Miniflux vs FreshRSS

Both Miniflux and FreshRSS do the same core job: they pull your feeds into one place so you own your reading instead of renting it from Feedly. The real decision is not features on paper — it is temperament. Miniflux is the reader that does less on purpose and asks almost nothing of you after install. FreshRSS is the reader that hands you themes, extensions, and knobs, and trusts you to run a PHP app in exchange. Which one you should self-host comes down to whether you want a fixed appliance or a workshop.

Two philosophies, one job

An RSS reader is a small, well-understood problem, so the interesting differences are in how each project chooses to solve it. Miniflux is famously opinionated: a stripped-down, keyboard-driven interface, no theming beyond light and dark, and a feature set the maintainer deliberately keeps small. Feeds go in, clean articles come out, and there is very little to configure or break. FreshRSS takes the opposite view — it is a full aggregator with a theme gallery, a plugin/extension system, user accounts, and a genuine community of tinkerers building on top of it.

Neither approach is wrong. Miniflux's restraint is the whole point: fewer options means fewer decisions and fewer things to maintain. FreshRSS's flexibility is equally deliberate — if you want to reshape how your reader looks and behaves, it lets you.

The stack is the real difference

This is where the two part ways in a way you feel every month, not just on day one. Miniflux ships as a single compiled Go binary backed by PostgreSQL, and that is the entire application. There is no interpreter to tune, no extension directory drifting out of sync — you run the binary, point it at Postgres, and updates are a matter of swapping the image. It is licensed Apache-2.0, a permissive license.

FreshRSS is a PHP application, which means the classic PHP surface area: a web server or PHP-FPM, the language runtime, and the app's own files to keep current. It is happy on SQLite for a single user or MySQL/MariaDB and Postgres for more, and it is licensed AGPL-3.0. None of this is hard — FreshRSS has an excellent official Docker image that hides most of it — but a PHP stack is fundamentally more moving parts than one static binary, and over years that is the gap that matters.

Features where FreshRSS pulls ahead

If you want your reader to do more than show articles, FreshRSS is the richer tool:

• Themes and layout — a gallery of themes and view modes versus Miniflux's single, fixed, minimalist look.
• Extensions — a community extension system for everything from custom filters to sharing integrations; Miniflux has no plugin model by design.
• Built-in scraping — FreshRSS can generate feeds for sites that dropped theirs, using CSS-selector rules, which is genuinely useful for the modern feed-hostile web.
• Multi-user — both support multiple accounts, but FreshRSS leans into it with per-user themes and settings.

Miniflux answers with a smaller but sharp toolkit: readable article extraction, integrations to save articles to services like Wallabag or Pinboard, a clean API, and full Fever/Google Reader API compatibility so third-party mobile apps just work. It does less, but what it does is polished.

Resources and maintenance

On paper the two are a tie for hardware — both start happily around 256 MB of RAM and rate the same 2 / 5 on setup difficulty, so neither will strain a small VPS. The difference is what happens after install. A Go binary plus Postgres is about as low-maintenance as self-hosting gets: nothing to tune, a tiny attack surface, and upgrades that rarely surprise you. FreshRSS is still light and its Docker image makes updates painless, but a PHP app with a theme and extension layer is simply more that can need attention over time. That is why Miniflux edges the maintenance column — not because FreshRSS is heavy, but because Miniflux is almost nothing to run.

Which should you self-host?

Pick Miniflux if…

• You want a reader you can set up and then forget — a single Go binary and Postgres, with the smallest possible maintenance burden.
• You value speed, a clean keyboard-driven UI, and an opinionated feature set over customization.
• A permissive Apache-2.0 license and a rock-solid API for third-party mobile clients matter more to you than themes and plugins.

Pick FreshRSS if…

• You want to customize your reader — themes, layouts, and community extensions to bend it to your taste.
• You need built-in scraping to rebuild feeds for sites that removed them.
• You are already comfortable running a PHP app and would rather have knobs than an appliance.

Running either on a VPS

Both run comfortably on the smallest boxes you can rent — this is a category where a 256 MB footprint is realistic and neither will ever be your server's bottleneck. Miniflux gives you a touch more headroom simply because a single Go process and one Postgres database is so frugal, while FreshRSS's PHP stack is still perfectly at home on a modest server. The step-by-step setups are linked below, and any of the VPS options here has plenty of room for the reader plus its database, with capacity to spare for whatever else you self-host alongside it.