FreshRSS

What is FreshRSS?

FreshRSS is a free, open source RSS and Atom feed aggregator, written in PHP, that you host on your own server. It pulls articles from websites, blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels into one timeline, and can even scrape sites that don’t publish a feed. It’s multi-user, licensed under AGPL-3.0, and light enough to run on a Raspberry Pi.

What is FreshRSS best for?

FreshRSS fits people who want a fast, private reading hub they own rather than rent from a cloud service. It’s a strong pick for self-hosters, privacy-conscious readers, and small teams: it handles heavy libraries (1M+ articles and 50,000+ feeds), supports multiple user accounts, and exposes a sync API so you read from native mobile apps while the data stays on your own box.

What can FreshRSS do?

• Aggregate RSS and Atom feeds from blogs, news sites, podcasts, and YouTube channels into a single timeline
• Generate feeds from sites that don’t offer one, using built-in XPath web scraping
• Full-text search with saved searches, plus custom tags and labels for organizing articles
• Get near-instant updates through WebSub (PubSubHubbub) push, not just scheduled polling
• Run multi-user, with an optional anonymous read-only mode for public sharing
• Sync to 16+ mobile and desktop apps through the Google Reader and Fever APIs
• Import and export subscriptions with OPML, and extend the app with themes, community extensions, and a CLI

Where does FreshRSS fall short?

• No official mobile app. FreshRSS is web-first, so phone reading means pairing it with a third-party client (Reeder, NetNewsWire, FeedMe, and others) through its API rather than an app the project ships and supports itself.
• It’s a reader, not a discovery or intelligence engine. You won’t get Feedly’s Leo AI, web-wide keyword and topic monitoring, or built-in recommendations — you bring your own feeds, and FreshRSS reads them.
• Some capabilities live in community extensions, not core. Niceties like richer YouTube handling or full-article fetching often mean installing and trusting third-party add-ons rather than toggling a built-in setting.

Is FreshRSS free?

Yes — FreshRSS is completely free and open source under AGPL-3.0, with no paid tier, premium edition, or gated features. You only pay for the server you run it on, and it’s light enough that a small VPS or a Raspberry Pi is plenty. If you’d rather not self-host, third-party providers such as PikaPods, Cloudron, and Elestio offer paid managed hosting, but the software itself stays free.

What does FreshRSS replace?

FreshRSS is a self-hosted alternative to Feedly and Inoreader, the popular cloud RSS readers. It covers the core job those services charge a subscription for — subscribing to feeds, organizing and tagging them, searching, and syncing to mobile — without the monthly fee or a profile built around your reading. It doesn’t chase their web-wide AI monitoring; it’s a cleaner, self-owned reading hub. Among open source options, it sits alongside Miniflux and Tiny Tiny RSS.

FAQ

Is FreshRSS open source? Yes. FreshRSS is licensed under the GNU AGPL-3.0 and developed in the open on GitHub by a community of contributors. It’s fully free with no paid edition or feature gate.

Can I self-host FreshRSS for free? Yes. The app is free to download and run; your only cost is the server. It runs comfortably on a small VPS or even a Raspberry Pi, and SQLite means you don’t need a separate database server for a single user.

Is FreshRSS a good Feedly alternative? For subscribing to, organizing, and reading feeds on your own infrastructure, yes — with no subscription and no data leaving your server. If you specifically want AI summaries, recommendations, or web-wide keyword monitoring, Feedly’s paid tiers still do more.

What do I need to run FreshRSS? PHP 8.1+ with a handful of common extensions, a database (SQLite, MySQL 8.0+/MariaDB 10.6+, or PostgreSQL 10+), and a web server such as Apache or nginx. An official Docker image is available for containerized deployments.