Summary: Fluent Reader is a great RSS client for casually browsing articles, and probably the best RSS client if you want to replace your home feed from a social media with a local RSS client and don't want to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of articles people publish. It's not a good choice if you intend to subscribe to a large number of feeds, or intend to keep articles for a long period of time, as it lacks functionality to manage that. It's still a great choice to get started with RSS, although you will need some other software to help you find URLs of RSS feeds to use with it. Personally, I could see myself using it as a casual social media replacement, because it feels really good to use for that purpose, while using a different RSS client to complement its weaknesses.
Summarized Support by Considered Use Case
RSS completeness: poor: no podcasts (no enclosure support); no Youtube embedding; incomplete ATOM 1.0 support.
Browsing articles: excellent: thumbnails; card view; keyword blacklisting.
Reading articles: great: light and dark theme; customizable font size; no text search; can display article as webpage.
Notifier: poor: notifications by keyword per feed; no global notification rules; no system tray.
Long-term management of a large number of articles: inadequate: no advanced search; no tagging; no sorting; no saved searches; unclear archival functionality.
Long-term management of a large number of feeds: inadequate: no hierarchical folders; no feed search; immutable URLs; no annotations.
Programmability: poor: no executable or local file subscription; no global rules; per feed rules.
General usability: terrible: no RSS autodiscovery; confusing workflows for several basic operations; functionality hidden or scattered; use of unique GUI design with no clear advantage over traditional designs.
Legend
✅ Positive remark.
⚠️ Caveat or issue.
❌ Missing functionality or critical issue.
Basic Functionality
Portability
Fluent Reader is available for Windows, macOS, and Linux. The Linux version is provided as an appimage and is found on their Github repository.
Adding a Feed
✅ Fluent Reader only supports local RSS, so you don't need to create a "local RSS account" to use it.
✅ It takes 2 clicks and 1 chord to add an RSS feed to Fluent Reader.
⚠️ It's not obvious how to add a feed in Fluent Reader.
There is no "Add feed" button in a toolbar, not even a button with a plus icon in the headerbar, and there is no menubar. There is no context menu in the feeds pane, and its only button above it looks like it has a hamburger menu icon and would display a dropdown menu, but it actually hides the sidebar. There isn't even an "add your first feed" button when there are no feeds added to the RSS client.
To add a feed in Fluent Reader:
1: click on the button with a cog icon on the top-right of the window, which you would normally expect to open a settings or preferences dialog. It does open a settings or preferences dialog, it just happens that part of the settings is a list of "Sources" where your feeds are listed.
2: in the "Add source" text box, paste the URL of the RSS feed with Ctrl+V.
❌ It's not possible to paste by right clicking on the text box and selecting "paste" because the text box doesn't have a context menu.
Observation: what kind of UI toolkit doesn't have context menus for text boxes? Oh, it's made with Elecron.
3: click "Add." The feed will be added.
Observation: after using it for a while, I didn't get used to it. I kept looking for a way to add a feed from the sidebar where it would make sense instead of clicking on the cog that's on the opposite side. You can create menubars with Electron, by the way. But if you disable full access to the system from the web environment, which is a good idea for security, then your menubar-to-web-view communication becomes asynchronous inter-process calls, and that just over-complicates things so much you're going to need a black belt in typescript just to write the function signatures. It's hard to blame developers for not having menubars when Electron makes it so difficult to do something so simple.
Web (<link>) Support
❌ Fluent Reader doesn't support adding RSS feeds from webpage URLs. The URL you give as a source must be the URL of the actual XML file describing the RSS feed. See [How to Find the RSS Feed URL of a Website] for help with that.
❌ Considers a URL without a scheme or protocol to be invalid (e.g. you can't just type www.virtualcuriosities.com).
❌ Doesn't automatically paste the contents of the clipboard into the URL field. I'm not sure it would even make sense to do this considering it's not a single responsibility dialog.
RSS Categories Support
❌ Fluent Reader doesn't support making use of the categories declared in an RSS feed. It can't automatically tag articles with the categories of the website.
Default Feeds
Fluent Reader doesn't come with any default feeds.
OPML Support
✅ Fluent Reader supports importing and exporting OPML outlines, which can be used to transfer RSS feeds from one RSS client to another.
