I'm curious as to if anyone is familiar enough to comment on the state of the options available to us in terms of readers/managers such as Kavita, Komga, Mango, Tachidesk, or any others alongside other programs which can help with the actual downloading of chapters or metadata.
(free and open source software only, although feel free to discuss non-FOSS options in the comments if you think they are better for you 🙂)
This is primarily for the collection and reading of Manga and some Korean webtoons, I do not currently have a strong interest in collecting western comics or non-graphic novels. Perhaps I might in the future, but I don't want that to affect my choice of tool for this goal.
I've only recently started looking into this and here are my goals and potential solutions:
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Be able to select a series with a Sonarr inspired program and download all of the chapters that are currently available, as well as be able to download new chapters as they come out.
- Kaizoku is able to do this, but it is very feature incomplete and has a few bugs compared to Sonarr. Still, good enough for what I need (which is to download high image quality chapters of manga, preferably not in volumes).
- Anybody know how Tranga stacks up? I mainly try to source downloads from Mangasee with Mangadex as a backup.
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View my downloaded series in a Jellyfin alternative.
- Komga and Kavita seem to be the best options, and although I've installed both, my Komga library scan has been going on for days so I can't comment as to how effective either of them is yet for a full sized library (perhaps someone else can chime in if they've tried both recently). I don't know how other options like Mango fit in.
- Also: it is important that there are options for reading webtoons/vertical layout comics.
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Have Tachiyomi support (critical).
- I need the server to be able to support reading on Tachiyomi as an extension. Progress sync with it is a nice to have but not vital.
- Both Kavita and Komga have this, which is why I'm trying those out first.
- Note: just because I need strong Tachiyomi support, doesn't mean that I don't also want a good WebUI. It's less important to me personally, but half the fun of software like Jellyfin is sharing your media library with friends and family. Many of them are not on Android or are not invested enough to download Tachiyomi. I have friends who go on ad ridden, malware filled websites to read manga on their computers in 2023!
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Optional (but desirable): native AniList syncing support.
- I'll read from Tachiyomi, like, 85% of the time, but there are some series I prefer to read on desktop so this feature would be really nice to have.
- As far as I know Kavita has this feature, but it's locked behind a subscription fee.
- Komga does NOT support this natively, but apparently, it has integration with MALSync which might work well (although I'm not sure how this would work, in terms of UI). I don't necessarily want 100% parity between my library and AniList, I like the Tachiyomi approach where I can choose to track a specific series.
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M E T A D A T A
- This has been the most frustrating part of all this. Manga databases are nowhere near as robust as those that exist for TV and Movies.
- AniList is great for series name/title/description/genres, but not much beyond that. You can basically forget about stuff like individual chapter information.
- The one bane of my collection so far is that I would like to include volume information. I strongly prefer reading in chapters (due to years of Tachiyomi, MangaRock, and similar app usage) so I actively avoid getting full volumes when I can, although that doesn't mean I don't want that information. Ideally I would have both and I've been trying to find a way. If someone has any good way to do this PLEASE let me know (aside from MangaDex, their site doesn't have complete collections for many of the series I like)! I think I have answers for mostly everything else aside from this.
- Good sources for either English or text-free covers would be nice. I don't hate Japanese covers (quite the opposite) but I prefer my English translated library to have covers in my language. Also - I'm not sure if Kavita has this, but Komga doesn't have the ability to directly search for alternate images like in Jellyfin. It would be nice if you could directly select from images sourced from sites like AniList, Kitsu, MAL, MangaDex, etc.
- I've tried Manga Manager but it doesn't seem to be fully working or as effective as I'd like (+ the documentation is out of date).
The good news is that most of these problems are already solved or solvable with little effort (aside from the volume information 😞).
Please let me know if you have any suggestions or if there are any great tools that may do what I'm looking for better than what I'm currently using (Tranga is one which I discovered only while writing this post, so I can't comment on how it compares to Kaizoku yet...).
TL;DR:
Would like some advice. I'm trying to make a Sonarr/Radarr/Jellyfin stack but for Manga. Goals include new release automation and complete metadata retrieval. Ideally fully automated, featuring a webreader, Tachiyomi integration, and 3rd party progress tracker support.
What I'm using right now: Kaizoku for automated downloads like Sonarr, and Kavita/Komga (trying both for now) as my Jellyfin equivalents. Still haven't fully played around with them but neither is perfect for my use case.
