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NetNewsWire vs. Vienna



RSS (or Really Simple Syndication) is becoming an ever more popular way to read online content quickly and without having to visit individual websites. As RSS feeds becomes more popular, so do the RSS readers that allow you to access the feeds. In my opinion, the two best RSS readers on the Mac are NetNewsWire and Vienna. Now that NetNewsWire costs the same as Vienna (i.e. nothing), what better time to take a look at what each has to offer?

NetNewsWire (Free, NewsGator)
NetNewsWire combines speed with ease of use (and of course, power). NNW boasts a clean user interface that's not unlike iTunes or Mail. You are able to create multiple folders to contain your RSS Feeds (for instance, I have a three folders: Technology, News, and Blogs -- this allows me to sort all of my RSS feeds into different categories). Two features set NetNewsWire apart from Vienna: feed syncing and website thumbnail views. Feed syncing allows you to synchronize your feeds with NewsGator servers, FTP, or .Mac. When you read your feeds on two or more Macs keeping all your feeds in sync is a nice feature to have. The thumbnail view allows you to see a current snapshot of the website whose feed you're reading; this allows you to keep up with the design of the site you're reading.

Pros: clean Apple-like user interface, feed syncing on multiple Macs or for backup purposes, thumbnail view, AppleScriptable, quickly refreshes feeds
Cons:
feeds can only automatically be refreshed a minimum of once every 30 minutes



Vienna (Free, Open Community)
Vienna isn't too different from NetNewsWire; it includes a good user interface, smart folders, and built-in browsing abilities. One of the features that definitely sets Vienna apart from NetNewsWire is it's ability to refresh feeds with great frequency (every 5 minutes vs. every 30 minutes). This feature alone lets you get your news much more quickly, but can, often times, drain bandwidth. Even though you can refresh feeds more frequently, Vienna downloads these feeds slower than NNW.

Pros: ability to refresh feeds more frequently, feeds can automatically be refreshed once every 5 minutes
Cons: interface can sometimes be buggy, no feed syncing, no thumbnail view, slow to download feeds



Speed
Let's see how the speed of each stacks up. For this test, I imported a new OPML file into both NetNewsWire and Vienna; it contained 76 feeds. Below is the speed comparison of both news readers.

Vienna downloaded 1464 articles in 49.5 seconds.
NetNewsWire downloaded 1464 articles in 17.5 seconds.

As you can see, NetNewsWire was the fastest in downloading the articles.

Which is better?
If I had to chose, I would say, both! Since NetNewsWire and Vienna are both free, either one is a good option. Try out both, see which one you like better -- with both being free, you can't really go wrong, now can you?


[Update:] Many people in the comments were talking about NewsFire and some "reasons" why we didn't include it in the post. I would like to clarify on that topic. We abstained from including NewsFire simply because we wanted to compare two FREE feed readers.

Also, some people have pointed out Google Reader as another viable option for reading RSS feeds. Google Reader, when combined with Google Gears and Google Reader Notifier, can offer many of the advantages of a full-featured local application.

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Zedr0n

As you've listed the inability to refresh feeds faster as a main con for netnewswire i'd like to point out that it's easy to remedy that with applescript.
Actually I've blogged about precisely this - http://blog.quant0r.com/2008/01/16/custom-refresh-of-netnewswire-with-applescript/

It's a quick hack, but works well, so you might want to check it out...

January 17 2008 at 7:20 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
tobogan

I only heard good things about NNW, but Vienna being open-source as well as being named after my hometown, it probably will remain my RSS reader of sentimental choice.

January 13 2008 at 1:26 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Kevin

I seem to recall some mention of a utility app that would allow you to sync my newsreaders on a couple computers. Do you remember what the name of the app might be?

Thanks for this article. I've used Vienna for a couple of years now and have really liked it. I'm going to give NetNewsWire a try for a bit to see what it's like.

January 12 2008 at 9:00 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
andyp

Personally I use endo, which is by the same guy who wrote ecto. It's a bit quirky, but I prefer it over Vienna (which I moved from). It's free now, too.

January 12 2008 at 6:21 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Hugh

I like NewsFire but Watanabe turned me off so I refuse to buy it. I tested a bunch of other readers (NNW, Endo, Shrook, Vienna, Safari, NewsLife). They're all are good and basically indistinguishable from one another. I finally settled on NNW because of the free NewsGator sync.

January 11 2008 at 8:42 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jared Ferguson

Flash support in Vienna = Stinky! As far as I can find, it has been a problem since the early days of Vienna. More to the point, there's not an easy option to turn off plugins like in NNW. NNW FTW!

January 11 2008 at 6:43 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
merkuree

Vienna and NNW are ok. To be honest, I really like RSS Bandit on the PC.....and I wish Vienna or NNW would adopt some of the GUI ideas from RSS bandit.....

http://www.rssbandit.org/ow.asp?ScreenShots

It might appear similar to Vienna or NNW but it really has a huge amount of additional features and tweaks.

January 11 2008 at 4:31 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Raz

I don't like Vienna or NNW, they're both pretty ugly. I've been using Thinkmacs NewsLife for awhile now and really like it. Its a bit similar to NewsFire but at least the developer isn't dropping support!!

http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/newslife/index.html

sadly not free, but it doesn't nag you too much before you register.

January 11 2008 at 2:19 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
mikka

I just changed clients when I found out NNW was free. Used vienna happily for months. The biggest thing I miss is NNW doesn't seem to support YouTube videos!!? Vienna would play them in both the feed as well as in the built-in browser, but NNW does neither...

January 11 2008 at 1:18 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Alan Fleming

There's other issues to consider in this, especially in business use - would you really want all the feeds you read sent to Newgator? That could be a source of information leakage in the future, along the lines of Google Reader showing people what you're reading. Using Vienna keeps all information local to you at least.

I wrote more about this at http://www.corpmac.co.uk just yesterday.

January 11 2008 at 1:14 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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