3 self-hosted Inoreader alternatives

Last reviewed Oct 11, 2026 · 625 words

Leaving Inoreader is easy for the feeds and harder for everything you built on top of them. Your subscriptions travel in a single OPML file and land in FreshRSS in under an hour, but Inoreader's rules, filters, and saved searches have no export path, so a heavy Inoreader user should plan an evening of rebuilding them. A light user who mostly reads folders top to bottom loses almost nothing and gains a reader that idles in the directory's estimated 256 MB of RAM.

What you gain and what you give up

Gained: no subscription tier deciding how many feeds, rules, or searches you get, full-text search over every article your server has ever fetched, multi-user accounts for a household or team, and a reading history that stays on your disk. Given up: Inoreader's polished first-party mobile apps, its hosted monitoring of keywords across the web, and the automation layer that power users pay for. The mobile gap closes with third-party clients: FreshRSS exposes the Google Reader and Fever APIs, and Miniflux offers compatible APIs too, so established phone apps connect to your server the same way they connect to a hosted service. The automation gap narrows rather than closes. FreshRSS has per-feed filter actions that mark matching articles as read plus saved user queries that work like stored searches, and Miniflux has per-feed keep and block rules written as regular expressions. Neither matches a full Inoreader rule set with tagging, notifications, and chained actions.

Which replacement fits an Inoreader user

All three are rated Easy in the catalogue. FreshRSS has been maintained since 2013 and is the closest match for someone who used Inoreader as a filtering tool rather than just a reader. Miniflux suits readers who want less interface, with one firm requirement: PostgreSQL, and no SQLite fallback. Fusion is the newest (first released 2024) and does full-text article extraction out of the box, which matters if many of your feeds only publish summaries, but it has a much smaller community behind it.

How the migration actually goes

Export OPML from Inoreader's preferences, import it into the new reader, and subscriptions plus folders come across. Read state, starred and saved articles, tags, rules, and active searches do not. Before you cancel, go through your starred items and archive the ones you care about somewhere durable, and screenshot or write down each rule so you can recreate it as a FreshRSS filter or a Miniflux block rule. If you used Inoreader to pull email newsletters into your reading queue, Kill the Newsletter turns newsletters into feeds that any self-hosted reader can follow. On FreshRSS, set CRON_MIN in the container environment (the catalogue's example is 13,43), because without it feeds never refresh on their own.

Run FreshRSS

FreshRSS is my pick for anyone coming from Inoreader: it is the only option here with both stored searches and filter actions, it handles multiple users, and its API support keeps your phone client options open. Rebuild your three or four most important rules first, live with it for a week, and only then decide whether the rest were worth having. If you find you want a quieter reader instead, the FreshRSS vs Miniflux comparison covers that switch, and the reading and news stack shows what to run alongside it.