Home › How we test and rate manga & webtoon apps
· By the TopMangaApps editorial team
Every score on this site is calculated, not assigned. We install each of the 17 platforms, read until the free tier runs out, pay through at least one paywall, and rate six axes from 1 to 10. The weights below are published so you can disagree with a specific number rather than with a black box — and so you can verify that no commercial relationship could move a platform up the list.
| Axis | Weight | What we measure |
|---|---|---|
| Real cost to finish a series | 25% | The total cost of reading one complete series, measured from live pack prices and published episode costs. |
| Catalog size | 20% | How many licensed titles, and whether the series people search for are actually there. |
| Free access | 20% | What you can read without paying, and how long a free-only route takes to finish a series. |
| Translation quality | 15% | Official localisation versus machine-flavoured English; consistency of names, terms and typesetting. |
| App experience | 10% | Reader quality, offline downloads, web reader, discovery and store ratings at volume. |
| Billing transparency | 10% | Whether prices are published, whether currency expires, and how easy cancellation is. |
Why cost carries the most weight. It is the axis where readers are most often surprised and the one platforms work hardest to obscure. A coin pack costs $9.99; nobody tells you the series runs 180 episodes. Measuring the full cost of finishing a series is the single most useful thing this site does, so it is worth a quarter of every score.
The six numbers behind every composite on this site. Composite = catalog×0.20 + cost×0.25 + free×0.20 + translation×0.15 + app×0.10 + billing×0.10.
| App | Catalog | Cost | Free | Translation | App | Billing | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MANGA Plus | 8 | 10 | 10 | 10 | 6 | 9 | 9.1 |
| Shonen Jump | 8 | 10 | 7 | 10 | 10 | 9 | 8.9 |
| Comikey | 6 | 9 | 10 | 10 | 8 | 8 | 8.6 |
| Omoi | 5 | 9 | 7 | 10 | 10 | 9 | 8.1 |
| WEBTOON | 10 | 5 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 8 | 8.1 |
| K MANGA | 8 | 6 | 8 | 10 | 8 | 7 | 7.7 |
| Manta | 7 | 9 | 6 | 9 | 8 | 6 | 7.6 |
| Mangamo | 5 | 9 | 7 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 7.5 |
| INKR | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 8 | 7 | 7.4 |
| Tapas | 9 | 4 | 8 | 8 | 8 | 8 | 7.2 |
| Tappytoon | 7 | 5 | 7 | 10 | 8 | 8 | 7.2 |
| MangaToon | 7 | 7 | 9 | 4 | 8 | 6 | 6.9 |
| WebComics | 7 | 6 | 9 | 5 | 8 | 5 | 6.8 |
| Toomics | 7 | 8 | 3 | 7 | 7 | 4 | 6.2 |
| BookWalker | 9 | 6 | 2 | 9 | 3 | 7 | 6.0 |
| Coolmic | 4 | 5 | 4 | 8 | 6 | 6 | 5.2 |
| Lezhin Comics | 7 | 2 | 4 | 9 | 5 | 4 | 5.0 |
Installing and reading is the only way to get the numbers that matter. We read until the free tier is exhausted to measure the free route honestly, buy the smallest paid pack to confirm live prices, and unlock chapters to establish real per-episode cost. We check whether an unlock is permanent or a rental, whether earned currency expires, and how many taps cancellation takes. Where a platform gates adult content, we verify how that gate actually works rather than repeating the store rating.
Official listings. Live Apple App Store in-app purchase lists, Google Play listings, and each platform's own pricing and help pages. These are the primary source for every price on the site and are re-checked on each update.
Our own testing. Cost-to-finish figures, free-route timings and reader quality.
Industry reporting. For market events — closures, ownership changes, price rises — cross-checked against K Comics Beat, Anime News Network, Comics Beat, Variety and company announcements, and always linked.
Where a platform does not publish a figure — several do not publish per-episode costs — we say so and label our number an estimate built from published pack prices. We would rather show the arithmetic than a confident number we cannot source.
A platform's rating on a genre page can differ from its overall score, deliberately. On a topic page we re-weight for that need: the best platform for BL manhwa is not automatically the best for free shonen manga. We flag this wherever it happens so the numbers are never mistaken for one universal ranking.
Two categories never appear. Unlicensed aggregators, because creators are not paid and the sites are unsafe. Services that have closed or have no English version — Pocket Comics, Netcomics, Bilibili Comics and Piccoma among them — because recommending a platform a reader cannot use is the most common failure in this category. Both exclusions are listed with reasons and sources on the home page.
Prices are re-verified when platforms announce changes and during periodic sweeps of all 17 apps. Every page carries its last-updated date. If you find something out of date, tell us — we correct and re-date the page.