shouldiuse.io

Report

Should I Use NewsBlur?

newsblur.com·Analyzed 1 hour ago·Based on 8 sources

Personal news reader with intelligence training — follow RSS feeds and train stories you want more or less of.

Depends

Depends

Buy it if RSS is genuinely your reading habit: it's cheap, open source, and users report it's dead reliable.

Cheap, reliable, open-source RSS reader for feed power users. Skip it if you don't actually follow feeds.

Confidence: Medium

$36/year

Starting paid price

Premium, up to 1,024 sites

Yes

Free tier

Paid unlocks 1,024 sites

$99/year

Archive tier

Premium plus archiving

Feedly

Competitor benchmark

85 reviews on G2

Value for money5

$36/year for 1,024 feeds is cheap

Ease of use4

Praised as intuitive; training adds learning curve

Feature depth4

Training filters, AI, story clustering; deep but niche

Support quality4

Active public forum; long-term users report reliability

Pros

  • Open source and self-hostable²
  • Intelligence training hides stories by author, tag, and keywords¹
  • $36/year covers up to 1,024 sites¹
  • Long-term paying users call native apps dead reliable⁴
  • Active public forum where bugs and ideas get discussed⁷

Cons

  • No security page found on official site³
  • Feature bugs linger, e.g. unreliable YouTube Shorts tagging⁷

Gotchas

  • medium1,024-site cap on Premium; heavy feed users should verify headroom before subscribing¹
  • mediumGuess: exporting years of training filters may be painful; test export before committing²
  • lowArchive features cost $99/year; confirm you need story archiving before upgrading¹

Best for

  • RSS power users with hundreds of feeds
  • Open-source fans who can self-host
  • Readers who hate algorithmic feeds
  • People wanting trainable keyword filters

Not for

  • Casual readers who never use RSS
  • Anyone wanting algorithmic discovery feeds
  • Teams needing shared monitoring dashboards
  • Buyers expecting enterprise support or SLAs

Pricing

Free

$0

  • Limited feeds
  • Basic reading

Premium

$36/year

  • Everything in Free
  • Up to 1,024 sites

Premium Archive

$99/year

  • Everything in Premium
  • Story archiving

Security

No known public vulnerabilities found in the sources reviewed.

What users say

Long-time users praise reliability, the native apps, and the trainable filters, with only scattered feature-bug complaints.

“The native apps are fantastic and it's been dead reliable. I feel the small amount I pay for it is totally worth it”
— Hacker News
“Update: 5 stars! This app keeps getting better. It's updated for the iPhone 6+ and looks and runs great!”
— Apple App Store review
“NewsBlur allows you to train the service on what you like/does not like.”
— Quarter to Three forum

Alternatives

Compare NewsBlur with each alternative.

Feedly

Mainstream RSS with AI features and team plans

Readwise Reader

Paid read-later plus RSS; head-to-head comparison exists

Full analysis

Based on ~9 usable public sources; many scraped search results were spam domains and were ignored.

Sources

  1. NewsBlur official site and pricingnewsblur.com
    official
  2. NewsBlur on GitHub (open source)github.com
    official
  3. NewsBlur security page checknewsblur.com
    security
  4. Hacker News: paying user feedbacknews.ycombinator.com
    review
  5. Apple App Store reviewsapps.apple.com
    review
  6. Quarter to Three forum discussionforum.quartertothree.com
    review
  7. NewsBlur forum: YouTube Shorts tagging bugforum.newsblur.com
    news
  8. G2: Feedly reviews (competitor)g2.com
    review

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