Spritz, Spreeder, and Free RSVP Readers Compared (2026)
RSVP speed reading, where words are flashed one at a time at a fixed point, has been built dozens of times since the technique left the psychology lab. The tools differ more than you'd expect: some are SDKs, some are training platforms, some are simple free pages. Here's an honest map of what's out there and how to choose.
The main players
Spritz is the name most people know. Its signature is the red-highlighted ORP (optimal recognition point) letter that keeps your eye anchored, and the engineering is genuinely good. The catch: Spritz is primarily a technology company. Its reader ships inside partner apps through an SDK, not as a simple website where you paste your own text. If an app you already use has Spritz built in, it's excellent; if you just want to read your own documents, you need something else. (Full comparison →)
Spreeder by eReflect is the veteran consumer product: an RSVP reader attached to a paid training platform (Spreeder CX) with courses, a cloud library, and cross-device progress. The free reader works, but the useful features (importing your own ebooks and documents, training plans) mostly live behind the paid tier and an account. (Full comparison →)
AccelaReader is the utilitarian free option: paste text, set words-per-flash and speed, read. No account, no payment, and it's been reliably online for years. Its interface is dated and desktop-oriented, and there's no document upload, but it does one thing and does it fine. (Full comparison →)
SpeedRead (this site) sits in the same free-and-no-account category as AccelaReader, with a more modern take: PDF and DOCX upload parsed locally in your browser, a mobile-first interface with tap-to-pause, and finer display control over focus position, fonts, letter spacing, sentence-pause length, and dark mode.
Feature comparison
| SpeedRead | Spritz | Spreeder | AccelaReader | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Via partner apps | Free + paid tier | Free |
| Account needed | No | Varies by app | For most features | No |
| Paste your own text | Yes | Rarely | Yes | Yes |
| PDF / DOCX upload | Yes, local parsing | No | Paid | No |
| Mobile experience | Built for it | Varies | App available | Basic |
| Focus point control | Adjustable | Fixed red ORP | Limited | No |
| Training courses | No | No | Yes (paid) | No |
| Words per flash | 1 | 1 | Configurable | Configurable |
How to choose
- You want structured training with progress tracking: Spreeder's paid tier is the only real offering in that category, and it's decent at it.
- You read mostly in one app that has Spritz integration: stay there, since integrated beats switching.
- You want multi-word chunking: AccelaReader or Spreeder; SpeedRead currently shows one word at a time by design.
- You want to paste or upload anything and read it now, free, privately, on any device: that's the use case SpeedRead is built around.
What actually matters more than the tool
A candid note to end on: the differences between decent RSVP readers are smaller than the difference between using one and not using one at all. The technique itself does the heavy lifting by removing eye-movement overhead, which caps normal page reading around 300 WPM (the science here).
Whichever tool you pick, the effective routine is the same. Measure your baseline, read everyday material about 50% faster than that baseline, raise the speed in small steps, and check yourself occasionally by summarizing what you just read. Ten minutes a day for two weeks is usually enough to make 1.5–2× your old speed feel normal, on any of these tools.