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Which Feed Reader is Best?

Posted By Darren Rowse 13th of May 2007 RSS 0 Comments

FilenameTime for a little reader debate discussion.

Which Feed Reader do you use and Why?

Are you a Google Reader fan? A Bloglines junkie? Do you prefer NewsGator, Firefox Live Bookmarks or Netvibes? Or do you prefer to follow blogs via MyYahoo or iGoogle?

Which one do you use – why?

Leave us a mini review – it’ll be interesting to see what trends emerges from the discussion.

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. […] who are willing to leave comments, this can be a great technique. For example, in this post on Best RSS Feeds, it is the comments that make the post. Another advantage, of this kind of post, is that it makes […]

  2. Newsgator is ok. I’d probably look for a new one, but as Leopard is going to have a feed reader built into mail, I figure why bother.

  3. Does anyone know if you can tag a news item in NetVibes for later reading? In iGoogle I can use Google Reader to tag an item as a favorite so I can read it later when I have more time, but there doesn’t seem to be a similar option in Netvibes that I can find, and it’s the one dealbreaker preventing me from using it exclusively. :-|

  4. […] Which Feed Reader is Best? Which Feed Reader do you use and Why? Are you a Google Reader fan? A Bloglines junkie? Do you prefer NewsGator, Firefox Live Bookmarks or Netvibes? Or do you prefer to follow blogs via MyYahoo or iGoogle? Which one do you use – why? Tagged as: rss, blog, webdev, feed Tags: Art, articles, balloons, blog, blogging, Bookmarks, clothing, content, copyright, dice, drinking, drinkinggames, drinks, feed, for:jimic, funny, game, gamedev, Games, Geek, kingscup, missile, paper, papercraft, photography, rss, Shopping, tshirts, Vancouver, webdesign, webdev Related Posts:This Week’s Del.icio.us bookmarks 2007-04-20Del.icio.us bookmarks 2007-04-24 – 2007-05-04This Week’s Del.icio.us bookmarks 2007-04-17 […]

  5. Gregarius all the way for me , its slightly slower than a local application but means all my feeds are in sync and I only read them once whether I am using a desktop at home or out with my Nokia N800.

  6. I have always used Newsgator, mainly because its the first feed reader that i discovered after i found out what a feed was and what it could do for me. As i use multiple computers i was keen to have access to my feeds no matter which PC i was on.

    So saying, i also experimented with getting one of their client side feed clients, Feed Demon. I had difficulty getting it to sync and when it did suddenly 50 of my feeds disappeared from my subscribed feeds altogether (both online and in Feed Demon) which was enough to see me quite unhappy.

  7. antonio says: 05/17/2007 at 9:20 am

    Hi there!
    I’m browsing feeds since 2003 and I’ve been using Feedreader for a year now. I didn’t find a better reader.

    Footprint is sometimes high but I mostly use it for its ability to easily handle hundreds of subscribed feeds and the ‘offline’ view, which I use a lot while in the train.

    It also has the “smartfeed” function, which basically allows you to create “watchers” (complex search queries) on the feeds you’ve subscribed to, which themselves work as feeds.

    I also tried GReader and bloglines but I appreciate offline browsing. It keeps concentrated on what has arrived in the feeds without clicking on every interesting link I find online.

  8. I recently settled on Newsgator after trying out several Web-based feed reader options (I access from three PCs, so Web-based feed readers were the only practical, “don’t make me think too hard,” “don’t make me change my routine” options).

    Newsgator (and its toolbar for my browsers) is simple, uncluttered, and easy to learn. I got the gist of it just by looking at its screens and was able to use it without ever looking at its online help. It works the way I need it to work, and it’s designed close to the way I think. Switching to a feed reader (finally) has given me back about an hour every day.

  9. I use NewsFire but have never compared notes with any other Mac users on alternatives. No one I know in person here in my little community even knows what a Feed Reader is. Or what a Feed is, for that matter. Few know what a blog is.

    So, thanks Darren – this is a useful poll for me to look over.

    I should mention that I am barely over last week’s Group Writing Project, which kind of set me back in terms of keeping up for a few days there!

  10. I’m a big Bloglines user. I tried to make the switch to Google Reader when others were saying how great it was, but I went back to Bloglines. It fits me well….I knew within a day or two, I’m a Bloglines girl!

  11. […] Which Feed Reader is Best? […]

  12. I’m a Bloglines-er. Not for any particular reason. It was the first one I came across and it’s easy to use. I don’t ask for much in the way of features so it suits me.

