A great way to keep up with your favorite series
As Japanese comics (or anime) have seen a rise in popularity over the years, so has its graphic novel counterpart—manga. If you’re a fan but running short on cash, there are fantastic online manga sites for reading your favorite manga digitally—and legally.
The sites listed below make it easy to find popular manga or discover lesser-known series that might interest you. The mangas on these sites are uploaded through high-quality scans, allowing anyone to access them. It’s a great way to keep up on your favorite series. Here are some of the best manga sites you should check out.
Table of Contents
1. Crunchyroll
While most well-known for its anime streaming service, Crunchyroll provides manga lovers access to manga series. There are lots of free manga on the site, and an app is also available to read on the go.
Crunchyroll is great for an ad-free experience if it hosts the series you read or love. To read all the manga available, you can sign up for Crunchyroll Premium for $7.99/mo. A subscription gives you access to the site’s anime and manga. The site also provides “simulpubs,” where you can read manga while it’s released in Japan.
2. Manga Kakalot
If you’re looking for a little more variety, Manga Kakalot has what you need and more. It hosts manga series spanning 40 genres, and you can find all the popular and lesser-known series.
Each manga chapter is on one web page, so you can scroll to read the entirety of any chapter. You can also change a couple of options to make reading more accessible. There are options to choose which image server to use (if one of them has an error, you can switch) and change page margins. Overall, this is one of the best sites for manga reading.
3. Manga Owl
There are over 100 genres of manga to browse on this site, so you’re likely to find whatever niche series you want. Manga Owl has a vast collection, especially if you’re a romance manga fan, including top-rated series like Naruto, One Piece, and Dragon Ball. There are also many adult-oriented mangas on this site.
If you register to join the site, you can create collections of your favorite manga and participate in discussions. It has an active community and plenty of content to keep you busy reading.
4. Manga Reborn
Since most manga need to be translated from Japanese to reach an English audience, most smaller series never get translated or make their way out of Japan. This site aims to bring these lesser-known series out to a larger audience with the help of translators who volunteer to make them accessible to English readers.
There are plenty of free series on this site, or you can pay to read specific series if you wish. This manga site is an excellent service for all those who love manga to ensure that smaller creators and artists have the chance they deserve to get their work read.
5. Comic Walker
Comic Walker is a prominent site in Japan for manga, and you can easily change the language to English to make your reading experience easy. You can find lots of popular series with the latest updates. If you wish, you can buy more of a particular series for those that aren’t free.
Each page for the manga provides lots of information so you can find other similar series or other parts of the same series. Also, the scanned chapters are high quality and easy to read.
6. Book Walker
Book Walker is a sister site to Comic Walker, where you can buy lots of manga. However, they also provide many free titles for you to read in e-book form. The free manga offerings get updated often, so you never know what you might find to read.
Book Walker also has steep discounts on many manga titles, so if you want to own them, it’s a great place to buy manga. Once you download a title, you can read it in your browser with a suitable viewer and see all downloaded manga in your booklist. This site is one of the best ways to read free manga and light novels
7. KissManga
KissManga is one of the best sources of free digital manga, with tons of content available. If there’s a specific manga you’re interested in, you can search for it on the site. You can also see popular or trending series that others are reading.
Each manga series has summarized information on its page. You can read each chapter on one page, so you don’t need to refresh every time. The scans are high-quality, and there are many manga series translated into English that you may not be able to find otherwise.
8. Readm.org
Readm.org is a very cleanly formatted site, showing you the best and most popular manga series on the front page and many genres to browse. The scans of the series’ are high-quality and easy to read.
You can participate in the active community and discuss your favorite manga with others. Take advantage of the advanced search, subscription alerts on new updates, and the ability to create or find collections of manga series.
9. MangaFox (FanFox)
MangaFox (also called FanFox) is another platform with a diverse manga collection—Action, Mystery, Shounen, Webtoons, etc. The homepage is user-friendly and houses the latest manga releases, manga recommendations, and popular mangas read by other members.
The platform also hosts a “Manga Ranking” that ranks manga based on readers’ ratings, popularity, reviews, and other factors. There’s a daily, weekly, and monthly ranking and a grand “Total Leaderboard.”
10. MangaHere
MangaHere and MangaFox have similar homepage structure/design, but MangaHere has a broader collection of manga genres. You’ll find new manga releases and interesting title recommendations on the homepage. A “Manga Spoilers” section shares predictions and spoilers about upcoming and latest releases.
11. MangaDex
This is one of the best manga websites for free reading graphic novels and Manhwa-type comic books. You can access the platform as a guest or registered member. Creating an account gives you the full experiences and features—user groups, communities, reading history, etc.
MangaDex has a “Random” feature that recommends a random manga in its library. Use the feature if you find the library overwhelming or can’t decide what title to read.
12. MangaPark
MangaPark doesn’t have the best user interface, but its collection of manga books is grand. Mangapark’s advanced search engine lets you find mangas by author names if you don’t remember a manga title. You can also discover good mangas by views, rating score, and read status (completed, dropped, reading, re-reading, etc.).
We found Mangapark’s site theme to be quite interesting. You can switch the website’s theme (Light, Dark, Black, Dracula, Valentine, or Wireframe) to match the emotion of the manga you’re reading. Themes also spice up the background aesthetic to your preference.
13. BATO.TO
Although Bato.to doesn’t come close to other platforms on this list feature-wise, it’s a free manga website worth exploring. It has a diverse collection of manga comics, but you cannot search/find mangas by genre or category. However, it does color-code ties for easy identification.
Regular, old, or normal mangas have blue titles, while popular and newly added mangas have red and green labels. There’s a bookmark feature, dark mode, and a publishing tool for uploading new comics to the platform.
14. Honto.jp
Honto is an online manga website for core Japanese manga fans. If you don’t understand Japanese, use Google Translate to translate the website to your preferred language. You can read manga titles on the platform or download them (for free) to your device as eBooks. Honto also prints, sells, and ships paperback copies of manga comics.
Aside from manga comics, you’ll find light novels, novels/literature, economy, and business books on Honto.
15. Comixology
Comixology, an Amazon-owned company, has over 40,000 mangas, comics, and graphic novels in its library. If the websites above don’t have mangas from top publishers (DC, Marvel, Harlequin, etc.), you’ll find them on Comixology.
While Comixology isn’t free ($5.99/month), new users get a 30-day free trial and unlimited access to thousands of manga titles. Note that the free trial is available to U.S.-based customers.
Reading Manga Online
A lack of money shouldn’t keep you from the joys of reading manga, so try out some of the free manga sites listed above to find your favorites. You can read Japanese manga comics on these websites on any internet-enabled device—Android, iOS, PC, etc.
Mangafreak, Comico, Mangapanda, VIZ, and MangaGo are other notable websites for reading manga online for free.
