Guardo review
Another Thursday, another review! Firstly a little disclaimer for this week’s tool… it is our 2nd bookmarking service in two weeks, this wasn’t the original plan as the proposed tool we were covering, ‘Jam’ has something of a queue for new users to try out (see image below). So this week we tried out Guardo.io - the self-proclaimed ‘faster, simpler, cheaper and more secure’ way to bookmark all of your links. Are they right? Let’s find out!
As a video agency, we do spend many hours trawling the web for tips, ideas, hacks and general inspiration, so naturally, OD requires these types of services quite a bit. To sign up, Guardo is currently completely free, which is amazing. Cheaper? Tick. How long this lasts is undetermined, but we’ll update this once we know! Sign up using a Google account if you have one, if you’re a user of Google Chrome, this is the most synchronised way of managing Guardo. As opposed to adding URLs directly to your account as an uncoordinated mess, you can import your bookmarks directly from Chrome. You need to first export your bookmarks from Chrome to your device to achieve this. A little bit of admin, but the reward is a very aesthetically pleasing, and clear way of displaying your most important links. Not necessarily ordered, but organised chaos to some degree. You can download the Guardo desktop app for further access and connectivity. As its name suggests, Guardo is all about security, it won’t store or share your data, there are no ads, and no spam, meaning your account is yours without the headache of external eyes taking a peek. Secure? Tick. So far so good.
Guardo’s interface is clean and easy to navigate, we’re big fans of the dark skin and chunky typeface, it gives the tool a sense of grandeur. Guardo claims to be the fastest bookmarking service out there, as it uses the latest web technologies, now while we don’t contest that, we didn’t find the process super fast. It works well enough, importing bookmarks and navigating between windows worked fine, but we didn’t acknowledge its speed. So we’ll say it’s certainly fast enough. Can we score half a tick? Now when it comes to its simpler suggestion, we’re a little torn. The whole ethos of bookmark imports certainly is appealing, and maybe it’s just us. But instinctively, we feel a bookmarking tool works better by adding URLs individually, so maybe this isn’t the case for us. But this is very much a personal preference. Another half tick. So we’d say Guardo’s self-assessment is more or less a fair one.
Guardo feels good to use, it’s got a sense of self-worth and similar to the bookmarking tool we reviewed last week, Guardo can and probably will be much more down the line as if this is just the beginning of what a weblink hub can be. It’s good, and with it being free for the foreseeable future, we absolutely recommend it to anyone!
Guardo, great stuff. 👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼/5!