RSS Format Support
Fluent Reader supports almost all RSS formats provided by WordPress:
| Format | Supported |
|---|---|
| RSS 2.0 | ✅ Yes. |
| RDF (RSS 1.0) | ✅ Yes. |
| RSS 0.92 | ✅ Yes. |
| ATOM 1.0 | ⚠️ Yes. |
⚠️ Fluent Reader has partial support for ATOM 1.0 feeds. ATOM 1.0 feed entries can declare a summary (optional) and a content (also optional). Fluent Reader displays only the content and doesn't fall back to displaying the supplied summary if the content is missing, which means ATOM feeds that only have summaries will appear with titles but blank content..
Content Access Support
Web Support
✅ Fluent Reader features a built-in web browser that can display the content of RSS articles.
✅ Can display the linked webpage instead of the content of the article (by clicking on a world after clicking on the article).
❌ Doesn't display a link to the webpage below the snippet in the RSS feed. The article's title isn't a link either.
✅ It's possible to copy the link to the webpage by clicking on the three dots button after opening an article.
Text Support
✅ It's possible to select and copy the title of articles.
✅ It's possible to select and copy the date of articles.
❌ RSS categories aren't displayed.
HTML Images Support
✅ Fluent Reader can display images from HTML content.
✅ It's possible to open an image in full size via its context menu.
RSS Video Support
❌ Fluent Reader can't embed Peertube videos (<enclosure>).
❌ Doesn't display a link to the enclosure, so you wouldn't even know there's an enclosure.
❌ Fluent Reader can't embed Youtube videos (proprietary extension).
❌ Fluent Reader can't embed thumbnails from Youtube (Media RSS extension).
❌ Fluent Reader can't embed Vimeo videos (Media RSS extension).
Podcast Support
❌ Fluent Reader can't embed an audio player for podcasts (<enclosure>).
Raw Support
❌ Can't view the XML source code of an RSS article.
Feed Metadata Support
Selecting a feed displays only its entries. Information about the feed itself isn't displayed.
| Field | Supported |
|---|---|
| Title | ✅ Yes. |
| Description | ❌ No. |
| Image | ❌ No. |
| Link | ❌ No. |
| Copyright | ❌ No. |
| Text input | ❌ No. |
| Generator | ❌ No. |
| Managing Editor | Untested. |
| Webmaster | Untested. |
| Category | Untested |
❌ The displayed metadata can't selected and copied.
Notification Functionality
Alerts
❌ Fluent Reader doesn't display an icon on the system tray.
❌ Doesn't display unread count on primary window's title.
❌ Can't display a popup when new articles are fetched in general.
⚠️ Can display a popup when new articles are fetched per feed, however requires using a filter rule, and it will show a separate popup PER ARTICLE, so if 1000 articles are fetched, you will get 1000 popups!
If you have 100 feeds, you have to add the filter to every single one of them to make it work generally.
Counts
✅ Fluent Reader displays the number of unread articles in the feeds pane for each feed.
✅ There's a number for each folder as well.
Reader Functionality
Comfort
✅ It's possible to change the font size for the content.
✅ The font family is also customizable.
✅ Fluent Reader has a dark them and a light theme, following the system preference by default. You can change them by clicking the cog icon, then going to the "Preferences" tab, the options are "Light Mode" and "Dark Mode."
❌ It's not possible to search the text content of an article.
Layouts
❌ Fluent Reader doesn't have a horizontal pane layout. Only vertical.
❌ Doesn't supports displaying the content of all articles as a single scrollable feed.
Its layout modes are available by clicking on an "eye" icon next to the cog icon in the headerbar. They are:
- "Card View:" the articles are displayed as large thumbnails in a grid with title and description underneath; the name of the feed and its favicon are shown above the title. Clicking on an article makes it appears as a popup.
- "List View:" the articles are displayed as a list with square thumbnails and large titles; the name of the feed and its favicon are shown above the title. Clicking on an article makes it appear on a pane at the right side.
- "Magazine View:" the articles are displayed as wide rectangles with thumbnails stacked as a vertical feed with title and description. Clicking on an article displays the content in a popup..
- "Compact View:" the articles are displayed as a table where each article occupies only a single line. No thumbnails. Clicking on an article shows the content in a popup.
