SurgeNews is a newer product, it has the following advantages.

SurgeNews Advantages

• It's fully threaded
• It can cope with larger news groups and larger spool areas.
• It supports a 'proxy' mode for sharing load/groups between several servers.
• It can do multiple channel header based sucking.
• It has a built in web admin interface
• It has a built in webnews interface.
• It's easier to install and use.

On the other hand

• It may have bugs in it (because it's newer)
• It doesn't have all the features of dnews.
• It is not compatible with dnews config settings or dnews database files (you can't trivially upgrade/downgrade)

We recommend people use surgenews for 'new' installations or when upgrading hardware, but generally if dnews is working fine for you, then upgrading would probably be a lot of effort/risk with no obvious benefit.