NewsBlur
NewsBlur is an open-source RSS reader available on web, iOS, and Android that lets users train their feeds to surface relevant stories. Its intelligence training system allows users to highlight or hide stories by author, tag, title, full text, URL, or regex patterns, putting control in the user's hands rather than an algorithm. Premium plans start at $36/year for up to 1,024 sites, with higher tiers offering features like full-text search, story archiving, and AI-powered summaries.
- Software Only
- Artificial Intelligence
Funding
Founders
Founder details are not available yet.
Product
Problem
Traditional RSS readers present a flat, chronological list of stories from all subscribed feeds, forcing users to manually sift through content they don't care about. As feed subscriptions grow, the signal-to-noise ratio drops, making it difficult to stay on top of relevant news without missing important updates or wasting time on irrelevant posts.
Solution
NewsBlur provides a web-based and native RSS reader that lets users train their feeds to surface what matters. The intelligence training system allows users to give thumbs up or down to authors, tags, title keywords, full-text content, URLs, or regular expressions, which highlights matching stories in green or fades them away. The more a user trains, the smarter their feeds become, with no algorithm deciding for them. NewsBlur also offers real-time feed fetching, full-text search, story archiving, text view for extracting full articles, and the ability to follow websites that don't publish RSS feeds. The service is available across browsers, iOS, and Android, and is fully open source with a self-hosted option.
Target Audience
Primary users are power readers, journalists, researchers, and professionals who rely on RSS to monitor many sources and need granular control over content filtering. The service also appeals to users who value open-source software, data ownership, and a sustainable, independent alternative to large tech platforms.
Features
- Intelligence training with thumbs up/down on authors, tags, titles, full text, URLs, and regex patterns (Pro tier)
- Real-time feed fetching via PubSubHubbub for free users, up to 5x more frequent checks for Premium, and every 5-15 minutes for Pro
- Full-text search powered by Elasticsearch, with saved searches as feeds
- Story archive with back-filling of feed history and permanent searchable storage (Archive plan)
- Ask AI feature supporting Claude, GPT, Gemini, or Grok for story Q&A and summaries
- Daily Briefing with AI-generated summaries of top stories, customizable sections, and delivery schedules
- Story clustering with semantic duplicate detection to group similar stories
- Text view that extracts full article content from original websites
- Web Feeds that generate custom RSS feeds for any website without native RSS support
- Email newsletter forwarding to read newsletters as feeds
- Blurblog for public story sharing with comments, with privacy options for Premium
- Saved stories with searchable tags, each tag generating its own RSS feed
- Native iOS and Android apps with offline reading and swipe gestures
- Open source under MIT license with one-command Docker self-hosting