Rich Site Summary is a technology which has a long run in our lives and many apps available to use it. RSS clients are available for all platforms including desktop clients and Chrome web extensions.
RSS is very popular among regular news followers on the Internet. It allows you to stay up to date news or any information published around the globe without finding manually.
Once you add the RSS feed of any website in the dedicated client, it will serve you whenever they publish an article. You don’t need to manually open a website to check their latest updates. A good RSS client features a list of options which makes your reading experience more convenient.
Here is the list of hand-picked best RSS readers for Windows.
1. Feedly
Feedly has a very popular name in the feed readers list. A lot of news you can manage in the Feedly account. Its user-interface is decently organized and many options are available to add and manage the feeds. Feedly can seamlessly integrate with a lot of applications that you have been using. IFTT, Newsify, gReader, Readkit, Junkie, and almost any popular application can be integrated with Feedly.
It has many advanced features compared to the other RSS clients. It completely cloud-based and allows you to add the feeds from various sources. The built-in search box allows you to search for a particular feed. For example, if you want to add “thetechhacker” feed to your Feedly account, just type thetechhacker in the search box. Feedly will show the available list of feeds based on your search, it will also show the number of subscribers to the feed you are subscribing. It is one of the finest features to check the original publication from the duplicate names.
The collaborative features are the asset to the Feedly program. If you are using Feedly for content curation, sharing and collaborating the article ideas through Feedly is very easy. The built-in tools let you share the content for a seamless workflow. Feedly is available in both free and paid versions. In the free version, a user can add up to 100 feeds to its account whereas the pro version comes with a wide variety of advanced features.
Read our detailed Feedly Review here.
2. Nextgen Reader
Nextgen Reader is one of the finest feed reader available for Windows platform. The user interface is divided into 3 columns. The first column on the left side carries the list of subscription names, the middle one shows the feed entries of a particular feed selected on the first panel. The third column contains the detailed post of the feed selected in the second column.
Nextgen reader is packed with many readability options. You can summary, or full article or web page in the settings as set open method. The option works individually, it means you can set an opening method for each feed added to the Nextgen reader. It is useful to set the summary option for rarely reading feeds and full article option for regularly reading interesting subscriptions.
Another interesting feature of Nextgen reader is sharing option. Once you add the social media connections to the reader, you can easily share them on Facebook and Twitter with the tap of a button. For convenient reading, the Nextgen reader has light and dark themes support. You can tweak a lot the user interface section, the built-in font changer, font size, alignment options are additional attractions to the app. Nextgen Reader is currently available for $2.99 on the Microsoft app store.
3. RSSOwl
RSSOwl is a simple looking feed reader available for Windows platform. The user-interface and feel look like the Mozilla Thunderbird and offers a very intuitive feel to the users. If you are looking for a perfectly designed open source RSS reader to fulfill your daily news reading, RSS Owl comes first in the list. It is completely free and comes with a set of premium program features.
The filtering options are the main asset to the program. You can set custom keywords to filter the news from the rest. For example, if you want “Apple Airpods 2” news or articles from the feed, set this as a keyword and filter the rest. If any article contains that keyword, the program will intimate you with a sound or marking the article with color.
It has many advanced features to make your article reading habit more comfortable. It has group feeds option to sort the particular category of RSS items under one group. For convenient reading, RSS Owl offers various styled layouts. These layouts let you read the article in classic, headlines, newspaper and widescreens styles. RSS Owl is a completely free to use RSS reader available on the official website.
4. RSS Central
RSS Central is a paid program available in the Microsoft Windows Store. It has all the finest features to simplify your RSS reading more convenient. It updates automatically and fetches all the new feeds continuously and updates when the new feeds available to read.
When you closely look at the user interface of the RSS Central, you see the attractive and informative to read. It has many powerful tools to organize feeds easily. The options include read/unread, article tracking, import/export, international characters support and many more.
If you check the qualities of a good RSS reader, it must provide a neatly organized layout for distraction-free reading. RSS Central has all the attractive features make your subscribed feed reading quite simple. The RSS Central is available for $1.29 in the Microsoft Windows Store.
5. Feedspot
After the demise of Google Reader, we have seen many companies are entered into the RSS feed readers development to create a perfect alternative. Feedspot is one of its kind of reader available for Windows users. The client organizes all your subscribed feeds in one place. It looks like Gmail user-interface as a reading system, the left-panel contains subscribed feeds list and whereas the right panel shows the complete feed of selected feed.
Apart from basic reading features, Feedspot has many advanced features designed for normal and as well as advanced readers including marketers. The program comes in both free and paid versions. The free version contains all the basic features and whereas the premium offers to add unlimited sites, daily digest emails, Google News keywords alerts, YouTube channels and playlists following and saved searches. Feedspot is one of the best RSS reader available for all types of users.
Honorable Mentions
The below-given tools are enough to start your first journey with RSS. These tools are very popular and come with easy feed organizing features. I have given them under honorable mentions section because of the lack of further development, and mediocre user-interface.
6. FeedDemon
FeedDemon is one of the oldest RSS reader available for Windows. The company has stopped the development of app in June 2013 and no further updates or supports are introduced. However, the app still works like charm and it is good enough for hassle-free reading.
7. RSS Bandit
RSS Bandit one of the promising feed reader available for Windows with its unique features. Recently the program is moved to GitHub community and project is almost dormant. However, the existing features are rich enough to manage and read feeds.
8. Winds
Winds is yet another RSS reading tool available for Mac, Linux, and Windows. The user interface is fully elegant and very reader-friendly. It lets you import feeds from other sources using OPML format. It is an open source reader which gets the latest features regularly by the community of developers.
9. QuiteRSS
With a decent user-interface and features, Quite RSS is one of the finest RSS readers to replace the website visit every time when you check for news. The app is open source and has the ability to show the feed in full HTML format with the help of browser integration.
10. SharpReader
The design of the SharpReader is not maybe the attractive proposition of the program. However, the program manages to attract its user by a wide variety of customization options. It has many features packed which are essentially needed for a good RSS reader.
Summing up
We can’t visit every website we know for daily updated content. The web syndication is the technology used for RSS readers. A good RSS reader remains great to simplify the website visits and lets you check all the updates in one place. These are the finest RSS readers available for Windows platform. Many apps are available for free and some are paid with an extra set of features.
Let us know which is your favorite RSS reader. If your favorite reader is not in the list, please feel free to mention in the comment box below.