The number of anime series to date is a vast and constantly expanding endpoint, thanks to there being a fairly large list of new series added each season. Sometimes it's not always easy to remember that horribly obscure anime that had such a generic plot that it was completely unmemorable from any of the other similarly dull anime. Sure there are people that may find said series to be the grand tier of all anime and you are insane for not remembering any of it, but w/e I don't remember anything important from KoiChoco or Fortune Arterial besides one having an election at the end and the other having a vampire. Unless your memory is outstanding, remembering specific anime and even what episodes you are currently on for the duller anime might not be the easiest thing to do. Thus the internet has come up with some rather shitty sites that almost cover your needs of tracking what episodes you are on, what stuff you have already watched, and other useless stats that can be used to formulate just how shut-in you are. For anyone already into anime, this stuff is pretty much old hat and you probably already have an account in one or all of the websites that I'm going to list.
AniDB: This website is kind of ugly, though can be somewhat fixed with some css magic. It's database of anime knows no bounds and it's got some nice extra details about the releases out in the wild and wonderful tags. Aside from all of the dead or nonexistant clients, and zero dealings with manga, it's probably at the top of the list providing a bunch of information on any series. The fact that there are no well maintained clients for aniDB kind of kills it's usefulness unless you want to manually deal with it, which I don't.
Uranime: Honestly, I've never even heard of the anime prior to scouring the internet for information on the topic of keeping track of anime. If I haven't heard of it, most likely you haven't either, which also pretty much means it's a website with a small minority of people and nobody really cares about them. They also don't have many clients either...there is one on Android if you use uranime though.
MyAnimeList: This website is the defacto site for keeping track of your anime and manga, for better or worse. The API kind of fails and doesn't get updates, the website layout is also rather ugly, but there are more clients than I have fingers on one hand and a number of them are actually still alive. It might have it's ups and downs...very heavy downs...but almost everyone uses it, and thanks to the exporting feature, moving elsewhere is always an option even if moving back really isn't.
Herro: A short lived dream of a single otaku to create the greatest successor to anime/manga tracking that mankind has ever known. Started in 2013, as of ages ago in 2014 the website is 404'd and dead. RIP that site. This is just incase you once recalled hearing about a tracker called Herro...because you probably only heard about it once :3.
Melative: A slightly different premise holds melative up in comparison to the rest of the sites available. It more or less is a generic tracker of the media you consume, so it isn't just anime or manga, but it can be music, light novels, visual novels, games, etc. It has a microblogging feature as well where you can blurt out how Oshino Shinobu is best girl or maybe just say all of the typos and other fansubbing errors with a hashtag like "#FansubIsDead", though I have no idea if you can actually search stuff via hashtags, so it is more for effect than anything important. The API is available and for the most part everything is fine and dandy. If there was anything to really gripe about, it's that about nothing has really changed since 4 years ago though I say this while refreshing my email inbox for that mythical reset password email that has yet to appear. So if anything, YMMV. There are some clients too I guess...but on the whole, melative is dead to all but it's users.
Anilist: The cute spawn from the guys at anichart that fancied a modern, minimalist approach. I like how they organized and displayed the information, though I guess it should be expected since anichart looks and works fantastic even on the shittiest of internet speeds. Just add some tags and release a fucking API that has been promised since eons ago, and maybe things could get somewhere. At the very least, it's still on the horizon as of July 2014 just as it was on the horizon an entire year ago. Of course, until that API gets released and people make some clients, this website is going to stay on the list of manual management.
Hummingbird: Yet another new-ish anime/manga tracker that at least has an API out, which means some clients can, and some have, add support for HB. Probably the closest to being an actual replacement to MAL/AniDB with some strange affixation towards a community profile, so each episode update shows up on your feed and you can write your own statuses too. In a way, it's like a better version of Melative with a focus on anime and manga. You can pretty much use it like a microblogging medium and it has some twitter-like aspects (followers and following), as well as the all important breakdown of what you watch. The API has two versions apparently with the first version being dead and the second being used as the base of the website already, but doesn't have any documentation at the moment. If there is anything else going for it, since moving to Github, it has seen some popularity since I remember seeing it in the trending some ages back.
So now the end result of all this derping around. Honestly, it really doesn't matter what you want to use to track your anime/manga. It can be an excel sheet or a piece of paper or even papyrus reeds for all I care. A number of the websites above do what is needed, and that is to track anime, thus it all really comes down to what sort of stuff you are expecting from it. As for myself, I like having things really easy, so a desktop client and maybe an android client are preferred which narrows this list down to just HB and MAL for me. Continuing on this convenience, converting to HB is not completely flawless and some series do get lost moving from MAL to HB and thus I hesitate a little to go fully to HB because if I ever want to move back to MAL, I'm not going to get all of that information back. To bring things to a conclusion, I'm really just waiting for Anilist and Hummingbird to mature before swapping to either, because decrepit as MAL may be, it's still there with my list of anime since years back.
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