RSS Bandit – Impressive Open Source Desktop Feed Reader

RSS Bandit version 1.5.0.17 is truly an impressive open source desktop feed reader. Unfortunately I had only learned about this recently, because I paid to use Feed Demon by NewsGator.

Feed Demon was totally worth the money to me, because you could synchronize your feeds with NewsGator Online, so whether I was at Home, Work, PDA or the Web all my feeds were there with only items I hadn’t read yet.

Well, apparently RSS Bandit now does the exact same thing, with not only an option to sync to NewsGator Online, but also via WebDAV, FTP or a file share.

Why Desktop version as opposed to Web version? Many reasons, which I won’t get into now, but mainly you have significantly more options and features in a desktop version comparatively. The advantage of RSS Bandit to synchronize over the web (via NewsGator or otherwise) allows for full functionality on your computer, but the web abilities when you are away.

RSS Bandit Features:

• Multi-language support
• Newsgroup Support
• Newspaper View Styles
• View and Post Comments to News Items in an RSS feed
• Autodiscover webfeeds
• Feed errors reported in a special folder
• Comments Posted to blogs from RSS Bandit show up in “Sent Items” Special Folder
• Integrated Configurable Web Search Bar
• Rss Item Search
• Monitoring System Event Logs

Check out the Full RSS Bandit Feature List and screenshots.

In the meantime, am I upset I paid for FeedDemon, certainly not, it’s been a great companion of mine for several months, but RSS Bandit is free and open source, so it depends which route you want to go.