According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, more than 35% of adults in the United States say they regularly read news on mobile devices. This includes tablets, smartphones, and other handheld devices.
The majority of adults who read blogs use their phones to do so (66%). And it’s not just one kind of phone; people read blogs with iPhones, Android phones, and BlackBerrys.Also, many adults are reading blogs on their computers (43%)—and if you’re too young to have a “computer,” that’s what we call laptops or desktop computers.
Table of Contents
Best Apps For Reading Blogs
When you want to follow specific writers, publications, and channels—to see every piece of content they publish—nothing beats an RSS reader app. RSS apps access web feeds published by websites, letting you aggregate and curate content you care about. Instead of visiting multiple sites, just open your favorite RSS app to see all new content in a central source.
Learn how to level up your RSS feeds
Automate your RSS
If you’re still looking for a replacement for Google Reader, or you’re just ready to start experiencing the web chronologically, check out the following five free RSS reader apps that keep you up to date.
Want to look at posts from your favorite social sharers in your RSS app alongside the blogs and channels you follow? Here’s how to build an RSS feed for Twitter and Facebook. Once your feed is set up, just add it to your RSS reader app to get all of your favorite content in one place.
What makes a great RSS reader app?
How we evaluate and test apps
All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who’ve spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it’s intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We’re never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.
For over a decade, Google Reader was the gold standard for RSS apps—at least until July 2013, when Google abruptly stopped supporting the tool. A good chunk of the internet is still mad about that.
But it’s not all bad news. There are plenty of polished, high-quality feed reader apps that let you access the content published on your favorite sites exactly how you want to read it.
For this piece, we will focus on the best free, online RSS services—the best alternatives to Google Reader—and we narrowed our recommendations using the following criteria:
Free: Each featured app is either completely free or offers a free plan that rivals the features of most premium plans on the market.
Web apps: Web RSS apps let you read content online using any device by accessing a URL. This is opposed to native RSS apps that sync feeds directly to your device. The apps featured below are all web apps.
Traditional: A traditional RSS reader app does two things: displays content in reverse chronological order and lets you curate the content you want to read. We excluded any apps that use an algorithm to determine the order in which posts are displayed (e.g., popular posts displayed first), and we also excluded tools better described as content discovery platforms (e.g., Flipboard).
Full-text: When creating an RSS feed, publishers elect to show either a preview of their content or the entire article, so it’s not always possible for RSS readers to display articles in their entirety. But for sites that have elected to show full-text, RSS readers should display the entire article, unless not having full-text is a specific feature that provides value to users (e.g., the app is designed to make it easy to skim lots of headlines). We eliminated any apps that placed access to full-text—when made available by the publisher—behind a premium plan paywall.
Usability: One of the major goals of using an RSS reader app is to simplify the process of seeing content from multiple sites. The apps we chose make it easy to perform basic RSS app functions like following your favorite sites, organizing your feeds into meaningful categories, saving articles, and marking articles as read.
With those criteria in mind, here are our picks for the five best RSS reader apps.
The 5 best RSS reader apps
Feedly for the best all-around free feed RSS reader
NewsBlur for filtering your RSS feeds
Inoreader for the best free reader with search and archiving
The Old Reader for sharing and recommendations
Feeder for quickly browsing headlines
Best all-around free feed RSS reader
Feedly (Web, iOS, Android)
Feedly
Feedly is the industry standard for web-based RSS readers, and has been for a while. It’s not hard to see why—its clean and simple interface is a great solution for both casual readers who just want to see all of their websites in one place and power users who want to take advantage of every feature RSS apps have to offer.
Feedly’s free plan offers most of the features casual readers need. Follow up to 100 sources, sort the sites you follow into topical categories, watch YouTube videos, and read full-text articles (when available) in a distraction-free, minimalist view. Plus, Feedly offers mobile apps for Android and iOS devices, so you can access subscriptions easily both at home and on the go.
Remember: If you have to leave your RSS app and visit the source website to view the full text of an article, it’s most likely a setting from the publisher and not a limitation set by the RSS provider.
But Feedly is also incredibly scalable, giving you the tools you need to do more than just curate and aggregate content. Upgrade to the Pro plan to search your feeds, get Google Keyword Alerts alongside your subscriptions, add notes to content, and highlight important passages. This is great for professionals who want to use their RSS app as a research hub.
