A deep dive into the RSS feed reader landscape

Summary

RSS feeds and, in one form or another, feed readers, have existed for more than 20 years. Their main purpose is enabling their users to consume content from various sources in one place. And especially in recent years, also helping users deal with content overload. Back then there were only a handful of relevant products. Today it's different, there are products for many different situations and use-cases. When first getting into RSS and feed readers, it can be difficult to find out which of this wide range of products are the right ones to use. This article describes the landscape so you can find out which product fits best for your use-case. Side-note: I'm using RSS as a synonym for all web feed standards (Atom, JSON Feed) Classification I attempted a classification of feed readers based on 2 axes: Deployment model: local (phone or PC), browser extension, self-hosted, hosted Business model: free, one-time payment, SAAS The deployment model is based on where data is stored and feed fetching happens. Some products have a web app and mobile apps, but feed fetching happens on the server. In this case it's classified as hosted. The business model categorization is based on the cheapest option that gives access to the full feature set of the product. A self-hostable product with a hosted option is categorized into free. A freemium SAAS product is categorized as paid (SAAS). And here the image in table format, for easily clickable links: Hosting models Browser extension Feed readers deployed as browser extensions can be installed through the respective stores of the browsers, usually either the Chrome Web Store or the Firefox Add-ons. Setup and maintenance: Setup typically only requires installing the extension, not even an account is needed. There is no maintenance required beyond the occasional update, which usually happens automatically. Data control and storage: Data is stored locally, with browser storage functionality (local storage or IndexedDB). How much data can...