Bryan Kam has reviewed a couple of free RSS aggregators for Windows. Below are excerpts of his reviews including his final choice
I began with the aptly-named and small FeedReader 2.5. While it has all the basic features covered, it lacks a lot of things I like...Score: 3/10. Fast but featureless. Next I tried Sharpreader 0.9.4.1. This is a pretty good one, which features different sorting, various update times, alerts, inherited properties, can import/export OPML...It would take 40+ MB RAM on my desktop computer, and sometimes would take 100% cycles for no reason...Score: 5/10. Full of features, but slow as hell! Another one I tried a while back was Syndirella 0.9b. While I was not a big fan of the Windows 3.1-esque interface, it does have a rudimentary scraper... This is great for sites that don't offer feeds. Other than that, though, this reader is pretty lacking, not even having categories which are a necessity in my opinion. Score: 5/10. Nice scraper, the rest kinda sucks. Currently I'm using Abilon 2.0, which has many of the features I like...The interface is divided into three vertical columns: the far left is the list of feeds, the middle is the items in the selected feed, the right is the detail for the selected item. I find this very weird. Score: 7/10. It's got the goods, it's small, but it's not fun to use. Okay, another brief RSS reader review. This one is called RSS Bandit and I've discarded Abilon in favor of it...Feature-wise it's pretty standard. The little slide-up alerts, which many of these readers have, is actually reliably click-able in this program...Another good feature is its "Locate RSS" feeds which attempts to find a feed for whatever websites or keywords you enter.8/10. Decent, but lacks that extra something.
I began with the aptly-named and small FeedReader 2.5. While it has all the basic features covered, it lacks a lot of things I like...Score: 3/10. Fast but featureless.
Next I tried Sharpreader 0.9.4.1. This is a pretty good one, which features different sorting, various update times, alerts, inherited properties, can import/export OPML...It would take 40+ MB RAM on my desktop computer, and sometimes would take 100% cycles for no reason...Score: 5/10. Full of features, but slow as hell!
Another one I tried a while back was Syndirella 0.9b. While I was not a big fan of the Windows 3.1-esque interface, it does have a rudimentary scraper... This is great for sites that don't offer feeds. Other than that, though, this reader is pretty lacking, not even having categories which are a necessity in my opinion. Score: 5/10. Nice scraper, the rest kinda sucks.
Currently I'm using Abilon 2.0, which has many of the features I like...The interface is divided into three vertical columns: the far left is the list of feeds, the middle is the items in the selected feed, the right is the detail for the selected item. I find this very weird. Score: 7/10. It's got the goods, it's small, but it's not fun to use.
Okay, another brief RSS reader review. This one is called RSS Bandit and I've discarded Abilon in favor of it...Feature-wise it's pretty standard. The little slide-up alerts, which many of these readers have, is actually reliably click-able in this program...Another good feature is its "Locate RSS" feeds which attempts to find a feed for whatever websites or keywords you enter.8/10. Decent, but lacks that extra something.
It's good to read first hand accounts of what people like or dislike about RSS Bandit especially when compared to other RSS aggregators. I tend to agree with Bryan that RSS Bandit currently leads the pack amongst the major free RSS aggregators for Windows. The next release will aim at being competitive with commercial aggregators such as FeedDemon and NewzCrawler.
This should be a fun summer.