RSS Readers Compared
With the recent announcement of Google Reader I thought it was time to try and evaluate it's RSS competitors. It's closest competitors (that I know of) are Newsgator and Bloglines. But I've also used Opera's M2 and RSS Bandit so I've compared some of their features also. This comparison may be updated as I learn more.
| Features | Google Reader | Newsgator | Bloglines | Opera M2 | RSS Bandit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Import OPML | Yes | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Folder organisation | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Tag organisation | Yes | No | No | No | No |
| View multiple feed items at once | No | Yes | Yes | No | Yes |
| Rename Feed | No | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Mark all as read | No | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Search feed content | No | No | Yes | Yes | No |
| TOTALS | 2 | 3 | 6 | 3 | 5 |
Obviously I'm not comparing all features, only those most relevant to myself.
Because you can't view multiple feed items in one long page, Google Reader is really only suitable if you only expect to recieve only 20 or so feeds at any one time. It makes scanning through long lists of feeds a chore and lack of folder structure doesn't give you instant access to organisation. It has tags which should work as well as folders, but the page layout doesn't make them so usable. It also doesn't download any feed items when you first subscribe. I'm also suprised that there is no way to search the contents of your feeds. This is Google after all.
Newsgator is a better online reader and works like more traditional software with organisation and reading of feed items. Unfortunately not all my feeds have titles so said feeds were given an arbitrary number without the option to rename them. Also, for some reason, folders that have no unread items disappear which means you have a few more steps to follow to find previously read messages.
Bloglines is my tool of choice here. It scored the best on my table of features, but also sports a simple clean interface devoid of advertising. I really appreciate the ability to search for keywords in feed entries. Although for some reason the dropdown list for moving feeds to a different folder doesn't work in Opera.
M2 was my e-mail program of choice for a very long time and soon enough it supported RSS feeds which I took advantage of. But it lacks any ability to organise your feed subscription. It also only displays one feed item at a time. M2 would be ok for someone who only wishes to subscribe to 10 or so feeds.
RSS Bandit is the RSS Reader I turned to after M2. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to read feeds in a stand alone application. The only feature I would like to see is the ability to search for keywords in recieved feeds. A feature being worked on in an upcoming release of RSS Bandit will allow synchronisation of feeds subscriptions with Newsgator.
I know there are other RSS readers such as Thunderbird (which is probably better than M2 but didn't compare to RSS Bandit) and Sage for Firefox (which I tried long ago and found cumbersome). But I feel Bloglines is good enough that I don't need to go trying every competing products and I prefer the convienance of a web based RSS Reader.
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