Should I use Atom or RSS? Which one is better?

At a higher level, Atom and RSS are doing the job, offering a format for Websites to publish their news feeds.

But if you take a closer look, Atom does a better job than RSS in several areas. For example:

Atom has better date format - Atom uses the ISO 8601 date and time format. And RSS uses the date and time format specified in RFC 822, which is for English language only.

Atom supports internationalization - Atom allows the entire feed to be internationalized including links. And RSS only supports links in ASCII characters.

Atom namespace exportable - Atom namespace can be exported to other XML documents. And RSS has no namespace concept.

Atom supports HTML contents - Atom allows you to specify content in Text, HTML or XHTML format. And RSS only supports Text format.

So you should be using Atom instead of RSS, if possible.

⇒ Atom Specification - RFC 4287

⇐ Differences between RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0

⇑ Introduction of Atom

⇑⇑ RSS FAQ and Tutorials