FreshRSS

FreshRSS is the most popular self-hosted RSS aggregator in the open-source world: a PHP app, about 16,300 GitHub stars, AGPL-3.0 licensed, with 100+ contributors and roughly monthly releases (v1.29.x in 2026). The pitch is simple — your feeds on your server, free forever — and the feature set is closer to a full Feedly replacement than to minimalism: categories, labels, full-text search, saved queries, statistics on publishing frequency, multi-user support with per-user settings and an anonymous read-only mode, WebSub for real-time push updates from compatible sources, and built-in XPath web scraping to generate feeds for sites that don't publish RSS. A Google Reader-compatible API plus a Fever API endpoint means Android (FeedMe, Readrops), iOS (Reeder, Unread), and NetNewsWire all connect.

Setup is genuinely easy for a self-hosted app: a single Docker container with SQLite needs no external database, and a web wizard walks through configuration. Themes and extensions from the community add read-later integrations, sharing services, and full-article fetching. Honest tradeoffs: PHP makes it measurably heavier than Miniflux's Go (independent comparisons put idle RAM around 100–150MB vs 30–50MB), the AGPL license obliges you to share modifications if you run it as a network service, and advanced features like WebSub and scraping take configuration.

Run docker compose up -d with the official freshrss/freshrss image (single container, SQLite works out of the box). Open the web wizard at the container's address to create your admin user. Import your feeds via OPML. Enable the Google Reader API under Authentication to connect mobile clients (FeedMe, Reeder, Readrops, NetNewsWire). For larger collections, point it at PostgreSQL or MySQL during the wizard. Extensions and themes are installable from the admin panel.