And if you want to share your RSS feeds with others, Feedly’s Business plan lets you do just that. Share feeds, boards, notes, and highlights with other members of your team so you can all collaborate to uncover interesting research and share ideas.
Want to connect Feedly to the other apps you use? You can do that with Zapier’s Feedly integration, which can connect the RSS reader with thousands of apps. This lets you do things like push articles to your Buffer queue, share articles on Slack, or save tagged articles to a Google Sheet.
Add New Feedly Article From a Category to Buffer Queue
Buffer + Feedly
Use this Zap
Share new articles in Feedly feeds on Slack
Feedly + Slack
Use this Zap
Save tagged articles in Feedly to new rows in Google Sheets
Feedly + Google Sheets
Use this Zap
Feedly Price: Free for the Basic plan that lets you follow up to 100 sources and use the web, Android, and iOS apps; the Pro plan starts at $6/month and includes up to 1,000 sources, search, and third-party integrations (including Zapier).
Best free RSS reader for filtering your feeds
NewsBlur (Web, Self-Hosted Web, iOS, Android)
NewsBlur
With a free NewsBlur account, you can subscribe to up to 64 different feeds, read full-text content of those sites in its web reader, and save stories to read or access in the future. And you don’t even need to click that much while reading in NewsBlur. Just keep scrolling: articles display one after another for action-free reading.
But NewsBlur’s most interesting feature is its sophisticated filtering, which can automatically highlight or hide stories based on certain criteria. If you spend some time training your filters, the system will learn your preferences and try to surface the stories that interest you most. That way, you can subscribe to as many sites as you want—even the ones that publish 100 articles a day—and still only see the content you’re interested in.
NewsBlur also lets you share your favorite stories, either on social networks or inside of NewsBlur. Within the app, you can add stories that you read and like to your personal “blurblog,” or find people with similar interests and follow their blurblogs as well. Or, you can run NewsBlur on your own server for free.
NewsBlur Price: Free for subscribing to up to 64 sites; $36/year for a Premium account that includes unlimited subscriptions, search functionality, and private sharing; free open-source to run on your own server.
If you like the idea of a self-hosted RSS app but aren’t sure if NewsBlur is right for you, there are other options to consider: selfoss, FreshRSS, Tiny Tiny RSS, and Winds are all free to install on your own server, if you have one.
Best free RSS reader with search and archiving
Inoreader (Web, iOS, Android)
inoreader
Inoreader is one of the most feature-packed free RSS readers on this list. Without paying a cent, you can follow 150 feeds, and you can even search within your subscriptions.
And while most RSS apps only cache content for the short-term, Inoreader doesn’t have limited-time archives. Your content—even the stuff you’ve already read—is stored permanently. To stay organized, you can group your feeds in folders and use tags to separate out individual articles as you read them.
This makes Inoreader a great tool for power users, but it’s very accessible for beginners as well. After signing up, you’re guided through a tutorial that shows you how to use the app’s major features, making it easy to get up and running even if you have no previous RSS experience.
If you upgrade to one of Inoreader’s premium plans, you get even more features. Add feeds for Twitter profiles or Facebook Pages, write advanced rules for sorting your content into folders and tags, and customize your dashboard to see exactly what interests you the most when you log in.
Inoreader offers a Zapier integration, meaning you can connect it to thousands of other apps. This lets you do things like automatically save starred articles to Pocket and Instapaper, or compile saved articles in a Google spreadsheet.
Save starred Inoreader articles to Pocket
Inoreader + Pocket
Use this Zap
Create Instapaper pages for new starred Inoreader articles
Inoreader + Instapaper
Use this Zap
Track new Inoreader subscriptions in a Google spreadsheet
Google Sheets + Inoreader
Use this Zap
Inoreader Price: Free with ads for 150 subscriptions and search functionality; from $1.67/month for the Supporter plan for 500 subscriptions, no ads, a customizable dashboard, and custom rules.
Best free RSS reader for sharing and recommendations
The Old Reader (Web)
The Old Reader
If you and your friends all enjoy reading the same types of content, The Old Reader makes it easy to share your recommendations with each other. Just connect your Facebook or Google account, follow friends who also have accounts, and The Old Reader will show you content recommended by your friends.
