The Best RSS Feed Readers (Because the Internet Is a Mess)

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 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 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.