compare
LinkDigest vs xiaohongshu-mcp
xiaohongshu-mcp (16k stars) drives your own logged-in Xiaohongshu account from a local headless Chromium: it publishes, comments, likes, searches and reads feeds. LinkDigest is hosted, read-only and needs no account: a link in, the transcript, every image's text and checked quotes out. They are complementary. Dated comparison.
Competitor rows from their public docs on 2026-09-12; tell us if something changed. xiaohongshu-mcp rows from its GitHub README and issue tracker, read 2026-10-08 (Apache-2.0, Go, 16.1k stars, 13 tools). LinkDigest rows are computed from the same constants as the pricing page and the coverage table. “—” means not stated in what we checked.
| Feature | LinkDigest | xiaohongshu-mcp |
|---|---|---|
| What it is for | Reading one post a link points to, into text an agent can use. | Operating your account: publish_content, publish_with_video, post_comment_to_feed, like_feed, favorite_feed, search_feeds, list_feeds, user_profile, get_feed_detail. |
| Xiaohongshu / Douyin | Yes — Xiaohongshu image and video notes; Douyin video and 图文 image notes. | Xiaohongshu only. |
| Other platforms | YouTube, TikTok, X, web pages. Instagram wired but not verified; Bilibili blocked (HTTP 412). | No. |
| OCR of images and frames | Yes — every image described and read for on-screen text; frames sampled from video. | No — the note's text fields and media URLs. |
| Transcript (ASR) | Yes — native captions where a platform publishes them, otherwise Qwen3-ASR, in segments of up to ~170 s stamped with their start time. | No. |
| Cookies or login from you | Xiaohongshu: no login, no cookies. Douyin runs on our session; you supply nothing. | Yes — you scan a QR code with your own account; one web login per account; cookies expire and need re-login. The account at risk is yours (its issues #668, #680, #777 discuss bans and 慎用). |
| Where it runs | Hosted; an MCP URL and a REST call. | On your machine or Docker, with a ~150 MB headless Chromium; localhost:18060/mcp. |
| Search, feeds and comments | No — one post per link; comments are not read. | Yes — keyword search, the home feed, a post's comments, your notifications. |
| Publishing and engagement | No. Never acts on a platform. | Yes — posts (scheduled, with product tags), comments, replies, likes, favourites. |
| Checked quotes and a receipt | Yes — each key point backed by a quote the server checked; `coverage` says what was read and what was not; `degraded` names anything thin. | No. |
| Failed reads free | Yes — a digest that read nothing is not charged. | Free regardless; your time and your account. |
| Price: a typical image note | 1 credit ≈ $0.018 ($9 for 500 credits a month) | Free (open source). |
| Price: a 10-minute video | 11 credits ≈ $0.198 (1 per started minute, plus the base credit) | Free, but no transcript comes back. |
Where xiaohongshu-mcp is better
- Everything that needs an account: publishing, scheduling, commenting, liking, following a feed, reading your notifications. LinkDigest never acts on a platform.
- Search and the home feed — discovering posts. Reading a known post is our job; finding it is theirs.
- Comments on a post, which LinkDigest does not read.
- Free, open source, 16k stars and a large community of Chinese agent builders (issues in Chinese, n8n and Cherry Studio recipes).
Where LinkDigest is better
- Nothing of yours on the line: no QR login, no cookie refresh, no single-web-login rule, and no account that can be flagged. Xiaohongshu is read with no account at all.
- The content, not the fields: the words in every image, the spoken transcript with times, on-screen text, key points each backed by a quote the server checked, and a receipt of what was read. get_feed_detail returns the note's text and media URLs; the reading is left to the model.
- Douyin, TikTok, YouTube, X, WeChat articles and web pages with the same call.
- Hosted and stateless: no Chromium, no -32001 timeouts from a local browser, a shared cache, failed reads free.
- Use both: let xiaohongshu-mcp find and act, and hand LinkDigest the link when the agent has to know what a post actually says.
try the difference
One call, on a real link
curl -X POST https://linkdigest.dev/api/v1/digest \
-H "Authorization: Bearer ld_live_..." \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url": "https://xhslink.cn/o/...", "format": "markdown"}'