The Best Usenet Plans on the Omicron Backbone

First place in detail: Newsgroup Ninja Unlimited Yearly

Newsgroup Ninja's yearly plan costs €5.83 per month, is uncapped in volume and speed, and brings over 17 years of retention — which puts it at the top of the whole market, not just this list. 50 simultaneous connections are solid for a yearly plan, with servers in Europe and the USA.

Two things to know before you buy. The Trustpilot rating of 3.8 comes from only eleven reviews — too thin a base to infer much about reliability. And on privacy the provider is classed low in our data. If that matters to you, there are alternatives further down this list on the same backbone.

Omicron: the largest Usenet backbone

Omicron is the largest backbone on the market and the infrastructure behind most of the well-known names: around 30 of the providers listed on Usenet.org serve from it — considerably more than from any other network. It runs its own server farms in Europe and North America, which is why many Omicron providers offer locations on both continents.

In practice that means two things. First, Omicron is among the networks with the longest retention: the top figures in this list exceed 6,400 days, more than 17 years. Second, this is where the established providers with the most customer reviews sit — if a broad evidence base behind a rating matters to you, this network is a better hunting ground than the smaller ones.

Why retention varies so widely inside Omicron

This is the striking feature of the field: on the same backbone, offers with 750 days sit next to offers with more than 6,400. That is almost a ninefold difference — and it does not come from the network.

The backbone holds the spool; the provider decides how far back it opens it to its customers. A short retention is usually a pricing decision: pay less, get access to a smaller slice of the archive. For recent content that makes no difference; for older content it makes a large one. So check the retention column, not just the price — on this network it is the criterion with the widest spread.

How this ranking is built

Every provider serving from Omicron with a twelve-month plan that is uncapped in data volume and speed is included. Providers buying from two backbones appear in both backbone rankings — correctly so, since they serve from both.

The backbone itself is not scored. It is the selection, not a criterion: every candidate shares it, and a criterion with an identical value sorts nothing. Scoring uses price, Trustpilot rating, retention and the number of simultaneous connections.

Combining two backbones

If an article is missing on Omicron it is missing at every provider in this list — they read the same archive. A second account is therefore only worth having on a different network. The natural complement is the Abavia ranking, the second-largest backbone.

If you would rather not commit for a year, the monthly plans ranking runs across all backbones.