The Best RSS Feed Readers for Streamlining the Internet [Updated August 2022]

[Karlston]

The internet is a mess. Ignore the algorithm, and distill the web down to the things you actually care about.

 

Whether you are sick of social media, want to get away from endless notifications, or just want to read your news all in one spot, an RSS reader can help. RSS stands for “really simple syndication.” It's a protocol that allows an RSS reader to talk to your favorite websites and get updates from them. Instead of visiting 10 sites to see what's new, you view a single page with all new content.

 

There are two parts to RSS: the RSS reader and the feeds from your favorite websites. RSS has been around awhile now, so there are a lot of very good RSS readers out there. Most of them feature built-in search and suggestions, so you don't have to go hunting for feeds yourself. You just might discover some cool new sites to read.

 

I've been using RSS for more than a decade and recently spent a few months trying almost a dozen RSS reader services. The picks below are the best RSS readers available. Once you've found one you like, put it on one of our Best Tablets or Best iPads for easy reading on the go. 

 

Updated August 2022: We've added Feedbin and updated prices throughout.

 

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Best Overall

Inoreader

Photograph: Inoreader

Inoreader ($10 per month)

 

Inoreader offers a well-designed interface, good search and discovery options, and a nice set of features that are beginner-friendly and offer plenty of options for advanced users. There's a web interface as well as iOS and Android apps. Inoreader handles more than just RSS feeds—you can add email newsletters, Facebook pages, Twitter searches, podcasts, even Telegram channels. 

 

Advanced users will like extra features like keyword monitoring. Enter your search terms, and Inoreader will search all your feeds for any mention of that keyword or phrase and then create a feed of just those articles. You can also do the opposite and hide articles matching a phrase. Inoreader also offers a nice automation system you can use to create rules and filter your feeds, giving some higher priority. For example, you could get a push notification every time WIRED publishes a new review, but not the rest of our content. 

 

The automation requires a pro account, which also provides some other nice features, like the ability to integrate with IFTTT and Zapier, an offline mode for the mobile apps. It also includes my favorite: keeping your YouTube account in sync with your RSS reading. You can watch YouTube videos in Inoreader, and next time you log into YouTube you won't have a ton of unwatched videos.

 

Inoreader recently updated its mobile apps with a new search module that's very handy, as well as some improvements to the offline reading mode. 

 

Inoreader offers a free (with ads) account, which is good for testing whether the service meets your needs. If it does, the Pro account ($10 a month; cheaper if you buy a year up front) brings more advanced features and support for more feeds.

Best for Beginners

Feedly desktop and mobile apps

Photograph: Feedly

Feedly ($8.25 per month)

 

Feedly is probably the most popular RSS reader on the web, for good reason. It's well-designed and easy to use, and it offers great search options so it's easy to add all your favorite sites. It lacks one thing that makes Inoreader slightly better for my use—the YouTube syncing—but otherwise Feedly is an excellent choice.

 

It even has a few features Inoreader does not, like Evernote integration (you can save articles to Evernote) and a notes feature for jotting down your thoughts on stories. Feedly also touts Leo, the company's AI search assistant, which can help filter your feeds and surface the content you really want. I found that it worked well enough, but a big part of what I like about RSS is that there's no AI—I don't want automated filtering. Depending on how you use RSS, though, this could be a useful feature.

 

Like the others here, Feedly offers iOS and Android apps along with a web interface. Feedly is free up to 100 feeds. A Pro subscription is $8 a month (cheaper if you pay for a year) and enables more features like notes, save to Evernote, and ad-free reading. The Pro+ account gets you the AI-features and more for $12 a month.

Best for DIYers

Photograph: Newsblur

Newsblur ($3 per month)

 

Newsblur is a refreshingly simple old-school RSS reader. You won't find AI or YouTube syncing here—it's for reading RSS feeds and getting on with your life. It can subscribe to all kinds of content (including newsletters), read full stories (even from RSS feeds that don't offer them), integrate with IFTTT, and even track story changes if a publisher updates an article.

 

One thing that sets Newsblur apart is that it's open source. You can see the code on Github, and if you're comfortable with the command line you can even set up your own self-hosted version of Newsblur on your own server.

 

There are apps for iOS and Android, as well as the web-based interface. Newsblur's free account is the most limited of the options here, with only 64 feeds and only five stories from each at a time, but the Premium account is also the cheapest at $36 per year. That gets you access to all the features and unlimited feeds.

Best for Design Nerds

Photograph: Feedbin

Feedbin ($5 per month)

 

Feedbin is an elegant little RSS reader that's great for everyone, but design lovers will especially appreciate the customization via themes (with Hoefler & Co. typefaces!) and the attention to detail in the user interface. As with the others here, there are plenty of features that go well beyond RSS to pull in your YouTube subscriptions, newsletters, and even Twitter feeds. Feedbin will also let your read full stories even from RSS feeds that don't offer them.

 

Overall, Feedbin is a simple, clean RSS experience with everything you need and no cruft. I particularly like that while Feedbin has its own iOS app, it will work with quite a few third-party iOS and Android apps. Even the pricing is simple: Feedbin offers a 14-day free trial period; after that it's $5 per month.

Best Browser-Based Reader

Courtesy of Vivaldi

Vivaldi

 

The Vivaldi web browser, which I've elsewhere called the web's best browser, recently unveiled a built-in RSS reader. The Vivaldi feed reader uses the also-new Vivaldi Mail to display and manage feed items, which end up looking a bit like your email. There's no sync to mobile, which is a big limitation for some users, but you can import and export your feeds via an OPML file.

 

I really like how Vivaldi handles YouTube videos, which are extracted using a no-cookie URL and displayed inline rather than linking to the video, a small win for privacy. Vivaldi also supports podcast subscriptions and offers an embedded player, so you can listen to them in the background while you browse the web.

 

My favorite feature is how tightly the RSS integrates into the browsing experience. When you're on a webpage with a feed, you'll get an icon in the address field, and you can click that to see a preview of the feed. Click the Subscribe button, and it'll be added to your feeds. 

 

Vivaldi's RSS reader is new, and features are somewhat limited. For example, it doesn't handle some of the extras that other services do, like newsletters and Facebook pages. If you just want a simple reader to subscribe to a few feeds and you don't need a mobile client or all the bells and whistles, this is a great choice. Vivaldi's RSS reader is free and built-in to the Vivaldi web browser.

How to Get More Out of RSS

The first thing you'll notice when you get into RSS is that not every website advertises its feed. More often than not there is a feed, but finding it can be tricky. Fortunately, there are some web browser extensions that can help. This Chrome extension and this Firefox add-on will add an RSS feed icon to your URL bar, and you can click it to subscribe to almost any website you're on.

 

But some websites don't have RSS feeds. In that case, you can use a feed generator like Fetch RSS or RSS.app. Neither are perfect, but in my testing both were able to generate feeds for seven of the 10 pages I tested, which is better than nothing.

 

What about those really stubborn pages? Well, I just ignore them. There's a saying that “networks route around damage,” and not having an RSS feed is a kind of damage. Ignoring those websites is a way to route around it.

 

 

The Best RSS Feed Readers for Streamlining the Internet

 

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[Karlston]

FWIW, I use QuiteRSS RSS Feed Reader for quickly and easily gathering news articles to post here. It's freeware and has a simple Outlook-like intuitive interface that works really well.

 

PM me if you need more info or help using it.