NewsBlur review 2026: pricing, intelligence training, newsletter and YouTube feeds, and how this open-source RSS reader compares to Feedly and Inoreader.
NewsBlur is a personal RSS and news reading service, originally built by Samuel Clay in 2009 and still largely run as an independent, open-source project out of New York City. It pulls together traditional RSS and Atom feeds, email newsletters, and YouTube channel uploads into a single reading experience, and it became one of the best-known destinations for readers displaced when Google shut down Google Reader in 2013.
What sets NewsBlur apart from most feed readers is its 'intelligence training' system: users can mark specific sites, authors, tags, or individual stories as more or less interesting, and NewsBlur uses that signal to automatically re-rank and filter future stories, turning a firehose of feeds into a more curated river of news.
Beyond feed aggregation, NewsBlur fetches full article text for publishers that only ship truncated summaries, tracks and visibly highlights when a published story has been edited, and lets users share and discuss stories through Blurblogs, its lightweight social layer. It ships with native web, iOS, and Android apps, plus an API and IFTTT integration for people who want to automate actions around new content.
Because NewsBlur is open source (its full codebase lives on GitHub), technically capable users can run their own self-hosted instance instead of relying on the hosted newsblur.com service, giving privacy-conscious readers an alternative most commercial RSS tools do not offer.
NewsBlur uses a freemium model. The free tier supports following up to 64 sites with core reading features, which is enough for many casual users. Paid tiers remove that cap and add extras: Premium is $36 per year and includes unlimited feeds, saved searches, and no ads; Premium Archive is $99 per year and adds a fully searchable historical archive of every story ever published by any subscribed site.
For people who prefer monthly billing, Premium Pro is available at $29 per month. All paid tiers include a 30-day free trial that does not require a credit card, making it easy to evaluate the intelligence training system before committing.
Yes, NewsBlur has a free tier that supports following up to 64 sites. Paid Premium plans remove that limit and add features like saved searches and a story archive.
Premium ($36/year) unlocks unlimited feeds and removes ads. Premium Archive ($99/year) adds those same benefits plus a permanently searchable archive of every story ever published by your subscribed sites.
Yes, NewsBlur is open source and its code is published on GitHub, so technically skilled users can deploy their own instance instead of using the hosted newsblur.com service.
Yes, in addition to standard RSS and Atom feeds, NewsBlur lets you subscribe to email newsletters and YouTube channels and read them alongside your other feeds.
When Google announced Google Reader's shutdown in March 2013, NewsBlur's subscriber base jumped from about 1,500 to over 60,000 users almost overnight, as readers looked for alternatives.
You can mark sites, authors, tags, or individual stories as more or less interesting, and NewsBlur uses that feedback to automatically re-rank and filter future stories in your feed.
Yes, NewsBlur offers a 30-day free trial of its paid plans with no credit card required.