Netvibes rides into the sunset, alternatives do not impress

It’s always news like this that serve as a stark reminder of a simple fact: nothing is forever in the world of tech. Netvibes, one of the most widely-known, widely-praised personalized homepage services on the Web, will be no more after June 2nd of this year. There was no official announcement on its official website or on the website of its owner company, Dassault Systemes: just a simple, one-line e-mail in every current user’s inbox letting them know that “Netvibes.com is retiring its standalone service and you should backup your data before June 2 noon CET” (sic). Just a few short months ago the most famous personalized homepage of this kind, My Yahoo, went away in the same unceremonious manner after more than 25 years of operation.

It was, in both cases, not exactly the ideal way of sunsetting popular Web services but – truth be told – for Netvibes it was in line with what its long-time users were expecting to happen sooner or later. See, the consumer-facing side of Netvibes had not been meaningfully improved or even updated for a very long time – since it was acquired by Dassault in 2012, essentially – which is a clear sign of a product or service not having much of a future. Even as an enterprise dashboard intelligence platform, actually, not just an end-user personal dashboard, Netvibes was pretty much abandoned over the last few years (despite boasting over 250.000 enterprise web app connections at some point). The service’s consumer customer base was never officially revealed – some speculate that it peaked at around 8 or 9 million back in 2009 – but now we’ll never know, will we?

What Netvibes got right early on – and iGoogle never managed to pull off as effectively – was the arrangement of many RSS feeds at once in an easily glanceable manner. While typical RSS readers force consumers into going through each feed one by one for newly published articles, Netvibes offered highly configurable feed widgets that worked all on the same screen at the same time. That way, the service was able to easily display 20-25 website feeds of e.g. 10 article headlines each, in perfectly legible text on a 4K screen. On an 8K screen – like the one yours truly uses as a secondary display on his everyday work setup – one can fit around 40 instantly glanceable feeds (many websites publish more than 10 stories daily so their RSS widgets are larger) with relative ease.

For journalists in particular, that alone was a big deal: pre-2006, before Netvibes became popular, it used to take yours truly around half an hour to go through all the different RSS feeds a tech and entertainment reporter constantly needs to be checking out. Sure, it was the best excuse for a 30-minute early-morning coffee, but still. Netvibes took that half-hour down to mere seconds when combined with appropriately configured tabs: one could put “Tech”, “Gaming”, “Entertainment”, “Internet”, “Design” and other thematically grouped RSS feeds in different “pages” and then go through a hundred or more information sources in less than a minute. Even with 4K or 8K screens unavailable back then – yours truly was using a Dell 2560×1600 30-inch screen with horrible viewing angles, for instance – it was nothing less than a transformative information gathering experience.

Combined with a handful of other useful widgets one could configure and include in different “pages” – like simple text notes, link listings and social media feeds – the highly configurable RSS feeds of Netvibes made for an excellent personalized homepage: the very first one so many people opened in the first browser window of the day for more almost two decades. So it’s more than a little frustrating to find out that, in this time and age of Web 3.0 – or maybe because of it – frequent Netvibes users will not have enough decent options in replacing this particular service with a similar one come June.

Why? Well, most pure RSS readers are still not as flexible or configurable as Netvibes was, a couple of paid personalized homepage services seem to be a bit costly for what they actually offer and most free ones look veritably ancient in 2025 terms. Basically, for people looking for a Netvibes alternative while the clock is ticking – as yours truly currently is – the only two such services standing out from the crowd are Protopage and Start.me. There are more interesting, high-quality options in the enterprise space, but they are overkill for consumers looking for just a free, basic personalized homepage offering most of the functionality Netvibes used to offer.

Of the aforementioned two that stand out, Start.me is the nicer-looking one, but its 3-page limit for the free plan is too restrictive (unless one enjoys scrolling a lot). It’s not that expensive on a yearly basis, but its additional widgets and overall functionality do not impress. Plus… another subscription, for a simple personalized homepage this time? Come on. Protopage is totally free and poses no such restrictions, but its look is dated and its widget selection limited. It gets the job done, but yours truly would probably not enjoy using it day in, day out for very long. Other alternatives – like igHome, which strives to replicate what iGoogle offered 15 years ago – do not inspire confidence and are not worth considering.

As was the case with the sorely-missed Windows WordPad, there doesn’t seem to be a direct replacement for Netvibes available for free right now. Some people will care, most will not. But the personalized homepage concept still makes sense in 2025 for a specific subset of Web users who don’t feel that the way almost all RSS readers work today is fast and productive – or, frankly, that start pages is the same thing as RSS feed aggregators (it definitely isn’t). At the end of the day it’s just sad that there’s seemingly zero interest from any software company or startup to offer a modern, high-quality, configurable personalized homepage service for free and upsell to something worth the price difference. Perplexity seems to think it’s not that complex or expensive to build a Netvibes-like self-hosted service, though. Any takers?