Feedly vs Instapaper
When comparing Feedly vs Instapaper, the Slant community recommends Instapaper for most people. In the question“What are the best ways to organize bookmarks?” Instapaper is ranked 12th while Feedly is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Instapaper is:
Allows leaving notes attached to articles and highlighting certain part of the text. Free version of the app is limited to 5 highlights a month.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
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.
Pro Annotation tools
Allows leaving notes attached to articles and highlighting certain part of the text. Free version of the app is limited to 5 highlights a month.
Pro Excellent typography choices
Instapaper allows you to choose from 14 different fonts, some of which have been designed specifically for the application. You can manually adjust spacing between lines, padding around text and font size to fit your preferences.
Pro Allows listening to articles
Instapaper comes with a build in text-to-speech feature that will read out loud articles. Premium version of the app allows creating playlists.
Pro Articles can be emailed to Instapaper
You can add articles to Instapaper by sending them to a unique email address associated with your account.
Pro Pagination
Allows for pagination, not just scrolling.
Pro Awesome offline mode
Pro Can look up words in a dictionary and Wikipedia
Pro Can be set to switch to dark mode based on time of day
Instapaper includes a dark theme and allows switching to it after a set period in time or gradually over the course of the day.
Pro Rarely seen organization options
In addition to allowing you to sort articles by when you saved them, you can also order articles by length or read progress and popularity.
Pro Free archiving of deleted webpages
In Pocket, this is a paid function - but Instapaper provides this for free! If a webpage is deleted, it remains in your Instapaper and they even archive pictures of the articles.
Pro Can playback inline video
Instapaper will play videos from YouTube, Vimeo and other sources that are embedded in articles, but you have to be online for playback to work.
Pro Has a font designed for readers with Dyslexia
Instapaper includes Dyslexie a font that helps people with reading problems understand the text better.
Pro Includes optional social features
If you set your Instapaper profile to be public, your friends will be able to see articles you've liked.
Cons
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.
Con Slow interface
Con Became a paid service again
Most functions, like search, became premium.
Con Basic search not free
Basic search for link title or website too is part of the premium.
Con Embedded images and videos are sometimes ignored
Instapaper sometimes saves articles without images or videos.
Con Only supports English
It only supports English, and not Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages.
Con Tags not implemented
Con Search functions return random articles
The search function is very slow and does not provide accurate results. The user can not filter or reorder the search results, or search the archive or annotated articles.