They are just your basic treadle style feeder and they do work to exclude rats and wild birds if you can get your chickens to use them. Many chickens are afraid of the movement of the feeder and take extensive training periods before they are comfortable with using one.
Nope, these are radically different than every other feeder on the market. It is the ONLY feeder with a soft close door option, the only feeder with a spring loaded door to stop a rat from just pushing the door open, the only feeder with a heavy counterweight to help keep the vermin out of the feed, and the only feeder with a narrow and distant treadle to prevent mass rodent attacks.
If you take the time to read the reviews most people will say that their birds learned to use the feeders in a day or less. If you read the reviews you will find a half dozen that tell you to follow the directions, usually in capital letters. Those are the ones that had problems and emailed asking for help. Every single time it was because the instructions weren't followed. Every time someone called in for help they got their birds trained after we stressed how important it is to follow the instructions to the very letter, nothing extra, nothing left out.
One guy I will never forget, a doctor both medical and PHD kind, researcher, inventor, built a multi million dollar medical device company. The guy started calling me at night, no daytime calls please unless you are having problems with the payment system or shopping cart. He would send emails with pictures, we would talk. He would try and fail. His birds just wouldn't use the feeders I was told.
After a week of this he called saying I was right, the birds mobbed the feeder after he followed the directions. I just had to ask and we had kind of become friends and chatted about many things other than the feeder. "Why wouldn't you follow the directions?" His response was "The instructions just weren't logical."
The lesson, never use logic on a chicken. Use hunger, use instinct. Install it properly, securely fastened to a post, a wall, or a large chunk of plywood so it is rock solid and not wobbling around when the birds step on it. Make sure the treadle bottoms out on something so the bird can stand on the ground with one foot and use the other to bottom on the treadle. Remove ALL other sources of feed before trying to train and keep them cooped up till they learn how to use the feeder. Adjust the spring before trying to train the birds and make sure the inner bolts are securely tightened and the outer lock nut is backed off 1/8th of a turn.
You do that, a few hours of training, meaning two minutes the first time and coming back an hour later and doing another two minutes, and your birds will use the feeder when they are hungry. One will usually learn quickly and teach the others. If you are short of time or facing a deadline like an upcoming trip, buy the soft close version, less noise, easier to train. But other than that it isn't needed and many have remarked they like the sound of the feeder because it tells them everything is okay in the pen.
