feed.works vs Feedly

For netizens of a certain age, Google Reader was the easiest and best way to take in a boat-load of information. When Google shut down Google Reader (as it served its users too - not serving its advertisers well enough), many talking heads predicted the end of web-feeds (RSS, etc).

But ever since Google Reader was shut down in 2013, Feedly has quietly been the reason "RSS is dead" never happened. Feedly absorbed the product exodus, kept the format honest, and built a real business on top of it. Credit where it's due: the web still has RSS in large part because they kept the lights on.

Over the last decade, though, Feedly has been moving somewhere specific.

The free personal reader is still there, but the product that gets pitched, priced, and shipped hardest is Feedly AI — their market-intelligence suite, where an AI analyst named Leo tracks topics, summarizes competitor moves, and feeds a team dashboard. That product is aimed at sales, marketing, and research teams, not at readers.

It's priced accordingly.

feed.works can work with sales and marketing teams, and we also do all kinds of AI stuff too. But as anyone who ever read the chat-log of someone else's AI agent can tell you - we all use AI a little bit differently. In fact feed.works is committed to open-standards to the tune that we work with Feedly. You can port your feeds through feed.works and then back into Feedly if that's where your team is.

That's the beauty of the open-web, users win. feed.works is a love letter to the open-web, a hat-tip to a forgotten era when data was just scattered out there in cyber space.

feed.works may not have "dashboards for analysts" but given enough time, I bet there will be a worker that does exactly that.

feed.works has arrived - not as an opponent to Feedly and others, but as a way to augment them. Feedly is a fine product for what it became.

We're different businesses, and different missions. feed.works is very much grateful to Feedly and countless other stewards of the open-web.

Choose Feedly when

• Catalog and crawl coverage. A decade of infrastructure means they've seen almost every feed on the web. Niche podcasts, forgotten blogs, specialist newsletters — chances are Feedly has the URL indexed. For a new reader to match that scale will take years.
• OPML portability, still honest. This one matters to us. Feedly has kept OPML import and export as first-class operations the whole way. Even as they moved upmarket, they never held subscriptions hostage. That's rarer than it should be, and they deserve credit for it.
• Team features that actually work. Shared boards, team assignments, Slack integrations. If your job is to triage five hundred industry sources a day with four teammates, Feedly has the machinery. feed.works doesn't.
• Mobile apps. Polished, multi-platform, offline-capable. Still their strength.

Where feed.works is different

• Audience. Feedly's paid product sells to businesses tracking competitors. feed.works welcomes those users too. But our roots are also in creating a network of readers and creators who want to own their data.
• AI posture. Feedly's AI product is closed. You get Feedly's take on how to use AI. The Feedly AI analyst is great if you like it. There is no way around it - if it's not doing what you need it to. The feed.works design is more like an App Store - that has different workers to create data, and synthesize data. So that you can make a workflow that matches how your business runs vs letting the AI agent tell you how to run your business.
• Social model. Feedly's collaboration is team-based: shared boards inside a paid workspace. Ours is connection-based: Shared Reads between small groups, no workspace required.
• Pricing. Feedly Business tops out around $18/user/mo, which is fair for the BI product it is. We have a free tier and a paid tier that isn't priced for procurement to approve.

Who should pick which

Pick Feedly if you or your team needs to monitor topics at scale. Track competitors, surface emerging narratives, flag mentions across hundreds of sources — and if you already love their AI, the board product is built for that. They'll keep doing it well.

Pick feed.works if you're trying to read, or trying to discuss data with an Agent. If you want a reader that is flexible, creates easy buttons for private AI enhancement, doesn't pitch you an analyst you didn't hire, lets you share a reading list with three friends without creating a workspace, and treats data-portability like a promise — that's us.

If Data portability is your hard requirement, you're lucky either way: both products make it easy. Try both, export from one to the other, see which one you'd rather open on a Sunday morning.