  13. The Sage-Extension for Firefox and Google Browser-Sync – the winning team. All feeds in sync – at home, at work, on the laptop …

    Markus

  14. I personally use Sage. It’s a plugin to Firefox that opens up a Sidebar and manages all of your feeds right their as bookmarks. I love it because it is clean, simple and it is integrated well into the best web browser on the planet!

  15. netvibes.com with it’s clean look and modules makes reading blogs a breeze. nothing has been easier for me. thanks for putting the question out there. interestingly enough, it wasn’t easy to find updated content on what the best rss readers are out there.

  16. I use JetBrains Omea Reader.
    It is a free offline reader that has everything I need.

    The main feature that makes me use it is that you can set some feeds so that when you click the headline it opens the actual web page of the blog in the application which is extremely useful for blogs that don’t include full text in their feeds.

  17. Here’s a link to omea reader http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/reader/.

    Also what I like about it is you can create customisable “views” such as “unread items this month” which lists all new items in the month.

  18. Ahmed Aldeeb says: 05/30/2007 at 8:11 am

    I dunno if it is just me or what, but I didn’t find any of you guys mentioning anything about either the new feature in IE 7 to of feed reader or in the new outlook 2007 … honestly, i don’t find either of them is sufficient to me, but I really wanna stick to one good offline reader that would work well with Windows Vista, any recommendations ?

  19. […] Two weeks ago I asked ProBlogger readers – Which Feed Reader is Best? […]

  20. […] tijd terug vroeg Darren Rowse zijn lezers wat hun favoriete feedreader is. Vandaag heeft hij na 219 reacties de […]

  21. I use Thunderbird for around 100 plain-text RSS feeds, very easy to see which feeds have been updated and it’s quick when skimming through posts.

  22. Another vote here for sage plugin for firefox. I gave google reader a try once but went back to sage. You can also organise your sage feed bookmarks just like you would all your other bookmarks from the “organise bookmarks” menu item.

  23. Like many others here, portability is crucial for me, so I use Google Reader primarily. On my home machine I sometimes use Shrook, which has a nice interface for picking up on the freshest posts.

    With both, however, I must gripe about the lack of a drag-and-drop style interface for folders/tags. There may be tools that could help with this, but either comes out-of-the box with the capability.

    As I am constantly trying to tweak and reorganize my feeds, drag-and-drop would be enoramously helpful

  24. […] results of darrens survey which feed reader is best were 219 responses with 39 different ways of reading rss […]

  25. […] Two weeks ago I asked ProBlogger readers – Which Feed Reader is Best? […]

  26. […] Two weeks ago I asked ProBlogger readers – Which Feed Reader is Best? […]

  27. MFlint says: 06/12/2007 at 11:07 pm

    Blogbridge! Google reader is clunky and good for people who only read a little. But if you are a power user, using different machines, or you just have a lot of different interests, Blogbridge is totally the way to go. And who doesn’t love free and open source!

  28. I found google reader the best.

  29. Google Reader!!!

  30. Pierre says: 04/03/2008 at 10:05 am

    I think some who are saying they are satisfied with the built-in feed readers in the various browsers (IE7, firefox, Opera) must have simple needs that do not require an aggregator.

    By aggregator, I mean a feed reader that allows you to see all the news items. For a simple example, let’s say you need to keep up with, say, medical news. You put all of the feeds you want in one folder, and then you can see them all together when reading the whole folder – all in one list, that is. This is very handy and time saving when you have that kind of need. Programs like Sharpreader, Feedreader, RSS Bandit, etc. allow you to do this. Browsers don’t, and so they are next to useless for this.

    Personally, I think that if you’re only going to check out your feeds one feed at a time, you don’t gain much over just going to the websites where those feeds originate. This is just using a feed reader as a kind of bookmark system, as opposed to a real feed aggregator.

    I’ve used Liferea (on Linux), Sharpreader, Feedreader and RSS Bandit myself, as well as the Firefox add-ons Sage, Wiz, Newsfox and Brief.

    My personal favourite is Feedreader, but I also like Sharpreader. They are both very similar in their simplicity and effectiveness, but as of right now (April 2008), Feedreader is more current, while Sharpreader almost seems abandoned. I really could live with any of them, though. I like both Sage and Newsfox, but I can’t be committed to using just one browser at the moment.

  31. I use Google Reader since I should read RSS c several computers (including PDA).

  32. fareast says: 12/17/2008 at 10:23 pm

    I use Google Reader. Google Reader is the best so far!!

  33. I am using Google reader but not happy with it: it’s slow and sluggish and organisation and tagging is some problem

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