, and pages you've saved on a topic, plus the specific passages you highlighted on those pages. That combination lets a curated board carry your editorial judgment — not just what to read, but which part matters.
Is Marqly free to use for curation?
There's a free tier with no card required, so you can build and share boards without paying. Pro — $48 per year or $8 per month, with a 7-day free trial — adds AI chat features on top. Sign up at app.marqly.com and start with the free plan.