Webcomic App Review - Webtoon
I've tried six of them. Here's what I think.
Well this is the final review in the series I’ve been doing. Next week and the next few weeks, I’m planning to resume my podcast! There’s going to be a few reviews I’m doing on the podcast. As this is Substack, there is room for both audio and text content.
The audio podcast will be both a general review and then a spoiler laden discussion of the title in question. The text post will be just the general review as I don’t want to spoil those of you who aren’t familiar with the title and want to check it out for yourself. Anyways, here’s the final webcomic app!
What is Webtoon?
If you somehow don’t know what Webtoon is, it’s a major webcomic platform. It was originally started in South Korea by the major internet corporation, Naver, in 2004. The English language version was launched in 2014, which is of course the version I’m talking about here. There’s a number of sister brands to Webtoon such as Line, which is a message app, and V Live, which is a streaming platform.
Webtoon licenses a number of Korean manhwa for readers. They also accept submissions for publication. One rather famous original comic published on Webtoon is Lore Olympus. This is also a really good opportunity for webcomic artists to get their work noticed since Webtoon does have a large user base.
Cost
It’s actually free to read comics on this app! A number of the comics I read are for free, which makes this a really good budget friendly option! They also have daily passes in which you can read some comics for free if you want to read ahead. You also have the option to purchase coins, which again let you read chapters early. The coins you pay vary. Some comics also let you bulk purchase a number of chapters at once to read earlier if you’re not interested in waiting a whole month for free access.
Coins can be purchased as monthly plans or coin packs. For the monthly plan, it’s 110 coins for USD$9.99/mo or 575 coins for USD$49.99/mo. For the Coin packs, the cheapest plan is 52 coins for USD$4.99 and the most expensive is 1150 coins for USD$99.99. Normally I’d do what I did with the other apps and do a comparison of how many chapters you can read for $5. However like I said, with Webtoons many of the comics are free and the purchasing is basically early access to chapters if you’re impatient or super eager to read chapters of a story.
My personal thoughts
There’s a large library of content with a variety of stories you can read on here. I can honestly say that this is an app that’s definitely worth getting. You have plenty of stories to read and a lot of them are free to read!
This is why if you were to ask me to recommend you which apps to get for someone on a budget, I would highly recommend this app and Manta. As I wrote in my previous review for Manta, that app is also pretty inexpensive compared to the other apps because it’s a monthly or annual subscription. You can get access to ALL of the webcomics on Manta with the option to purchase and download web novels separately.
Regardless of which app(s) you wind up using, there’s plenty of excellent content to check out. I’m certainly finding plenty of new stories to read. Don’t be surprised if you start seeing some of those stories being reviewed in the future!
Have you tried Webtoons? If you have, what stories are your favorites? What are you currently reading? Leave a comment below and let me know!