NetVibes vs. PageFlakes
After praising NetVibes in my earlier post, several people pointed to PageFlakes as an alternative. So I’ve decided to do an informal comparison of the two content aggregators:
Design
Both sites are quite nice looking, however on purely subjective criteria I like NetVibes more.
Content selection
NetVibes as well as Pageflakes offers a selection of standard display widgets like weather, web search, TODO list, Flickr photos, etc. Judging by the menu Pageflakes beats its hands down in its breadth, with 68 widgets vs. 16, however NetVibes supports user-created modules via Mini API. Considering those, NetVibes has additional 60+ modules
Interface
Interface on both pages is very similar, down to widget drag & drop, support for multiple tabs and fairly heavy use of AJAX.
Social
Pageflakes is the only one that supports page sharing and it allows you one of three options:
- Private
- Share it with a select group of people
- Share it with everybody
Overall
As it stands, NetVibes vs. PageFlakes is virtually a tie with an almost identical set of features and the personal choice would probably be dictated by subjective factors or availability of a particularly needed widget. I can easily recommend both for a day-to-day use.
Tags: netvibes, pageflakes, web-20
3 comments May 6th, 2006
