When comparing NewsBlur vs Feedly, the Slant community recommends Feedly for most people. In the question“What are the best news readers?” Feedly is ranked 2nd while NewsBlur is ranked 4th. The most important reason people chose Feedly is:
Feedly has an easy to overview interface. While this interface is clean and simple, it is still full of bright colors. A great feature that adds to the clean feel is "eliminate clutter", which keeps only the text of the desired topic.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Recommended articles that improves over time
NewsBlur has a discovery algorithm that users can "train" to show stories they are interested in and hide ones they don't care about.
Pro Keyboard shortcuts for fast navigation
By default arrow keys and spacebar are used to quickly navigate stories, but they can be rebound for premium accounts.
Pro Multiple layout & style options
NewsBlur allows users to customize the font size, line spacing, story layout, and type faces.
Pro Fast to use
Very fast to navigate around the UI and load articles.
Pro View content the way it is originally displayed
NewsBlur offers an option of reading articles just like they are displayed on the original site.
Pro Organize feeds into folders
Feeds can be grouped into folders for easier management and to allow users to separate feeds for work, comics, research, etc.
Pro Share stories with comments
Burblog is a simple, customizable website for sharing stories with comments that people can subscribe to.
Pro Aggregates email newsletters
You can forward email newsletters to a user-specific email address to have them aggregated in your feed reader along with your RSS content.
Pro Free / Libre software
NewsBlur is FOSS, so it can be freely modified & redistributed.
Pro Freemium service
Free version has a limit of 64 sites. Upgrading to unlimited sites costs $1/month.
Pro Clean, easy to overview UI
Feedly has an easy to overview interface. While this interface is clean and simple, it is still full of bright colors.
A great feature that adds to the clean feel is "eliminate clutter", which keeps only the text of the desired topic.
Pro Integrates other services for ease of use and sharing
Feedly sign-in is done with Facebook, Twitter, Google, or Microsoft credentials. It offers many ways to share a story from within the application, including social networks, e-mail, etc.
Pro Choice of many different layouts
For each news source, a different layout can be chosen. Choose between showing thumbnails, titles and summaries, titles only, thumbnails with overlaid titles in a grid, or have all content inlined.
Pro Great article recommendations
Search a topic and Feedly will offer resources that are related to that topic.
Pro Supports OPML export/import
With this feature, all subscriptions can be saved.
Pro Seamless Google Reader migration
Feedly have made it especially easy to navigate away from Google Reader.
Pro Similar mobile experience to Google Reader
It supports a list UI similar to Google Reader, among other more graphical layouts.
Pro Browser extensions
Feedly's extension lets users add feeds directly from websites, but also lets users curate pages, save them to Evernote or Facebook, email, or Tweet pages.
Pro Open API
There are multitudes of third party clients available for many platforms.
Pro Boards for organising the content (Paid)
Feedly allows you to create unlimited Boards (folders/sets/collections) and use them to organise your saved content.
Pro IFTTT and Zapier integration (Paid)
Feedly functionality can be extended and workflows automated with IFTTT and Zapier integrations that make it possible to connect the reader with hundreds of popular apps.
Cons
Con Freemium
This service is free, but can cost up to $24 per year for premium users.
Con Can't have unread items older than a 14 days/month
This is a premium feature.
Con Long list of paid-only features
Free features are pretty basic. It seems like all the new development goes into paid-only features. Paid features include sharing and saving options, alerts, backup, support or integrations with collaborative tools.
Con No push notifications
Among the most requested features for Feedly is push notification support. The feature was officially requested in 2011 and currently has over 600 votes on Feedly's Uservoice.
Con Log-in is buggy
Logging in can sometimes cause Feedly to struggle. It can become unresponsive and force close.
Con The layout isn't like Google's original or Inoreader's of which is much easier to browse and read quickly
Con Inline adds
Free version puts adds in your feeds
Con No keyword filtering
Feedly has no ability to filter a feed by keyword like a lot of other RSS readers do.
Con No offline support
There is no offline support with the official client.
Con Forces external account to log in
Users are forced to use Twitter, Facebook, Google, or Microsoft login credentials.
Con Steals page views
Feedly has had issues multiple times with hijacking page views from original publishers. See:
Con Organization/sorting features lacking
There is no ability to sort feeds within a folder, and moving feeds between folders is difficult with lots of content.