Wisp vs SmartNews
Discovery feed vs calm topic feed.
SmartNews is one of the biggest news apps in the world — tens of millions of downloads, thousands of publisher partners, and a feed built for discovery. It mixes editor picks with machine learning, surfaces local news and weather, and adds a left–right slider on political stories so you can see coverage from both sides. It's designed to be the one app that covers everything.
Wisp is built for the opposite instinct: follow the topics you already care about, get one neutral summary per story, and stop. No For You feed deciding what you might like next. No infinite scroll of publisher headlines. Chronological, clustered, finished.
If you want a broad discovery app with local news and a big publisher catalog, SmartNews is excellent at that. If you want to stay informed on your own topics without an engagement-optimized feed, Wisp is the calmer alternative. We wrote a fuller SmartNews review if you want the honest long version.
Side by side.
| Feature | Wisp | SmartNews |
|---|---|---|
| Personalized to topics you choose | ✓ | ✓ |
| One neutral summary per story | ✓ | — |
| Clusters duplicate coverage across sources | ✓ | — |
| Chronological feed, no algorithm | ✓ | — |
| Algorithmic “For You” discovery | — | ✓ |
| Local news, weather, crime alerts | — | ✓ |
| Left / right coverage slider | — | ✓ |
| Thousands of publisher partnerships | — | ✓ |
| iOS & Android | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free tier | ✓ | ✓ |
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