Flipboard vs Feedly

Both Flipboard and Feedly offer compelling alternatives in the wake of Google announcing the demise of Reader. This blog post aims to compare the two services to help you with the switch decision.

Look and Feel

This is quite a subjective area and it depends on where you err more towards slickness or simplicity. Flipboard certainly is slicker than Feedly. The page turning experience looks and feels great and the magazine build up of your blog posts makes the app very intuitive. Feedly on the other hand doesn’t quite have the wow-factor but keeps simplicity at its heart. You can make it look more magazine like but doesn’t have such a pretty page turning feature. Getting to your post content whether it be on Flipboard or Feedly is remarkably easy so try them both to see which you prefer.

Compatibility

Flipboard is currently mobile only so if you want to read your content on a Mac or PC you need to install something like Bluestacks which emulates an Android environment. Feedly has mobile and web apps meaning that you can read this on a computer easily. it’s for this reason that Feedly wins in the compatibility stakes.

Curation

Flipboard does an excellent job of curating content for you. You can choose topics such as Technology or Music and Flipboard will present you with posts it thinks you should be reading. Also if you wish to curate your own “Magazine” then Flipboard 2.0 also has this feature built in. They both allow sharing to social media tools but Feedly has the better selection of services that you can share to.

Overall

I think the choice between Flipboard and Feedly will be driven by how you consume post content. If it is entirely mobile then the pendulum swings towards Flipboard. If however you do your consumption on the web then Feedly should be your first choice.

For me Flipboard is still my preferred consumption app of choice. I already have everything set up exactly as I want it and the interface is lovely. I will continue to experiment with Feedly and will use it in place of the Reader web app from Google for the occasional time I consume posts from a computer.