RSS reader is a small category with strong opinions attached to it. Some people want an inbox-zero triage tool for work; some want a native Mac app that feels like it was designed in Cupertino; some just want to get through a stack of articles on a commute without staring at a screen. There isn't one best RSS reader — there's a best one for how you actually read. This is a straight comparison of eight of the most-used options in 2026, including where our own reader, Plume, fits and where it doesn't.

The short version

Feedly

Feedly is the reader most people have heard of, largely because it survived the 2013 Google Reader shutdown and absorbed a lot of that migration. Its strength is triage at scale: boards for organizing sources by topic, team-shared feeds, and Leo, its AI assistant, which can be trained to surface or mute articles by keyword and priority. That makes it a solid fit for competitive intelligence and research teams. The tradeoff is that the free tier caps you at a small number of sources, and the features that make Feedly worth using — Leo, integrations, team boards — sit behind a paid plan.

Inoreader

Inoreader is the power-user's reader. Its filtering rules can auto-tag, auto-mark-read, or auto-forward articles based on keywords, and it supports things like full-text RSS generation for feeds that only publish summaries, and monitoring for pages without RSS at all. If you want to build something closer to a custom alert system out of your feed list, Inoreader can do it. The interface is dense and takes some setup time, and — like Feedly — the free tier is a limited preview of what the paid tiers unlock.

NewsBlur

NewsBlur is the reader that has taken explicit training the furthest. Its intelligence trainer lets you like or dislike authors, tags, title words and publishers, and newer versions add natural-language classifiers: describe a kind of story in a sentence and NewsBlur sorts matching articles into focus or hidden. It also clusters duplicate stories, can notify you when a classifier matches, and has an MCP server for AI agents. It's the closest in spirit to what Plume is doing with filters; the difference is that NewsBlur's natural-language classifiers sit on its paid tiers and are billed per story, while the interface keeps the dense, three-pane feel of a classic reader.

Readwise Reader

Readwise Reader is a read-later app first and an RSS reader second, and it's very good at the read-later part. RSS items, newsletters, PDFs, EPUBs and YouTube transcripts all land in one keyboard-driven queue you triage into Later or Archive. Highlights sync to Readwise for spaced-repetition review, and Ghostreader answers questions and summarises using an LLM, now across your whole library. If you read to remember, it's hard to beat. The tradeoffs: there's no free tier beyond a trial, and it doesn't try to decide which of 300 unread feed items deserve your attention — that triage is on you.

Folo

Folo (formerly Follow) comes from the team behind RSSHub, and its big draw is sources: it can follow X accounts, GitHub releases, YouTube channels and plenty of sites that have no RSS feed at all, through RSSHub routes. On top of that it adds AI summaries of your timeline, a daily digest and translation, metered by a daily quota on the free plan. It's the most "AI-native" of the bunch in the sense of generating text about your feed, and it runs everywhere. If most of what you follow isn't a classic blog, Folo is worth a look.

Reeder

Reeder has been the default "nice RSS app for Apple people" for over a decade, and the newer versions keep that reputation: fast, gesture-driven, and visually consistent with iOS and macOS design conventions. It added a subscription for cross-device sync in recent versions, which was a change some longtime users pushed back on, but the reading experience itself is still one of the more polished ones available. The catch is platform lock-in — there's no Windows, Android, or web version, so it only works if your whole reading life happens on Apple hardware.

NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire is the free, open-source option, built and maintained largely by volunteers with no ad model and no account requirement. It can run entirely local with no server involved, which is appealing if you don't want a company holding your reading history at all. The tradeoff is the same as Reeder's: Apple platforms only, and sync between devices (if you want it) depends on setting up an iCloud or third-party sync account rather than it being built in by default.

Plume

Plume assumes you've already got more articles than you can read, and focuses on cutting that down to the ones you will. Catch me up predicts, for each unread article, how likely you are to open it and read to the end, keeps the handful you'd most likely finish, and clears the rest — showing you the plan first, with an undo after. Top Stories does the same across every feed, as a ranked list with a match score you can click to see which of your reading signals drove it (and correct them: "less from this feed", "not interested in #crypto").

Smart filters let you describe what to hide in plain English — "crypto price speculation", "sports transfer rumours" — with a strictness slider and a preview of how many recent articles each would catch. The same story from several outlets is grouped into one row. All of this runs on Jev, a model that makes calibrated yes/no decisions rather than writing summaries, so Plume never rewrites an article: it decides what's worth your time and sends you to the original.

Then it helps you get through what's left: an RSVP mode that flashes text one word at a time so you can read well above your normal pace, a listen mode that turns any article into audio, and daily reading stats and streaks. It's a web app (any browser, no install), free with no feed limits, you can browse its feed catalog without signing up, and OPML import makes switching a few minutes of work. What it doesn't have yet: newsletter or social-media sources, Inoreader-style rule automations, highlights review like Readwise, or native apps — it's built for one person working through their own list.

How to actually choose

• You manage feeds for a team or need competitive monitoring: Feedly.
• You want to build custom filters, alerts, or automations around your feeds: Inoreader.
• You want to hand-train a classifier on authors, tags and phrases: NewsBlur.
• You read to remember — highlights, PDFs, newsletters, review: Readwise Reader.
• Most of what you follow is on X, GitHub or YouTube, and you want AI summaries: Folo.
• You're fully in the Apple ecosystem and want a native, polished app: Reeder or NetNewsWire, depending on whether you want free/open-source or a paid, actively developed app.
• You have more unread articles than time, and want them cut down to what you'll actually finish — then read or listen through the rest faster: Plume.

Frequently asked questions