⚠️ In "List View," it's possible to hide or display a thumbnail, snippet, or fade the color of read articles. This setting is hidden, accessible by right clicking on the articles list WHILE IN LIST VIEW and choosing View -> Show Cover, for example. It's not in the eye icon dropdown menu. Other layouts don't have a "View" context menu item when you right click an article. Ideally this option should be a button obviously displayed somewhere. Another way to improve this would be to have a "View" item on the context menu of every layout, but display only a disabled item labelled "No Options for This View Mode" in view modes that don't support additional customization.
✅ Supports card view and tabular view.
✅ Supports thumbnails for articles that contain images.
❌ Window panes aren't resizable. In particular, in the "List view" with three vertical panes, none of the panes can be dragged to resized them.
✅ It's possible to hide the feeds pane.
Article Management Functionality
Status Management
✅ Fluent Reader marks an article as read when you click on it.
❌ This behavior can't be customized, disabled, or delayed.
✅ Articles can be manually marked as "Read" or "Unread."
✅ Uses an orange circle to indicate the "Unread" status of an article.
⚠️ It's not possible to customize this indicator.
✅ Can mark whole feed as read by right clicking on a feed on the feeds pane.
❌ Can't configure a feed to mark articles as read the moment they're fetched. Although this should be possible with filters, there is no dedicated, plain option for this.
Tagging Articles
✅ Articles can be marked with a "Star."
❌ Doesn't support tagging articles as anything except starring them.
❌ Doesn't make use of the categories declared in an RSS feed.
Annotating Articles
❌ Doesn't support leaving a note (or private comment) on an article.
Filtering Articles
✅ Filters by selected feed.
✅ Combines articles when a folder is selected.
❌ Can't combine multiple selection (multiple selection of feeds isn't supported).
✅ Can display all articles combined by selecting "All articles" on the feeds pane.
✅ Has quick search text filter; it appears by clicking "Search" on the feeds pane.
| Field | Support |
|---|---|
| Title | ✅ Yes. |
| Content | ✅ Yes. |
| Author | ❌ No. |
| Status | ✅ Yes. |
| Star | ✅ Yes. |
| Date | ❌ No. |
⚠️ Filtering by full text content, status, and star is done by clicking on the eye icon in the headerbar, which isn't very intuitive considering the same eye icon is also responsible for the menu of the layouts, and it's literally on the opposite side of the "Search" label you have to click on in order to search. In the menu, you have the options "Unread only," "Starred only," "Case sensitive," and "Search in full text."
Searching Articles
❌ No advanced search.
❌ No regex support for search.
Sorting Articles
❌ Articles can't be sorted by clicking on column headers, because there are no column headers, even in the tabular view.
Columns
❌ You can't hide columns by right clicking on column headers.
❌ It's not possible to reorder columns.
Articles List
✅ Articles have context menus with related actions.
✅ It's possible to copy the URL of the linked webpage from the context menu (option: "Copy link").
❌ Doesn't support selecting multiple articles. Clicking on an article in most layout modes immediately displays a popup, hiding the article list. On list mode, a blue accent indicates selection but it's not possible to select multiple articles by shift or ctrl clicking.
Archiving Articles
⚠️ Can store articles indefinitely, however, only if you never delete any articles.
All articles are stored indefinitely by default. You can delete stored articles via preferences. This is a global operation, not per feed.. It's not clear whether starred articles will be preserved, and if you were using it, I don't think you would take the risk of clicking just to verify.
❌ Can't limit by number of articles.
❌ Can't expire articles after a number of days.
❌ It's not clear whether starred articles are stored permanently.
❌ Can't delete specific articles.
❌ No recycle bin.
✅ It's possible to "hide" articles. Hidden articles can be displayed by clicking via the menu on the eye icon.
Feed Management Functionality
Folders
✅ Fluent Reader supports placing feeds in folders, which it calls "Groups."
❌ Folders can't be nested.
⚠️ Folders are created in what's probably the least intuitive way I've ever seen, compared to all other RSS clients I've reviewed. It's almost impressive, honestly.
