Kill the Newsletter vs NewsBlur (2026): which should you pick?
As of Nov 13, 2026, Kill the Newsletter and NewsBlur share a 3.0 GPA, both have a free plan, and Kill the Newsletter has no paid plan to buy, against $3 a month when paid by the year for NewsBlur.
Checked Oct 5, 2026 and Nov 13, 2026 · graded Oct 10, 2026 and Nov 13, 2026 by ToolGPA
Kill the Newsletter grades higher on value for money and the free plan. NewsBlur grades higher on features and platforms. They get the same grade on ease of use.
Price, platforms and features side by side. The table says where each price was read and when.
Kill the Newsletter
Turns email newsletters into Atom feeds for your feed reader
NewsBlur
Open-source RSS reader with trainable story filters
Which one is for you
Pick Kill the Newsletter if
- Fits if you already use a feed reader and want newsletters out of your inbox
- Works for someone who wants no tracking on the newsletters they follow
Look elsewhere if
- Skip it if you do not have a feed reader
- Not for you if you need old issues: entries older than one month are deleted, sooner if a feed is large
- Watch out: a few newsletters cannot be subscribed to this way, and some publishers block its addresses
- Watch out: the feed address identifies your subscription, so the site says not to share it
Pick NewsBlur if
- Fits if you want to train your own filters instead of trusting an algorithm
- Works for people who forward newsletters in and read them as a feed
Look elsewhere if
- Tight if you're staying free: 64 sites, and no search, text view or River of News
- Pricey if you want web feeds, Ask AI or the full archive, which need the $99 a year plan
- Not for you if you want a desktop app from NewsBlur itself, as it's the web or a third-party client
- Watch out: Premium and Premium Archive are sold by the year only, and Premium Pro is $29 a month
How we grade them
| 3.0GPAKill the NewsletterVery good | 3.0GPANewsBlurVery good | |
|---|---|---|
| Value for money | AFree to use, with no paid plan; the site links to donations. Against the reading category's $4 a month middle, nothing is charged. | CPremium is $36 a year, $3.00 a month, which lands in the ordinary middle band for reading apps here: above the $2.42 line for the cheapest quarter and below the $6.99 dear one. Go up for web feeds, Ask AI or the archive and Premium Archive is $99 a year, $8.25 a month, past the dearest tenth. |
| Free plan and trial | ACreating as many feeds as you want costs nothing. | BFree covers 64 sites with real-time updates, training and both phone apps, and every new account gets a 30-day Premium trial with no card. One person could live on that, as long as they don't need search, text view or River of News, which are paid. The open-source code is free to self-host too. |
| Features | CIt does one job fully: an email address plus a feed, with confirmation emails arriving as entries and no tracking. It is a smaller job than a reader, and it can't reply to a publisher's confirmation request. | AIt covers the whole feed-reading job and does what its rivals don't: you train it by author, tag and title, with regular expressions on the top plan, and it highlights or hides stories to match. Add newsletters by email, search, a permanent archive, feeds built for pages with no RSS, and Ask AI. |
| Ease of use | BNo store rating on record. You fill in a form on the home page and paste the feed address into a reader, with nothing to install. | B4.71 from 507 App Store ratings, but we want 1,000 ratings behind a 4.7 before it earns an A. The training itself is a thumbs up or a thumbs down, nothing more technical than that. |
| Platforms and integrations | CWeb only, with no apps, and it relies on you having a feed reader. No integrations are listed. | BWeb, iPhone and Android, with IFTTT and Zapier and an open API that Reeder, ReadKit and Unread plug into. No desktop app of its own, though, so on a computer it's the browser or somebody else's client, and that's what keeps it off an A. |
| Best for | newsletters in a feed reader instead of your inbox | training your own news filters |
The GPA is the average of the five grades: an A is 4 points, an F is none. The full reasons are on each tool's page: Kill the Newsletter and NewsBlur. How we grade
Price against what you get
Kill the Newsletter has no paid plan and scores 2.3 out of 4 on features, ease of use and platforms. NewsBlur starts at $3 a month when paid by the year and scores 3.3.
NewsBlur scores higher, and starts $3 a month higher: the question is whether the extra is worth that to you. Of the other read-later and bookmark apps on the chart, none scores higher than Kill the Newsletter for less, and none scores higher than NewsBlur for less.
Features, ease of use and platforms, averaged
What paid plans start at, a month (each step along is roughly double) →
- The best score at each price
- Has a free plan
- No free plan
Where they differ
- NewsBlur is self-hostable, according to its own site.
- NewsBlur also covers read later.
