Whether you are fed up with social media, want to get away from endless notifications or just want to read your news in one place, 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, 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 for a long time, so there are a lot of really good RSS readers out there. Most of them come with built-in search and suggestions, so you don’t have to go looking for feeds yourself. You might discover some interesting new places to read.
I’ve been using RSS for over a decade and recently spent a few months testing nearly a dozen RSS reader services. The options 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.
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Better overall
Inoreader offers a well-designed interface, good search and discovery options, and a good set of features that are easy for beginners and offer plenty of options for advanced users. There is a web interface as well as apps for iOS and Android. Inoreader handles more than just RSS feeds: you can add email newsletters, Facebook pages, Twitter searches, podcasts, and even Telegram channels.
Advanced users will like additional features like keyword tracking. Enter your search terms and Inoreader will search all your channels for any mentions of that keyword or phrase, then create a feed of those articles. You can also do the opposite and hide articles that match a phrase. Inoreader also offers a nice automation system that you can use to create rules and filter your feeds, giving it a higher priority. For example, you may receive an automatic notification every time WIRED publishes a new review, but not the rest of our content.
Automation requires a pro account, which also offers other nice features like the ability to integrate with IFTTT and Zapier, an offline mode for mobile apps. It also includes my favorite: keeping your YouTube account in sync with your RSS feed. You can watch YouTube videos on Inoreader, and the next time you log into YouTube, you won’t have a bunch of unwatched videos.