Developers who want a Feedly alternative that is open source usually have one of two goals. Some want a reader they can inspect, self-host or script against. Others mostly use Feedly to track releases, changelogs and model launches from AI coding tools, and want that information in a form their own code can consume. Those two goals point to different tools, and this comparison covers both.
The options
| NewsBlur | Inoreader | AyeWatch | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Open source RSS reader | Hosted RSS reader | Hosted AI monitor |
| License | MIT, on GitHub | Proprietary | Proprietary |
| Free plan | 64 sites | 150 feeds | 3-run preview, no card |
| Lowest paid plan | $36/yr | $7.50/mo billed annually | $9/mo |
| Filtering | Train by author, tag, title | Rules and filters | Plain-English rule judged by AI |
| Sites without RSS | Web feeds on Premium Archive | Web feeds on Pro | Webpage monitors |
| Programmatic access | MCP server and CLI on Premium Archive | API on custom plans | REST API, signed webhooks, MCP on paid plans |
Prices and features are from each vendor's site, checked October 2026.
NewsBlur: the open source reader
NewsBlur's source code sits on GitHub under the MIT license, so you can read it, run it or fork it. The hosted service is free for 64 sites. Premium costs $36 a year for 1,024 sites, and Premium Archive costs $99 a year for 4,096 sites, a searchable archive, web feeds for sites without RSS, an Ask AI feature and an MCP server and CLI for connecting AI agents.
Its intelligence training lets you mark stories up or down by author, tag or title, and the Pro tier adds regular expressions. For a developer who wants a reader they control, it is the natural first stop.
Limitation: it is still a reader. A training rule decides what to show you, but you still open the app to see it.
Inoreader: the configurable hosted reader
Inoreader is closed source, but it is the most configurable hosted reader. Pro costs $7.50 a month billed annually and adds 2,500 feeds, rules that can tag items or send push notifications, filters, monitoring feeds that search beyond your subscriptions, and web feeds that watch pages for text or visual changes. API access comes through custom plans.
Limitation: rules match the conditions you write, so they catch what you named and miss what you did not.
AyeWatch: when the feed is an input to your code
AyeWatch is our recommendation for developers whose real goal is tracking, not reading. It is not open source and not an RSS reader. You describe a topic in plain English, it checks a very wide set of sources including news, blogs, forums, GitHub-style release pages you add by URL, and social platforms, and it sends an alert with a short summary when something matches the meaning of your rule.
The developer side is what sets it apart here:
- REST API on every paid plan to create, list, update and delete topics.
- Webhooks with HMAC-SHA256 signatures, delivering topic.update events that include the AI summary.
- MCP server at
https://ayewatch.ai/api/mcp, so an assistant in your editor can create or pause monitors for you.
A typical setup for someone tracking AI coding tools: one monitor per tool for "new releases, pricing changes or usage limit changes", plus webpage monitors on each tool's pricing and changelog pages, with webhooks posting into a channel or a small script that logs changes.
A Free Preview of three runs lets you check the alert quality, and paid plans, which include the API, Slack and webhooks, start at $9 a month. For a developer leaving Feedly, it is the better choice overall when the point is acting on news: rules are plain-English sentences you can keep in config, the AI judges whether each item matters before your code ever sees it, payloads arrive as short summaries with sources, and one account covers topics and single pages. Web, iOS and Android apps show the same alerts to the people on your team.
How to choose
- You want to run the code yourself: NewsBlur.
- You want the most control inside a hosted reader: Inoreader.
- You want structured, filtered events your own tools can act on: AyeWatch.
The honest trade-off: if self-hosting or reading the source is a hard requirement, AyeWatch does not meet it, and NewsBlur does. Many developers end up with both: an open source reader for browsing, and AyeWatch's API for the handful of signals that should trigger something. The AyeWatch and Feedly comparison shows how the alert model differs from a reader.