If you are Bored of social media, want to stay away from endless notifications or just want to read all your news in one place, an RSS reader can help you. RSS stands for “really simple distribution”. It’s a protocol that allows RSS readers to talk to your favorite websites and receive updates from them. Instead of visiting 10 websites to see new content, you view a single page with all the new content.
There are two parts to RSS: an RSS reader and a feed from your favorite websites. RSS has been around for a while, so there are a lot of very good RSS readers out there. Most of them have search and suggestions built-in, so you don’t have to search the feed yourself. You just might discover some interesting new sites to read.
I’ve been using RSS for over a decade and recently spent several months trying out almost a dozen RSS reader services. The selections below are the best RSS readers available. Once you’ve found one you like, put it in one of the Best Tablets or Best iPads for easy reading on the go.
Update August 2022: We’ve added Feedbin and updated pricing.
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Overall the best
Inoreader offers a well-designed interface, good search and discovery options, and a nice feature set that is beginner-friendly and offers plenty of options for advanced users. There is a web interface as well iOS and Android application. Inoreader handles more than just RSS feeds — you can add email newsletters, Facebook pages, Twitter searches, podcasts, even Telegram channels.
Advanced users will love the extra features like keyword monitoring. Enter your search term and Inoreader will search all your feeds for any mentions of that keyword or phrase and then create a feed of only those articles. You can also do the opposite and hide posts that match a phrase. Inoreader also offers a great automation system that you can use to create rules and filter your feed, giving it some higher priority. For example, you may receive a push notification every time WIRED publishes a new review, but not the rest of our content.
Automation requires a pro account, which also offers some other cool features, like integration with IFTTT and Zapier, an offline mode for 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 the next time you log into YouTube, you won’t have tons of unwatched videos.
