Google Reader alternatives

Used liferea for years. Using it now. Will continue using it.

Tangentially, it saddens me to see people forgetting about simple native desktop apps - no getting shut down; no ads; no obnoxious social bullshit; just simple tools that succeed based on being useful rather than getting their users hooked and spamming their contacts for attention...

The feature I'm most interested in is not mentioned in this chart at all: whether my feeds will render correctly! I read a bunch of math blogs, many of which are on WordPress and use some LaTeX plugin for formulas. Many RSS readers do not render the formulas at all (I'm not sure why). Google Reader does it right, as does the RSS to email service blogtrottr.com (which is what I'm using now). Last time I tried Feedly, to give just one example, the formulas didn't show up.

I asked on /r/math for RSS feed readers that don't use Google Reader as a backend and render formulas correctly and didn't get a single answer, so I'm not optimistic. Maybe reading math blogs is too small a niche for RSS readers to bother with it?

The list confuses full feed reader services (like Feedly, Newsblur) with Google Reader clients (Reeder). Would have been nice to separate those as Reeder is certainly not a replacement for Google Reader.

I'm using http://feedbin.me right now, which doesn't appear to be on the list.

What does "Web" mean? I would expect it to mean I can access it with a web browser, but that does not seem to be the case (feedly, reeder are applications to install). It does not mean hosted either as tt-rss and stringer need to be self-hosted.

Concerning FeedHQ, it has now a paid service (free for one month, 12$ a year)

I haven't tried many of the services on this list, but I would recommend Feedly. It can be a bit slow, and the fact that it requires a browser extension is a bit off-putting, but those things are being improved I believe.

They seem to be willing to listen to their users (in particular all of the ex-Google Reader users) and are improving the service very quickly, trying to cater for everyone's seemingly different needs.

The Android app is great as well, and is a much more visual reading experience than Google Reader was (but it doesn't have to be- it seems to be very highly configurable).

The fact that it's free is a bit worrying, but in a survey they sent out last month they asked if user's would be willing to pay a small fee for it- so this might be where it heads in the future (I'd hope so, anyway).

For Emacs users, there's Gnus [1] and Newsticker [2]. Gnus doesn't support Atom feeds natively [3], so you have to call an external script to convert them to RSS before they're processed by Gnus. Newsticker supports RSS and Atom [4].

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/gnus/RSS...

[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/newstick...

[3] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/GnusRss

[4] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/NewsTicker

Doesn't seem to consistently note which options you host yourself vs which are hosted elsewhere. E.g. I see Fever has a note that it is self-hosted, but tt-rss does not have a similar note.

Nice long list though. I guess it's almost July, I need to get on this.

Great list!

I'm holding off to see what the 'Digg Reader' has to offer before making a final decision.

Looks like it's going to be Feedly though. I was pretty much sold when I heard that Reeder (iOS) and GReader (Android) will both sync with it.

I have been using feedly, but it keeps asking me for logging in to google after every session. I wonder what will happen once reader goes down. That and it looks/feels bloated.

I'm not as heavy an RSS user as I was, but I use newsbeuter. Minimal, light, fast.

http://www.newsbeuter.org/

They're going to have to pry Klipfolio 5 from my cold, dead, internet-hands. I still find it the most awesome RSS reader - as a bonus, you can program it to do pretty much anything as it is a full-fledged KPI program. v.5 is the last consumer-oriented one they put out, after which it disappeared, but you are still able to find it about. Give it a try if you like a desktop version!

I'm reluctantly probably to go with Feedly for now, even though the "slickness" of the experience really gets in the way, the preferences are limited, and the page-by-page flipping on Android is maddening. I skim in streams, not blocks.

Newsblur was my second choice, but I found it too busy and cumbersome. That arrow that follows your mouse vertically that you can lock/unlock was the last straw.

Here's another self-hosted option I came across in my search for a Reader replacement http://projet.idleman.fr/leed/ The site's in French but Google translate works well and it seems the developer has done good work on this project.

Thanks for the comprehensive list I now have more options to consider for a home hosted replacement.

I use http://www.feedsapi.org to forward all my expanded rss to my email account, On the web I use it in combination with Feedly to read fulltext rss feeds, and on my desktop, I use snackr + http://www.feedsapi.org .

I've been using Tiny Tiny RSS since Google Readers announcement of shutdown. It's worked really great and since you can host it yourself the only person you can blame for it getting shutdown is yourself. The updating of RSS feeds is a little janky, but certainly not a show stopper. I have been very happy with it so far.

Just a quick note, you have Feedly as "Chrome, iOS, Android", but it also has at least a Firefox plugin.

I'm still looking for one with a spiffy UI, a backend written in Python with Flask not Django, and not using MongoDB as a back end. I'd piece together my own but it's tempting to just use NewsBlur or one of the others that don't quite meet all those but see active development.

Here's a list with mostly shortcomings of some RSS readers: https://gist.github.com/bdsatish/5627447

It would be good to know which of these readers has a sustainable business model. For example, Feedly is free. After Google Reader, I'm not sure I can trust that.

Thanks for re-submitting this. I submitted this earlier when the Google Reader shutdown was first announced. Any more additions or suggestions most welcome.

I use http://www.FeedRebel.com (Disclaimer: I built it), can you add it to the list as well.

Unfortunately, I feel like this list is so long it ends up being useless.

You did miss FeedWrangler too. I guess it wasn't out at the time of the other thread.

Count this as a strike against Yanobs after spamming its entire userbase with a few hundred emails (while CCing everyone ta boot).

netvibes.com is free and good, just wish they would implement showing youtube embeds properly, other than that it does what I want