Short Review: Yahoo Pipes versus Google Mashup Editor

Yahoo Pipes and Google Mashup Editor both allows you to create mashups with RSS feeds. The following is a brief comparative review.

1. Google Mashup Editor is significantly harder to use than Yahoo Pipes (read my review of Yahoo Pipes).
2. Google Mashup Editor mixes the pipeline (mixing and matching RSS feeds, filtering etc.) with layout which is fundamentally a bad idea. Yahoo Pipes cleanly implements the pipeline and provides a nice user interface to design it.
3. Yahoo Pipes user interface for designing the pipeline is leagues ahead of Google Mashup Editor. Google Mashup Editor doesn’t even have an user interface. All it has is a code editor.
4. Yahoo Pipes debugger is simple to use and intuitive, though somewhat limited. Google Mashup Editor doesn’t have an equivalent facility as far as I could see.

I gave up on Google Mashup Editor after about 15 minutes. I would rather pull out my healthy mollar than design my next killer mashup on Google Mashup Editor. Yahoo Pipes was a much fulfilling experience and was fun to use. However I had to finally give up on it too as it is pretty flaky with complex pipelines. I may come back to it if it has some SLA in place. Overall Yahoo Pipes wins hands down.