Liferea vs selfoss
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted rss & news readers options — licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one replaces.
| Feature | Liferea | selfoss |
|---|---|---|
| Deploy effort | Read-the-docs project | Under-an-hour setup |
| Health score | 82 · Excellent | 68 · Good |
| Category | RSS & News Readers | RSS & News Readers |
| License | GPL-2.0 | GPL-3.0 |
| Language | C | HTML |
| Setup difficulty | Easy | Easy |
| Min. RAM | 128 MB | 128 MB |
| Deployment | binary | docker, bare-metal |
| GitHub stars | ★ 922 | ★ 2,470 |
| First released | 2003 | 2012 |
| Replaces | Feedly, Google Reader | Google Reader, Feedly |
What are Liferea and selfoss?
Liferea
Liferea is a desktop news aggregator for online news feeds and weblogs. It supports RSS and Atom feeds, offline reading, and synchronization with services like TinyTinyRSS and TheOldReader.
- Long-standing GNOME reader
- Offline feed reading
- Sync with online services
selfoss
selfoss is a multipurpose RSS reader and aggregation web application. It pulls in content from feeds, Twitter, and other sources, presenting them in a clean unified stream.
- Unified content stream
- Mobile-friendly interface
- Plugin sources beyond RSS
Liferea vs selfoss: key differences
Liferea is written in C, while selfoss is built with HTML. Licensing differs — GPL-2.0 for Liferea versus GPL-3.0 for selfoss. Liferea is the more established project (first released 2003), while selfoss arrived in 2012. Selfoss has the considerably larger community, at 2,470 GitHub stars versus 922. Selfoss lists first-class Docker deployment; Liferea does not.
Why pick each one
Choose Liferea if…
- Released under the GPL-2.0 license
- Easy to set up — beginner-friendly
- Written in C
- Tiny footprint — runs in 128 MB RAM
Choose selfoss if…
- Released under the GPL-3.0 license
- Easy to set up — beginner-friendly
- First-class Docker support for quick deployment
- Active community (2.5k GitHub stars)
Frequently asked questions
Is Liferea or selfoss better?
Neither is universally better. selfoss has the larger community; both share a easy setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Liferea and selfoss free and open-source?
Yes. Liferea is licensed under GPL-2.0 and selfoss under GPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Liferea and selfoss with Docker?
Liferea: check the project docs for container support. selfoss: yes.