Archive.ph compared with Perma.cc and Wayback Machine| Archive.ph (archive.today) | Perma.cc | Wayback Machine |
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| Capture format: Each capture produces a replica of the page and a screenshot, taken at a width of 1,024 pixels. JavaScript-generated content is saved in a frozen state, and CSS is converted to inline CSS. | Capture format: Perma.cc creates a Perma Link, an unalterable copy of the cited page. Neither its content nor its address changes after capture. | Capture format: The Wayback Machine of the Internet Archive combines scheduled crawls with Save Page Now, introduced in October 2013, which archives a single URL on request. Crawls miss content behind forms, interactive features and orphan pages. Each capture is timestamped, so versions of a page can be compared over time. The former Google cache link kept only the latest copy. |
| Control over archived records: No user can delete an archived page directly. The service does not obey robots.txt, arguing that it acts as a direct agent of the human user. | Control over archived records: You can delete a link within 24 hours of creating it. After 24 hours the link joins the permanent collection. | Control over archived records: Site owners can ask the Internet Archive to exclude a site by email, and a team reviews each request without a guaranteed outcome. Since April 2017 an explicit exclusion request is required, and robots.txt is no longer the only mechanism. It stopped honoring robots.txt for US government and military sites and later more broadly. |
| Operator and institutional backing: The operator is anonymous. In February 2026 English Wikipedia banned archive.today links, citing a DDoS incident and tampered captures. | Operator and institutional backing: Perma.cc is built and supported by libraries. Listed partners include the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, the Internet Archive and the Digital Public Library of America. | Operator and institutional backing: The Wayback Machine is run by the Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based American nonprofit. It opened to the public on 25 October 2001, and as of October 2025 it had archived more than 1 trillion web pages. |
| Access and cost: Access is blocked in several countries, among them China, and Russia since March 2026. | Access and cost: Anyone can register for a free account, and an API is available. Becoming a registrar is free for academic libraries and courts, while other organisations pay a subscription. | Access and cost: Use is non-commercial with optional registration, and archival and retrieval requests have been limited to 15 per minute since October 2019. It offers an Availability JSON API, a CDX Server API and Memento Protocol compliance. China blocks archive.org. |
| Status: The site is operating. Owner identity is the subject of an October 2025 FBI subpoena to the registrar Tucows. | Status: Perma.cc is listed as operating, with the API and library registrar program described on its site. | Status: The service is operating. In October 2024 a DDoS attack took it offline, and it returned on 14 October in read-only mode with Save Page Now disabled until 4 November. The cache: operator of Google has no equivalent, since it was retired in 2024. |