To create a folder (group) in Fluent Reader, first you click the cog to open the settings dialog—you can't just create a group from the feeds pane by right clicking there, that would have been too easy—there, the first tab you see is "Sources" tab that lists all your feeds, but that's not where you organize them into folders. Instead, you click the "Groups" tab, where your feeds are listed. If you click on a feed, you can select which group it belongs to. Which means you should NOT click on a feed first, but instead you should click type a new in the "Create Group" text box above the feed list first, so the group appears in the list of groups when you select a feed afterward. After creating the group, the group appears in the feed list in the dialog. You can't just drag and drop a feed into it. You have to select the feed, then select the group in a dropdown list button, then click add. By the way, the area that displays the widgets to modify a feed change according to which feed is selected, and is different if you select a group. I wonder if this convoluted interface was inspired by Thunderbird.
❌ Can't set a custom icon for a folder.
Structural Updates
❌ The URL of a feed can't be changed.
✅ Folders can be renamed.
⚠️ Feeds can be reordered, however, it's extremely unclear how to do it.
You can't reorder feeds on the feeds pane. Right clicking on the feeds pane displays an option to manage sources, which opens the settings dialog in the "Sources" tab that lists the feeds you added.
However, you can't reorder feeds in the "Sources" tab either! How do you reorder these feeds then, if you can't reorder them in the feeds pane where you click to view articles, nor in the "Sources" tab where you add them? Where else would you be able to do such task?
You have to click on the "Groups" tab. This tab will list ALL your feeds, even if you don't use groups (folders). There, you can drag and drop to reorder feeds.
Observation: honestly, I don't think anyone would ever figure this out. It's ridiculous how hidden this functionality is. Who else, besides me, would have tried to drag and drop feeds to reorder them in the feeds pane, fail that, try to drag and drop them in "Sources" tab, FAIL THAT, and STILL TRY TO DRAG AND DROP FEEDS A THIRD TIME IN THE "GROUPS" TAB??? Most people would have just assumed your application lacks this feature. There is also no indicator that groups are draggable by the way. If you're designing something that can be dragged and drop, always include a "grip"-like dots effect to indicate that you can click and drag it if you can. There is plenty of space for that in this dialog.
Observation: by the way, in order to reorder feeds inside a group, you have to DOUBLE CLICK THE GROUP! WHO WOULD HAVE EXPECTED THIS???
⚠️ Feeds can be moved by drag and drop. See above.
✅ Folders can be moved.
Tagging Feeds
❌ Doesn't support tagging feeds.
Searching Feeds
❌ Doesn't support searching the feeds you added by name.
Custom Automatic Update Intervals
✅ It's possible to manually fetch a single feed or all feeds. The term used is "Refresh."
❌ Fluent Reader can't be configured to fetch all feeds on start up.
✅ It's possible to set a custom update intervals per feed. More specifically, it says "Fetch frequency limit."
The default frequency is "Unlimited" which sounds scary.
⚠️ Doesn't allow arbitrary frequencies. Allowed values are:
- Unlimited.
- 15 minutes.
- 30 minutes.
- 1 hour.
- 2 hours.
- 3 hours.
- 6 hours.
- 12 hours.
- 1 day.
❌ Setting this setting doesn't actually do anything by default, which is confusing.
There is a global preference for "Automatic Update Interval" that defaults to "Never," with allowed options ranging from 10 minutes to 1 hour.
Fluent Reader's algorithm appears to work like this:
- Every X minutes (as defined by the global option), the feeds are checked.
- If the last time a feed was updated is longer than its fetch frequency limit, the feed will be updated, otherwise, it won't.
This means a feed with "Unlimited" frequency is updated according to the global interval, but if the global interval is never, nothing ever gets updated.
❌ It's possible to make a feed never update automatically.
Feed Annotation
✅ Feeds can be renamed.
Observation: once again, the way the interface is designed appears to be trying to be deliberately confusing. On the settings dialog, in the "Sources" tab, when a feed is selected, you have a field labelled "Selected Source" with a dropdown list button with the item "Name" selected, the name of the feed, and a button that reads "Edit name." How do you edit the name of a feed? If you thought you had to click the button that reads "Edit name" to make a dialog appear, you're completely wrong. You click on the text box where the name is already visible and editable, then you click on "Edit name." This means what this button actually does is applying the name. I don't think there exists a good label for this button specifically because this design is too confusing. If you click on the dropdown list button, you can choose URL and Icon to view other properties, then the feed name disappears and you can't replace it. This dialog has a scrollbar, by the way. Why not just put all three fields there? I don't understand!
