Which Is the Best Offline Feed Reader?

Over the last few days, I was running a poll here to find which the best offline feed reader is. Out of the enormous responses I received, I found the most popular software among the readers. Here are the results with reviews of each feed aggregator.

The products in the poll were: RSSReader, FeedReader, FeedDemon, Awasu, NewZie, BlogBridge, and others.





Total number of votes: 1005

RSSReader: 34 % of the votes with 340 votes
FeedReader: 25 % with 255 votes
FeedDemon: 10 % with 102 votes
Awasu: 8 % with 85 votes
NewZie: 8 % with 84 votes
BlogBridge: 7 % with 68 votes
Others: 7 % with 71 votes

Features of These Feed Readers

RSSReader

Hands down, RSSReader is the king among offline feed readers. Most of the users find it very valuable. This is a free software that had almost 2 million downloads. The latest version of this lightweight software also works with Microsoft Windows Vista. It is supported under these versions of MS Windows: 98, NT, ME, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista.

RSSReader requires you to download and install the Microsoft .Net Framework's latest version for the Windows PCs.

Download and install the .Net Framework from the Microsoft Website.

System requirements: 200 MHz Pentium MMX processor or higher; 64 MB of RAM; 10 MB HDD space.

FeedReader

The second best as per the user survey, FeedReader has a very user-friendly interface and advanced features. FeedReader is a free, fully customizable RSS/news reader, which comes at a very lightweight (4MB) installation package.

The program has support for podcasting, tagging, nested folders, full Unicode, and secure SSL connection. It can smoothly handle large number of feeds, in varying formats. Another important feature as touted by FeedReader website is its optimized update system that intelligently analyzes the time of update of most of the feeds and updates only when necessary. Its advanced filtering features help make the feeds smart, by filtering out unwanted updates.

The FeedReader is supported in systems running Windows 2000 or later, with Internet Explorer 6 or higher version installed.

FeedDemon

NewsGator's FeedDemon is a very popular feed reader. It is supported under Microsoft Windows 98 onwards, with Internet Explorer 6 or higher. One of the latest features of FeedDemon is the 'panic' button. It is a feature that marks all unread old feed updates read in a click.

In FeedDemon you can enable a feature called 'watches', that filters upcoming news feed based on specific keywords you put in. FeedDemon also helps search outside your feed subscriptions through a generic feed search engine and find out specific feeds, thus, to subscribe to. There is also support for podcasts.

Awasu

Awasu is a power-packed RSS feed reader that comes in personal and professional editions. However, this feed reader is perfect only as a professional edition that has all features. The personal edition lacks a lot of features and is worse compared to other feed aggregators mentioned. You can compare the editions here.

NewZie

NewZie is a website-like feed & news aggregator with lots of features. When I used NewZie, I found it very effective and user-friendly. So many users also felt so. But this is a less popular feed reader.

What I loved the most about NewZie is its content presentation. It highlights new posts with different color and presents content in a window fashioned like a website with tiny links to minimize and maximize the post content.

By default the software uses Internet Explorer rendering engine. In order to read feeds in other engines like the Mozilla Firefox's Gecko or Google Chrome's Apple Safari WebKit, you need to install separate add-ons.

BlogBridge

BlogBridge is an open-source, Java-based news aggregator. This feed aggregator helps optimize subscriptions to many feeds at a time. It is perfect, as proclaimed by them, for journalists, OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language, a separate RSS format) enthusiasts, and PR professionals.

Other Readers

The other feed readers, as voted by the voters included Google Reader (of course), NetVibes, Amazon Kindle (yes, very offline and portable), and NewsGator.

Conclusion

Hope this review helped you find the best offline RSS reader. The next pole should be online within some time. Vote for it and let me post a similar review in some days' time.

Copyright © Lenin Nair 2008