2022-08-31 Share on: Twitter | Facebook | HackerNews | Reddit

The Best Self-Hosted, Open Source RSS Feed Readers in 2022

Best self-hosted RSS Feed Readers selected by popularity and project activity.

What is RSS
Actively developed and popular self-hosted Feed readers
- NewsBlur
- Tiny Tiny RSS
- FreshRSS
- miniflux
- Stringer
- selfoss
- CommaFeed
- yarr
Runners-up
- RSSMonster
- Sismics Reader

X::How to Deploy FreshRSS in the Cloud for Free on Azure? X::How to Deploy FreshRSS in the Cloud for Free on GCP?

What is RSS

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a web feed that allows users and applications to access updates to websites in a standardized, computer-readable format. Subscribing to RSS feeds can allow a user to keep track of many different websites in a single news aggregator, which constantly monitors sites for new content, removing the need for the user to manually check them.

Websites usually use RSS feeds to publish frequently updated information, such as blog entries, news headlines, episodes of audio and video series, or for distributing podcasts. An RSS document (called "feed", "web feed", or "channel") includes full or summarized text, and metadata, like publishing date and author's name. RSS formats are specified using a generic XML file.

(source: Wikipedia)

Did you know? In 2000, at the age of 14, Aaron Swartz co-authored RSS version 1.0, and shortly thereafter joined a working group at the World Wide Web Consortium to help develop common data formats used on the World Wide Web.

Actively developed and popular self-hosted Feed readers

The Feed Readers section of Awesome Self-Hosted mention 30 projects that provide functionality related to RSS. The search of the GitHub looking for rss-reader tag This article aims to select those actively developed and gained popularity measured by the number of GitHub stars. The criteria for selecting the best readers were that the project is actively developed - the last commit within the last 6 months and has more than 1k+ stars.

NewsBlur

NewsBlur is a personal news reader bringing people together to talk about the world

NewsBlur screenshoot

Tiny Tiny RSS

Tiny Tiny RSS is a free and open source web-based news feed (RSS/Atom) reader and aggregator

NOTE: While Tiny Tiny RSS is popular and has many plugins, official build is only for the amd64 architecture.

FreshRSS

FreshRSS is a self-hosted RSS feed aggregator.

If you want to get look & feel of FreshRSS there is demo available. screenshoot

miniflux

Miniflux is a minimalist and opinionated feed reader, Written in Go, It's simple, fast, lightweight and super easy to install.

miniflux screenshoot

Here is information on Miniflux Docker/docker-compose installation: Miniflux Installation with Docker.

Stringer

A self-hosted, anti-social RSS reader. Stringer has no external dependencies, no social recommendations/sharing, and no fancy machine learning algorithms.

selfoss

Multipurpose RSS reader and feed aggregation web application. It allows you to easily follow updates from different web sites, social networks and other platforms, all in single place.

selfoss screenshoot

CommaFeed

Google Reader inspired self-hosted RSS reader, based on Dropwizard and AngularJS. CommaFeed is now considered feature-complete and is in maintenance mode

CommaFeed screenshoot

yarr

(yet another rss reader) is a web-based feed aggregator which can be used both as a desktop application and a personal self-hosted server.

yarr screenshoot

Runners-up

RSSMonster

Sismics Reader

Hackable RSS readers written in Python

If none of available feed readers meet you expectations you might want to customize existing one. There are few that are relatively simple and might be easier to build upon those. You can check the GitHub topic feed-reader to explore popular but not necessarily lightweight options written in python. For small, hackable tools check the options below.

microreader

Very simple web based RSS/Atom feed reader. Written in python with bottle. There is one python module with app logic, one file with models and module for handling fav icons. At the moment of writing las commit was from 2015.

spudooli-reader

Features

A reasonably capable RSS feed parser - It even handles the inventor of RSS, Dave Winer's feed, although doesn't handles dates or timezones well as I ran out of skills
A simple, easy to use, and easy to understand interface
Star a feed item for later appreciation
An about page and a reading list page to show everyone the scope of your intersts
A basic admin to add/remove feeds
Single user log in to keep your feed safe
Basic code that allows you to follow along, if Flask isn't your thing

feedIO

"A News Aggregator that Knows What You Want to Read."

habr-observer

"An automatically updated feed with summaries of the best Habr.com articles generated by the YandexGPT neural network."" Russian tool, to observe Russian tech news. Interesting thing is that is using Streamlit for UI and uses LLM for summarization.

Other options on my list to check

Library allowing you write own feed reader

When hacking you own feed reader you might take a look on reader which is a Python feed reader library. It is designed to allow writing feed reader applications without any business code, and without depending on a particular framework.

Any comments or suggestions? Let me know.

To cite this article:

@article{Saf2022The,
    author  = {Krystian Safjan},
    title   = {The Best Self-Hosted, Open Source RSS Feed Readers in 2022},
    journal = {Krystian's Safjan Blog},
    year    = {2022},
}

Previous Post Next Post