The automation requires a pro account, which also provides some other standout features well worth paying for, like the ability to fetch full articles, integrate with IFTTT and Zapier, read offline, and 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.
You can share articles via social media, and you can use the Inoreader browser plug-in to save articles you find around the web (sort of like Instapaper or Pocket).
Inoreader offers a free (with ads) account, which is good for testing whether the service meets your needs. If it does, we recommend the Pro account ($7.50/month, billed annually), which brings more advanced features and support for more feeds.
A Beginner-Friendly RSS Aggregator
Feedly desktop and mobile apps
Photograph: Feedly
Feedly is probably the most popular RSS reader on the web. It’s well-designed and easy to use, and it offers great search options so it’s easy to add all your favorite sites. It lacks one thing that makes Inoreader slightly better for my use—the YouTube syncing—but otherwise Feedly is an excellent choice.
Feedly has some nice additional features like Evernote integration (you can save articles to Evernote) and a notes feature for jotting down your thoughts on stories. Feedly also has an AI search assistant, which can help filter your feeds and surface the content you really want. I found that it worked well enough, but a big part of what I like about RSS is that there’s 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 (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, a way to search your feeds, follow newsletters like RSS feeds, and more for $12 a month.
Best for DIYers
Photograph: Newsblur
Newsblur is a refreshingly simple old-school RSS reader. You won’t find AI features mucking about in your feeds—it’s for reading the news you aggregate and getting on with your life. It can subscribe to all kinds of content (including newsletters and YouTube), 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.
One thing that sets Newsblur apart is that it’s open source. You can see the code on Github, and if you’re comfortable with the command line you can even set up your own self-hosted version of Newsblur on your own server.