This is a great way to discover new blogs, sites, and channels to follow—as well as share your favorites with your friends. And even if you don’t have any friends using The Old Reader to connect with, you can check out the content in its Trending tab to see a list of the pieces that have received the most recent likes from other people who use The Old Reader.
Beyond its social aspects, The Old Reader’s free plan does everything you need an RSS app to do. View full-text articles when available, read all posts in reverse chronological order, and subscribe to as many as 100 feeds. But if you want full-text search functionality, need to follow more than 100 feeds, or prefer to use the app without ads, you’ll need to upgrade to Premium.
The Old Reader Price: Free with ads for up to 100 subscriptions; from $3/month for a Premium Account (login required to view page) that includes up to 500 subscriptions, one year of post storage, and full-text search.
Best free RSS reader for quickly browsing headlines
Feeder (Web, Chrome, Firefox, iOS, Android)
Feeder
Feeder’s web app isn’t all that different from any of the other apps on this list, outside its more modern aesthetic. Like all traditional RSS reader apps, it lets you subscribe to sites and view their posts in reverse chronological order. There’s support for setting up rules, for paid users, and some collaboration features. What makes Feeder stand out, though, is its browser extension that lets you browse headlines.
Using Feeder’s browser extensions for Chrome or Firefox is perhaps the simplest way to read RSS feeds—one that’s especially popular with those who want to quickly read the headlines and get on with their day. Just click your RSS icon to see recently published headlines from any page of your browser. Tap an article to read it, or just quickly skim through the latest updates without reading everything.
You can also take your RSS feeds on the go with Feeder’s mobile apps for iOS and Android, where you’ll get both the headlines and a simplified view of the full articles. It’s a great way to stay informed of what’s going on wherever you happen to be when you’re looking to catch up on the news you care about.
Feeder Price: Free with ads for the Feeder Basic plan that includes access to all of Feeder’s apps and 10 feeds; Pro starts at $2.50/month and includes faster updates, 30 feeds, and no ads.
RSS is one of the oldest technologies of the internet; it’s kind of like email in that way. But also like email, newer advances in technology haven’t reduced its importance. RSS remains one of the best ways to make sure you see everything your favorite sites publish.
best rss reader 2021
WHETHER YOU ARE sick of social media, want to get away from endless notifications, or just want to read all 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 different 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 RSS feeds from your favorite websites. RSS has been around a while now, so there are a lot of very good RSS readers out there. Most of them feature built-in search and suggestions too, so you don’t have to go hunting for RSS feeds yourself. You just might discover some cool new sites to read, too.
I’ve been using RSS for over a decade, and recently spent a few months trying out almost a dozen different RSS reader services. The picks below are the best RSS readers available right now. Once you’ve found one you like, put it on one of our Best Tablets or Best iPads for easy reading on the go.
Best Overall
Inoreader
PHOTOGRAPH: INOREADER
Inoreader offers a well-designed readable interface, good search and discovery options, and a nice set of features that are both 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, and podcasts too.
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 does require a pro account. Pro accounts also get some other nice features, like the ability to integrate with IFTTT and Zapier, an offline mode for the mobile apps. It also includes my personal 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 offers a free (with ads) account, which is good for testing out the service to see if it meets your needs. If it does, the Pro account is $7 a month (it’s cheaper if you buy a year up front), which brings more advanced features and support for more feeds.
Best for Beginners
Feedly
PHOTOGRAPH: FEEDLY
Feedly is probably the most popular RSS reader on the web, and for good reason. It’s well-designed, easy to use, and offers great search options so it’s easy to add all your favorite sites. It lacks one thing that makes Inoreader slightly better in my view—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 own 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. In my testing, I found that it worked well enough, but a big part of what I like about RSS is that there’s is 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 (it’s 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
Newsblur
PHOTOGRAPH: NEWSBLUR
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 5 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.
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.
Some websites don’t have RSS feeds though. 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 ten 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.
Conclusion
Let us know your thoughts in the comment section below.
Check out other publications to gain access to more digital resources if you are just starting out with Flux Resource.
Also contact us today to optimize your business(s)/Brand(s) for Search Engines