✅ It's possible to set a "comment" for an RSS feed in its properties dialog to describe it.
⚠️ The "comment" is a single line and is only visible by opening the properties dialog.
✅ Akregator displays the "description" of an RSS feed when it's selected. This "description" is set by website and is separate from the "comment" that you set yourself.
❌ Can't set a custom icon for a feed.
Feeds Panel
✅ Feeds have context menus with related actions. Although there are very few actions.
⚠️ Double clicking a feed doesn't do anything.
✅ Double clicking a folder expands, collapses it.
❌ Doesn't support multiple selection of feeds.
Automation Support
❌ Can't save search queries to feeds pane.
⚠️ Can blacklist keywords. Although it's not possible to automatically delete articles, it's possible to mark an article as "Hidden" based words found in its title, content, or even author name. However:
To do this, you must click on the cog icon to open the settings dialog, then on the "Rules" tab you must select your feed ni the "Source" dropdown list button, type a regex code, then select some actions to be performed, and click "Confirm."
Observation: I don't know why the button isn't labelled "Add Rule."
❌ It's not possible to add a filter rule to ALL feeds globally. Rules can only be associated with a single feed. If you want to be blacklist a keyword from all articles, you're going to have to add the same rule over and over to everything. There is no way to copy the rules from one feed to paste them in another, by the way.
Observation: if this was a traditional desktop application, this would be in the properties dialog of a feed. This "global" settings dialog where you MUST select things to edit their properties is a very confusing way of doing things.
❌ Although it's nice that Fluent Reader supports regular expressions, it's not nice that it ONLY supports regular expressions. There should be a plain text option to avoid confusion if [, ], ., *, ?, or other reserved character is part of the user's filter. As a general rule, if a user needs to Google something to use your application, you have done a terrible job. You can't expect users to learn regex to add a filter, and you don't provide tools built into the application to learn and test regex, so users can't learn to use your application without external help. A simple help dialog labelled "What is Regex?" could avoid this problem.
⚠️ There's a case sensitiveness option that is shown as an icon with the letters "Aa" at the right side of the regular expression text box. I don't know why this isn't a checkbox. Really, you have plenty of space. Why is everything "compact" is hard to figure out like this?
❌ Can't tag articles automatically based on keywords or other criteria.
❌ Can't subscribe to a program's output instead of URL.
❌ Can't modify articles with a script when they're fetched before storage.
⚠️ Can be notified when articles that match a filter arrive, however, there are two caveats.
First, once again the filter rules are PER FEED and must be in regex. Just as with blacklisting, if you want to always be notified of ANY articles featuring a keyword, you're going to have to recreate a lot of rules manually. I believe it should be the job of the program to automate this sort of work.
Second, Fluent Reader emits a notification for EVERY article that matches the filter.
For example, if you want to match ALL articles, you would use the regex .*. Then if Fluent Reader downloads 10 articles, it emits 10 popup notification.
I won't say it doesn't support this feature, because it technically does, but it's intended use case seems to be very limited. In fact, I'm not sure why would anyone want to add rules to a single feed but not globally. Perhaps global rules will be supported later? Even so, I'd expect global rules to be implemented first, then per-feed rules.
Other Observations
❌ Fluent Reader's main window has a very high minimum width, so it can't be resized very small. In particular, my screen's resolution is 1600x900px, but I can't move it to one half. At first I thought Winkey+Right Arrow wasn't working for some reason, but you can't drag it to a corner of the screen either. I assume this is due to the high minimum width setting.
✅ Despite all absurd issues encountered, I still like Fluent Reader as an application. It's one of the few RSS readers that supports thumbnails, so it provides an alternative way for consuming RSS feeds compared to other readers. In fact, I find its feed design very pleasant to the eye for casual browsing.
It's because Fluent Reader provides a great article browsing experience, but has terrible managerial support, while other RSS readers can excel at management feeds and articles, but have overwhelming interfaces, that I find difficult to say "which RSS client is the best client." Instead, I suggest using multiple RSS clients. One that excels at management for tracking feeds long term, and one for casual reading like Fluent Reader.
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