FreshRSS
FreshRSS is a free, self-hosted RSS aggregator. It is quite lightweight, fast (it can manage +100k articles without complaining) and powerful (e.g. shortcuts, filters, responsive design, multi-views, multi-themes, multi-users, statistics, provides a Google Reader API, etc.)
Features
- Feed Reader
- Import/Export OPML Feeds
- Lightweight
- Ad-free
- Web-Based
- Support for Themes
- Privacy focused
- Cloud Sync
- Integrated Search
- Self-hosted
- Dark Mode
- No Tracking
- Multiple Account support
- No registration required
- Import from Google Reader
FreshRSS News & Activities
Recent activities
FreshRSS information
Developed by
Marien FressinaudLicensing
Open Source (AGPL-3.0) and Free product.Written in
Rating
Average rating of 4.6Alternatives
116 alternatives listedSupported Languages
- English
AlternativeTo Category
News & BooksGitHub repository
- 9,564 Stars
- 818 Forks
- 595 Open Issues
- Updated Oct 3, 2024
What is FreshRSS?
FreshRSS is a free, self-hosted RSS aggregator. It is quite lightweight, fast (it can manage +100k articles without complaining) and powerful (e.g. shortcuts, filters, responsive design, multi-views, multi-themes, multi-users, statistics, provides a Google Reader API, etc.)
It is able to import feeds from OPML files and / or JSON files generated by Google Reader via Takeout.
To conclude, it is still a project in active development, so feel free to give a hand to help and have a look to the demo: http://demo.freshrss.org/
Comments and Reviews
After some years with TinyTinyRSS I decided to switch due to the crude community (see my post for TinyTinyRSS/TT-RSS). After a closer look at all alternatives I could find I have now concluded that FreshRSS is the most mature alternative as of today.
Evaluation
This is some of the factors that has been important for me during my evaluation:
This application have 11 contributors on Github, most alternatives have 2-4. Only 3 of the comitters are very active and has been so for a long period of time.
The activity on GitHub is high and has been active for a long period of time.
I collect a lot of feeds and like the history thus it is crucial to be able to view read items, this is not the case of some of the alternatives like Selfoss.
I like to organize my feeds into groups, most alternatives can do this and FreshRSS can do as well.
Some feeds I like to keep a short history of, some I like to keep a longer history for. FreshRSS uses a default setting that can be adjusted for individual feeds. It is combined with the least number of items to save, e.g. scarp all items older than 6 month but keep at least 500 items in this feed. It can be old but will not be empty.
In TT-RSS I used tags for things I like to remember or republish. This is not possible in FreshRSS at the moment. I can mark items as favourite though and I will need to manage with that.
The installation was flawless
I want this for my family, multi user is a must
Cool thing I did not know I might like is that I can select what feeds to include in the general "all items" list. Also cool thing is that there is a visual theme selector so I can see an example of what it is going to look like. 6 themes are included by default.
The overall impression (still after a very shorty period of time) is that I am satisfied and will continue the experiment and evaluation. All other alternatives I tested was rejected and I scraped the installation quite early.
Alternatives that I rejected
The Alternatives I looked at was:
http://selfoss.aditu.de/ Installed and tested. SelfOss is nice but not complete. Seems to be for one person only. No way to view history of read items.
https://github.com/brainfoolong/nreeda Tested the demo. To simple. Does not show all items in feed if feed is long. No way to read read articles.
https://www.commafeed.com Java application which is supported on my web hotel. I never installed this one.
http://rnews.sourceforge.net/ Latest news 2009, appears to be abandoned. I never installed this one.
http://readerself.com/ Cannot pass registration screen after install. Gave up and scrapped the installation.
https://github.com/xbmcfreak/phppaper Did never try to install because the ToDo-list on the home page have some important stuff in it like Mark-read and Search. I decided that this was yet to immature for my taste.
[Edited by ErikR, March 22]
Thanks for this nice review!
I'm one of the developers of FreshRSS and I would like to know if you're still using it and what you think is missing? I see you would be able to edit tags, it's something I want to support since a long time too so maybe some day you will see that arrive ;)
Marien
Reply written Jul 27, 2015
By far the best available open source alternative to feedly and the like.
I've tested quite a few RSS readers, and the ones that stand out are the great Feedly and the exciting FreshRSS.
The problem with Feedly is that we're limited in Feeds, and then you have to pay at the checkout ^^ so I fell back on FreshRSS, but I'm no less happy with it, it's a great application. It's missing a few options, but nothing too disturbing!
Locally, with 10k streams to read, FreshRSS runs without any problem, very fast, intuitive, really great!
Congratulations to the developers :)
The developers are great. They always respond enthusiastically and solve problems efficiently.
I hope that in the future version, the interface will be tighter and more suitable for reading. The current typesetting is a bit loose.
I really hope "Mercury full text" will appear, but there is no plan at present.
come on!
Reserch, compact and detailled view, clean UI, just perfect !
Seems to be the only self hosted RSS aggregator that does not have insane dependencies. Just needs a vanilla LAMP stack.
light, easy to install on a mutualized hosting and working just fine, nothing to complain about