Feedly vs Inoreader: Choosing an RSS Reader

When you're setting up an RSS reader, both Feedly and Inoreader offer powerful features and essential tools for managing your feeds. However, before you dive in, let's establish a crucial safeguard: both readers support importing and exporting OPML files, This technical feature is your practical escape hatch, ensuring you never get locked into a one-option future where you have to stay because moving your feeds would be too much work to handle.

That said, the fact that you can always leave also means the key differences are in the shape of your daily workflow and your appetite for advanced automation. Let's break down the top concerns when you’re choosing between the two.

Choosing a Free Plan: What Can You Get for Free?

Both Feedly and Inoreader offer a free tier, letting you try out the basics without committing to a subscription. It’s easier to hit the limits on Feedly, especially if you follow many subs at 5 feeds apiece, while Inoreader has a higher threshold to reach.

Inoreader's free tier also includes a deeper set of workflow tools, with rules and filters for sorting and thinning out your read stream right out of the box. That said, Feedly gives you access to its core experience without hitting the card, while Inoreader offers a richer free experience if you have more specific ways you want to manage your feeds.

The paid plans are relatively close in price, with Feedly Pro at $6.99 USD per month and Inoreader Pro at $7.50 USD per month billed annually, or $9.99 billed monthly. Feedly also has an extra $6 higher Pro+ tier, which might be why the entry prices are a little lower, and includes additional features for institutional use.

Rules, Filters, and Automation: Customizing Your Feed

If you need to deeply customize your reading experience, Inoreader is the clear winner. You can add up to 30 rules and 50 filters, with options to start and stop feeds, break them into folders, catch and repost the YouTube Shorts, and other narrowly targeted moves. Automation is built to be flexible, and you can set up conditional triggers to keep feeds moving exactly as you want.

Feedly’s free plan is much cleaner, with less to control, and even the paid plans don’t offer the same access. Feedly Pro adds search, Notes and Highlights to help you build a comparative research library, and connects to professional tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, IFTTT, and Zapier to push stories out as they match your criteria. It’s deep, but it supports the company-focused workflow over a highly customizable automation system.

Reading on Phone vs. Desktop Apps: Where You’ll Live Corporately

Both services offer mobile and desktop apps, access you will likely use simultaneously.

So there is little practical difference between the two in terms of the full-featured experience as you switch between devices. You may see some overlaps between the feature sets, depending on which articles and tools are currently supported in the mobile-to-desktop transition.

Import, Export, and Escape Hatches: OPML to the Forever Rescue

The best safety net with both of these services is that both will import and export OPML files, taking the drama out of migrating between them if and when you need to. Source management is your key escape from service lock-in, so long as you could do OPML export, as covered in Feedly’s documentation and Inoreader's documentation - there is a risk if you choose not to do it.

You can't rely on future porting if you just assume that escape will be possible, If you import and export via OPML periodically, you are smart.

What the Paid Tiers Add: Higher Levels of Freedom

For $7.50 USD to $10 USD a month depending on which service you choose, you can access some powerful enhancements. There's search, rules, filters, and connectabilities of various types: matches for different aspects of reader-side personalization you might want.

Both have substantial free offerings, but if you’re likely to grow into needing more, know in advance how each will change your experience.

How to Judge Any Other RSS Reader

As you look at alternatives to Feedly and Inoreader, start by seeing if they support OPML in and out, and pick readers that sync and archive the feeds. After that, consider how well each tool supports your approach to reading, setting it up to cut the dead weight and highlight the hits.

The key factors to watch for are how many rules and filters they offer, whether they share those capabilities across web and mobile, and whether that organization matches up with your needs. Also consider the primary tool where you'll carry most of the resources - this may be your phone, or more often on your desktop browser, depending on where you do most of your reading.

So there’s a nuanced way to pick the RSS reader you will end up with at the start. Research is rarely a one-and-done motion, though both Feedly and Inoreader keep you wonderfully free from the ultimate unwanted shackles of one-choice service lock-in.