RSS Readers: the verdict

Filed under: Text, Utilities, News, Windows, Productivity, Web services, Commercial, Freeware, Open Source

RSS Readers: the verdict

by Ryan Carter Jul 24th 2006

Download Squad readers totally rock! To everyone, thanks for all the feedback on our RSS Readers: SOUND OFF! post. There are so many options to choose from, and I haven't had a chance to really go through them all, so I will be posting my thoughts on the top RSS readers in the next week or two. DLSQ's reader-cloud is much wiser than I am. Several of the readers you mentioned I had never heard of. Thanks to everyone. I have a new favorite out of all the RSS readers I glanced at over the weekend. Drumroll and spotlights please...GreatNews is the winner! Not only was GreatNews the most recommended at last count (tied with Sage) but it is simple and powerful. I love it. I really like the newpaper layout and easy to use features. My favorite part about it was the ability to enter a web address, and GreatNews will pull any feeds from the page and list them at the bottom via an RSS icon. A simple click or two and you've subscribed. It is a piece of cake. Here are your top results:

GreatNews - 8 votes
Sage (firefox plugin - 8 votes
FeedDemon - 6 votes
Flock - 6 votes
Google Reader - 6 votes
Bloglines - 5 votes
Netvibes - 5 votes
Omea - 4 votes

Others were Bloxor, Alesti, Abilon, Endo, FeedLounge, FeedReader, Gregarius, Klipfolio, Onfolio, RSSbandit, Fizzle, Thunderbird, Vienna, Opera, RSSpopper, IntraVnews, Pluck, Reblog, SharpReader, Rojo, NewsAlloy, NewsHutch, IE7, humanized, BlogBridge, Awasu, a few homegrown varieties (very cool) and a few others I may have missed.

Tags: abilon, alesti, awasu, blogbridge, bloxor, endo, feedlounge, feedreader, fizzle, greatnews, gregarius, humanized, IE7, intravnews, klipfolio, newsalloy, newshutch, newsreaders, onfolio, opera, pluck, readers, reblog, rojo, RSS, rssbandit, rsspopper, sharpreader, thunderbird, vienna

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Nogg3r5 said 9:28AM on 7-24-2006

Newshutch is great. Everyone should use newshutch, its so simple and fast and easy to use!!!!

John said 10:19AM on 7-24-2006

FeedDemon has my preference...

Richard said 10:37AM on 7-24-2006

I gave Greatnews a try but it's amazing how used I have become to my 'old' reader: Sharpreader. Immediately I tried to see if I could immitate Sharpreader's behaviour. I couldn't so I will stick my old one.

Petko said 10:51AM on 7-24-2006

Hmm, not considering NewsGator is a crime in my opinion :) Seriously, NG is very good newreader (the web version) and I highly recommend it!

Ryan Carter said 11:09AM on 7-24-2006

NewsHutch I have yet to try out completely, and I really don't want to pay for FeedDemon, but it looks excellent as well. NewsGator is decent as well, and I was using it before I "found" GreatNews, I especially like the right-click feature in newsgator.

Peter said 1:18PM on 7-24-2006

FeedDemon is worth paying for. GreatNews is a complete rip-off of FeedDemon but it doesn't include synchronization. If you work on more than one machine, then the syncing feature alone is worth the price of FeedDemon.
The web-based readers are fine for light users, but once you start having lots of feeds you really need a desktop tool to handle them efficiently.

Martyn said 2:48PM on 7-24-2006

How can GreatNews be a rip off of FeedDemon? Greatnews has better features than FeedDemon (and is much quicker) if you are looking for a way to read the output of many feeds. You can customise the CCS in Greatnews to get many different looks. You can see ALL the feeds under a group on one page in Greatnews too. I have tried ALL the current offline readers including FeedDemon and I keep going back to Greatnews. It is the one for me! FeedDemon is a distant second and FeedReader a close third.

Peter said 4:43PM on 7-24-2006

Martyn - If you compare the GreatNews interface to the FeedDemon 1.x interface you'll see the similarities. There was also a point when the GN author was spamming many RSS forums complaining how horrible FD was and making up lies about FeedDemon's features. He was encouraging people to use GN (without actually saying at the time it was his program). That's dubious marketing at best.
The 2.x release of FD does contain many of the features you mention.
GN is free and that is a big advantage for some people, but if you need to sync several machines, GN isn't going to do that for you.

Martyn said 5:27PM on 7-24-2006

Hi Peter,

I take your points.............

I was not aware of most of what you said above. However, I do really like GN and find it a little more flexible than FD. Particularly the ability to read whole folders of feeds in one page. I created my own CSS to give a me a very small and clean page that I can scan through very quickly.

However, I am still waiting for someone to write the 'perfect' newsreader. There are many features of FD and GN that would be great together.

I suppose it is just a matter of personal choice. I have tried just about every one out there - free and shareware but I keep returning to GN.......for now!

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