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 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.
