"How each story is told is as important as the story itself," begins the promo video for Facebook's new much-hyped Paper app.
The app mixes curated news feeds with your Facebook timeline to create a platform that integrates news discovery and sharing into your timeline.
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With its tiled layout and gesture-based user interface, it feels very similar to Flipboard's suite of apps. We put both apps side by side to see how the two stack up. Here's how they compare:
Let's start with where these two apps are most similar: design.
Both use a tiled layout that displays news in a grid. But while Flipboard's design puts content first, Paper puts Facebook first, emphasizing interacting with your Facebook friends and timeline whenever possible.

Flipboard and Paper have different approaches to news curation.
Image: Facebook, Flipboard
Both apps rely heavily on gestures for navigation. But while Flipboard primarily employs one type of gesture, swiping up to "flip" through pages, Paper uses an array of tapping, swiping, pinching and dragging. Paper's gestures are more complex than Flipboard's, yet the app still manages to feel more fluid and intuitive. Details like tilting your device to pan around photos make it obvious that the app's designers spent a lot of time trying to create the best user experience possible.
When it comes to finding and reading news, the two apps take very different approaches. Simply put, Flipboard is an aggregator while Paper is a curator.
Flipboard, with its customized RSS, topic-based feeds and themed magazines, places importance on personalization first, discovery second. Paper puts discovery first, telling users what stories they should pay attention to, while emphasizing interacting with friends on Facebook.
Users can subscribe to the app's topic-based news sections, create customized "magazines" based around their interests, or use the app like an RSS feed to subscribe to specific sources.

Flipboard and Paper have similar layouts but Flipboard focuses on aggregation while Paper emphasizes curation.
Image: Facebook, Twitter
Paper also offers curated topic-based sections, but instead of categories such as "Entertainment" or "Sports," Paper's sections are focused on broad themes.
There are 19 sections to choose from, each with a buzzword-filled description (e.g: Creators: "Visual delights and inspiration from artists around the world," Glow: "Style, substance and beauty that's more than skin deep," etc.). But, unlike Flipboard, which has no limits on how many news feeds a user can have, Paper limits your sections to ten, one of which will always be Facebook.
Here lies another key difference between Paper and Flipboard. While both offer curated and topic-based sections, Flipboard ultimately gives users most of the control by allowing them pick and choose the sources and topics they see. Even in Flipboard's curated sections, users can mute the sources they don't want to see.
With Paper, Facebook controls the sources. And, beyond choosing which sections are of interest, the user has no control over which stories or sources they see. While Paper's editorial team pulls stories from top-tier sources, this approach could be less useful for someone more interested in niche topics.
Sharing and social media integration is at the heart of any news discovery app. Unsurprisingly, social media integration with Flipboard is much more subtle, while Paper puts Facebook front and center.
Facebook may be venturing into the news curation business with Paper, and it may be one of the first of many standalone apps from the social media giant, but the company is still very much emphasizing Facebook as the vehicle for news curation and discovery.
Paper transforms the content of your timeline into elegant tiles while also pulling in articles your friends have shared or commented on. While the clean, streamlined look of Paper is completely different from any of Facebook's other apps, Paper is still very much "a Facebook app." Just about anything you can do with Facebook's app, you can do with Paper. Everything from messages, notifications, account settings and timelines are seamlessly integrated into Paper.
The app does fall a little short on the sharing front. Predictably, Paper only integrates with Facebook and sharing is limited to your Facebook friends (although you can save stories for later via Instapaper, Pocket, Pinboard or your Safari Reading List).

Both apps emphasize photos when sharing content from Facebook.
Image: Paper, Flipboard
Flipboard, on the other hand, is excellent at sharing. With Flipboard, users can pull in updates from a range of social media, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram and LinkedIn, and share the news they find on any connected social network. Viewing social media feeds from within the app, however, is more of a mixed bag. Social media updates, particularly text-centric Facebook statuses and tweets, simply aren't very visually appealing in Flipboard.
While there are striking similarities between the two apps, at the end of the day, they were designed for different uses.
Flipboard is great for collecting all the news you want to read from the sources you like. And if you rely on Flipboard as an aggregator, Paper won't be a replacement. Paper is more of a Facebook app than a "news" app, and it's best suited for those looking to share and discover content with friends.
Flipboard is available for web, iOS, Android, Windows Phone 8, BlackBerry, Kindle Fire and Nook. Paper is currently iPhone only.
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