Top 5 Digital Magazine Subscription Services Compared

Amazon is the elephant in the room when it comes to digital reading. Despite Apple’s efforts – some of them seemingly illegal – Kindle is the de facto platform in many ways.

For many people, Kindle Unlimited will be hard to beat, because in addition to “current” magazines, the service includes over a million books and any audiobook on Audible. You can also read on virtually any platform, because in addition to iPhones and iPads, it’s on Android, Mac, Windows and of course Amazon’s Fire tablets, Echo speakers and eReaders. Kindle.

The service costs $9.99 per month, but can be tried free for 30 days.

Apple’s Texture includes access to somewhere north of 200 magazines, mostly mainstream publications such as Time, Wired, Atlanticand Sports Illustrated. For now, at least, it’s available not only on iPhones and iPads, but also on Android devices, including Amazon tablets.

Access costs $9.99 per month after a 7-day trial.

Rather than being an all-you-can-eat service, Zinio is more like a conventional storefront. You pay for individual magazine subscriptions, or even individual issues, which can potentially make it very expensive. In that sense, it’s better for the casual magazine reader than for someone who wants to know everything.

However, Zinio customers can benefit from special offers, and free items are also regularly available. iPhone and iPad readers can switch between a “traditional” magazine layout and a special text mode, the latter being better optimized for mobile.

The service claims to have “6,000+” magazines from around the world. Interestingly, users can also access Marvel comics, something outside the reach of most magazine services.

Magzter’s standard purchase model is a la carte like Zinio, but Magzter Gold is also available, which costs $9.99 per month. This gives access to over 5,000 magazines, as well as “premium” articles from publications such as Forbes and Atlantic.

Significantly, Magzter would like to say that Gold members can share their subscription with up to 4 family members. This might not be a big deal – after all, you can share logins for other services – but it could be useful for families where it’s important to separate progress and collections.

Apps are available for iOS, Android and Amazon Fire tablets.

After a 14-day trial, Readly costs $9.99 per month for unlimited access to over 3,211 magazines and 75,225 new and back issues (as of this writing). Yes, they are so specific.

A subscription allows users to play up to 5 devices simultaneously, with up to 5 individual profiles. You can read on iOS, Android, Amazon Fire tablets or the web.

Unless you’re an activist against Amazon, the answer is probably Kindle Unlimited. It’s simply impossible to ignore the added benefits of the service – after all, why limit yourself to magazines when you could also be reading books on the subway or listening to them while lifting weights?

Of course, there are perfectly valid reasons for wanting to avoid Amazon, in which case it really comes down to whether a service has the magazines you want to read and if you prefer their application(s). We strongly recommend that you sign up for as many trials as possible and test out the interfaces of the services, because it doesn’t matter what a service offers if playing on your favorite device feels inconvenient.

If you’re not determined to sign up for a service today, we suggest you wait and see what happens when Apple takes over Texture. If the company is planning Apple News integration or an all-in-one content bundle by the end of the year, it might not make a whole lot of sense to sink your hooks into anything else.