My Google Reader replacement
Published 2013-09-26, 14:48
After Google closed their RSS reader I of course was looking for a web based replacement for it. Wanting more a „river of news“ than Pinterest or „Let us decide what you want to read“, the search actually got quite complicated – many of the new reader replacements popping up didn’t match my requirements, and even if they looked like they did, most of the time they were broken or not really thought through.
A more structured list of my requirements:
- free, cheap or reasonable pricing
- fast
- reliable
- nice UX
- mobile options (own mobile version or via API)
- folders
- folder organization
- „river of complete articles“ view where I can scroll to see all articles, all the articles of a folder or all the articles of a blog
I used ReplaceReader, Russel Beattie’s Readerpocalypse-the-Players-article, this epic list and some Google searches to find the following list of replacements:
Feedly, free
Very feature complete. Sometimes strange UX, quite often doesn’t really save read progress. But has an API that is supported by the biggest iOS readers.
TheOldReader, free
Matches the old Google Reader very closely. Didn’t scale well in the first days after the shutdown, actually seems to closely related to Google Reader to innovate.
Aol Reader, free
Big company, good designers. Makes a great rss reader with a perfect design. Shame they needed sooooo looooong to offer users to reorganize their imported feeds. Small feature, big frustration if it’s missing.
Digg Reader, free
See what I wrote about Aol Reader.
Newsblur, limited free, $2/month, $24/year
Oldie but a goodie. Works great, but I don’t like parts of the interface.
Feedbin, $3/month, $30/year
Ben Ubois created one of the newer Google Reader alternatives, and he did a pretty good job. I really like the general style of the product, but really dislike the user of tags instead of folders and the missing ‚complete articles river‘ view.
Yoleo, free (or $9/year donation)
„the beautiful reader“ is it’s tagline, and Jamie Gilgen did a really good job at that. Unfortunately, she also made some very strange decisions and the river of articles, or „waterfall“ as she calls it, is still missing.
Curata Reader, free
„The Cleanest Reader“. Yup, but also missing lots of the functionality I want.
Feedspot, free, $3/month, $24/year
Again, most of the stuff of Google Reader (and more) works and looks pretty decent.
Commafeed, free
„Bloat-free feed reader“. Support the most important stuff, but is also quite slow.
Hive, free
„Content first, no distractions“
Bloglovin, free
Works, pretty, but also not flexible enough. Very Pinterest/fashion oriented.
kouio, free
Prettyyyyyy. But no river view and not really made for lots of folders.
Others
More great readers, but didn’t really bring anything new to the table beside variations in design and which features were or were not supported:
- Lector, $3/month
- Ridly, free
- InoReader, free
- BazQux Reader, $9/$19/$29/year
- go read, free
- rivered,7-day trial, $2/month, $20/year
Tiny Tiny RSS
Because it actually looks good I also decided to include this self hosted reader.
So which one did I choose? Feedly. It just worked when all the others had scaling problems and it supports all the features I need. It’s not perfect, but now I’m used to it.
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