miniflux.app

What It Is

Miniflux is a “minimalist and opinionated” feed reader that supports RSS, Atom, and JSON Feed. Its core goal is not to become a full-featured information platform, but to provide a lightweight, fast, readability-first subscription reading experience. It is open source under the Apache 2.0 license, can be self-hosted, and also offers an official hosted version.

Core Features and Integrations

In terms of features, Miniflux covers the key use cases of a feed reader: OPML import/export, URL import, categories and bookmarks, public article sharing, attachment support, embedded YouTube playback, and PostgreSQL-based full-text search. For summary-only feeds, it can automatically fetch the original article and parse the full text locally with Readability. It also supports CSS selector-based scraping rules, content rewrite rules, and regex filters. The interface is designed around reading, with responsive layouts, keyboard shortcuts, mobile gestures, light/dark themes, and custom styles.

Privacy, Security, and Deployment

Miniflux has a strong focus on privacy: it automatically removes tracking pixels, strips tracking parameters such as utm and fbclid, provides a media proxy, does not forward referrers, and blocks external JavaScript. On the security side, it mentions CSP, content sanitization, HTTPS, Let’s Encrypt, and custom certificates. For deployment, it is a single Go binary with PostgreSQL as its only dependency. It supports Debian/RPM packages, Docker, multi-architecture ARM images, and can also be used via the official hosted version.

Pricing and Support

The self-hosted version is free and open source. The official hosted version costs USD 15 per year and includes a 15-day trial. Payments are supported via PayPal and credit card, with credit cards processed by Stripe. The hosted service is maintained by the author and includes servers, security updates, SSL, backups, and monitoring. Support is available by contacting the developer directly via email, in English or French.

Pros, Cons, and Best Fit

Its strengths include being lightweight, privacy-friendly, ad-free and telemetry-free, inexpensive, and rich in APIs and integrations. It supports 25+ services such as Notion, Slack, Telegram, Wallabag, Raindrop, and Readwise Reader, and provides a REST API, Webhooks, plus Fever/Google Reader API compatibility. The trade-off is that its feature set is intentionally restrained: there is no apparent support for team collaboration, fine-grained permissions, audit logs, or enterprise compliance certifications. Self-hosting also requires some PostgreSQL operations capability. It is best suited for individuals, developers, heavy feed users, and self-hosters who want control over their data. It is less suitable for teams that need enterprise knowledge-base collaboration or organization-level permission governance.

Access from China

The crawled text does not provide information about accessibility from mainland China, so this remains unknown. If the official hosted version cannot be accessed reliably, self-hosting on a server in mainland China or a nearby region would be a more controllable option. Alternatives include FreshRSS, Tiny Tiny RSS, Feedbin, Inoreader, Feedly, and NewsBlur.