samuelclay/NewsBlur

What it does

NewsBlur collects articles from feeds and shows each one beside the publisher's original page rather than only as stripped text, expanding feeds that only publish a summary into the full article. Its distinguishing feature is training: thumb an author, a tag or a word in a headline up or down, and a classifier then highlights or hides matching stories, with a slider running from heavily filtered to completely unfiltered. Stories arrive as they are published rather than on a slow timer, and it notices when an article is quietly edited after publication, which is a genuinely rare feature. It searches the full text, supports custom tags and saved searches, reads email newsletters and follows video channels as though they were feeds, and shares stories to a per-person public page. There are four reading layouts, a dark mode, and native applications for phones and desktops, plus support in several third-party readers. Underneath it is a Python web application with a browser front end, backed by PostgreSQL for accounts and subscriptions, MongoDB for stories and read state, Redis for assembly and caching, optional Elasticsearch for search, a task queue for fetching, and two small services for text extraction and image proxying. The hosted free tier is capped at 64 feeds. Its agent interface requires a paid subscription, and the artificial-intelligence features and related-story discovery do nothing without a paid model key. Search is absent unless you also run Elasticsearch.

Why it matters

Who it suits. Anyone who follows more feeds than they can read and wants software to do the first pass of sorting — that is what the training is for, and nothing else in this category does it as seriously. It also suits anyone who wants their reading history to stay on hardware they control. Skip it if you want something small: this is the heaviest install in this edition by a wide margin, and the project's own README says the hosted service is the right choice for most people.

What people say. The oldest source is also the best and it is fifteen years out of date, which is itself worth knowing. Nathan Willis reviewed it at Linux.com on 23 November 2011 and was both admiring and sharp: he praised the rating and statistics engines as a level of machine learning other free readers did not attempt, and called the install instructions "on the sparse side", the database setup "non-trivial", and the whole thing "probably overkill" for one person. Several of his specific complaints no longer apply, because the stack has been rebuilt around containers since. The useful current source is a distribution rather than a review: the F-Droid package record for com.newsblur shows a reproducible build of version 15.0.5 "Added on Oct 05, 2026", confirming both the licence and that the mobile application is still being built; F-Droid is independently operated and sells nothing. One current article exists, feeder.co's comparison updated 27 September 2026, and it is published by a company selling a directly competing reader — it says so itself in the page — so we list it only as a price reference and not as an assessment. No current, credible, authored review of NewsBlur exists that we could find.

Verdict. Pay for the hosted version unless self-hosting is the point. That is the project's own advice and it is correct: running this yourself means PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, a load balancer, a web server and two Node services, and the project publishes no memory or disk figure for any of it. If you do self-host, read this next. The shipped development compose file has a PostgreSQL password of newsblur, a hardcoded agent-interface secret, Elasticsearch security switched off and no Redis password — and every single port, databases included, is published on every network interface rather than only through the proxy. On top of that the documented self-hosting defaults turn on automatic premium for new accounts, enable new users automatically, and switch the signup challenge off. In other words, an install left as documented is an open-signup service with your databases exposed. Fix those four things before it touches a public address. If you want something light instead, miniflux/v2 is one Go binary, and FreshRSS/FreshRSS is a PHP application that several people can share.