At a glance
| Kill the Newsletter | NewsBlur | |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing | Free | Free plan |
| Starts at | Free | $36 per year (Premium) |
| Free plan | Everything: creating a feed costs nothing. The site links Patreon, PayPal and GitHub Sponsors for donations. | Follow up to 64 sites with real-time updates, training by author, tag and title, saved stories, a public blurblog, and the iOS and Android apps. |
| Free trial | None listed | 30-day premium trial on every new account, no credit card required |
| Web | ||
| iOS | ||
| Android | ||
| Made by | Leandro Facchinetti | NewsBlur, Inc. |
| Price read from | kill-the-newsletter.com | newsblur.com |
| Checked | Nov 13, 2026 | Oct 5, 2026 |
Worth knowing
Kill the Newsletter
- Entries older than one month are deleted, and older entries may be removed sooner to keep a feed under a size limit.
- It cannot reply to a publisher's confirmation request, so a few newsletters cannot be subscribed to this way.
- Some publishers block its addresses.
- The feed address identifies your subscription, so the site says not to share it.
NewsBlur
- The free plan is limited to 64 sites.
- Search, River of News and text view start at Premium; web feeds, Ask AI and the archive need Premium Archive.
- Premium and Premium Archive are priced per year only, while Premium Pro is priced per month.
- Native apps are listed for iOS and Android; desktop use is through the web app or third-party clients.
Key features
Kill the Newsletter
- Email address plus feed
- Each feed comes with its own email address; mail sent there becomes an entry in the Atom feed.
- Confirmation emails arrive as entries
- Subscription confirmation messages are converted too, so you follow the confirmation link from your reader.
- No tracking
- The site says it does not track users.
- Feed settings in each entry
- Every entry ends with a link to manage the feed, including deleting it.
NewsBlur
- Intelligence Training
- Mark authors, tags and title keywords with a thumbs up or down to highlight matching stories or fade them out. Full-text training needs Premium Archive.
- Web Feeds
- On Premium Archive, NewsBlur builds a feed for a web page that has no RSS by monitoring the page for changes.
- Search and story archive
- Premium adds full-text search across subscriptions. Premium Archive keeps every story indefinitely and back-fills the history of newly added feeds.
- Ask AI and Daily Briefing
- Premium Archive can ask questions about a story using Claude, GPT, Gemini or Grok, and receives an AI-written daily summary of top stories.
- Email newsletters
- Forward newsletters to a personal NewsBlur email address and they appear as a feed that can be trained, tagged and searched like any other.
- Open source and open API
- The server and both mobile apps are open source on GitHub, and the API supports third-party clients such as Reeder, ReadKit and Unread.
Plans
Kill the Newsletter
Free$0
Create as many feed addresses as you need with the form on the home page.
NewsBlur
Free$0
Follow up to 64 sites, with real-time updates, training by author, tag and title, saved stories, a public blurblog, and the mobile apps.
Self-Hosted$0
The open-source code from GitHub, run on your own server with a single Docker command. Hosting is your own responsibility.
Premium$36
per year
1,024 sites, feeds updated up to 5x more often, River of News, search, text view, tagged saved stories, and blurblog privacy options.
Premium Archive$99
per year
4,096 sites, web feeds for sites without RSS, a permanent searchable archive, Ask AI, daily briefing, story clustering, and the MCP server and CLI.
Premium Pro$29
per month
10,000 sites, every feed fetched every 5 to 15 minutes, training with regular expressions, and priority support.
Common questions
Which is cheaper, Kill the Newsletter or NewsBlur?
As of Nov 13, 2026, Kill the Newsletter is cheaper to start with: it is free, against $3 a month when paid by the year for NewsBlur. Kill the Newsletter is free, and NewsBlur starts at $36 per year (Premium).
Which has a free plan, Kill the Newsletter or NewsBlur?
As of Nov 13, 2026, both Kill the Newsletter and NewsBlur have a free plan.
Which platforms do Kill the Newsletter and NewsBlur run on?
As of Nov 13, 2026, only NewsBlur lists iOS and Android apps. Both list a web app. A platform missing from a listing is one its maker's pages did not mention.
More comparisons
How this page was made
- The verdict at the top follows a fixed rule. When both tools are in the same category and either is in our top three for it, the verdict follows that ranking: the higher-placed tool is our pick. The top three weigh who each tool suits as well as its grades, so a pick can go against the GPA. Otherwise the page does not pick one and says which grades higher: the higher GPA first; on a tie, the one with a free plan, then the one that starts cheaper in dollars a month, counted the same way for both; if they are still level, what the choice depends on.
- The grades are our own, from each tool’s review or report card. The GPA is their average.
- Prices, plans and platforms come from each tool’s listing. The table above says where each price was read and when.
- The differences and the answers to the questions are worked out from those listings.