As much as I’d like to live under a rock, I know it’s a good idea to at least have some idea of what’s going on in the world. But true to my millennial nature, I don’t have cable TV—and I also know that trying to get news from social media is like asking a kindergartener to explain rocket science.
Enter the news aggregator app. While there aren’t many left these days, there are still a few reliable and popular options to choose from. These news apps let you stay well-informed and follow your interests without wading into the minefield of social media comment sections.
Over the last few weeks, I tested every news aggregator app I could find. Here are my top picks that balance usability, affordability, and reliable news sources.
The best news apps
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Apple News for access to a large variety of paywalled news
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Google News for free access to a wide range of news
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Flipboard for designing your own news experience
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Ground News for getting a variety of perspectives
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Rize for AI-summarized news
What makes the best news app?
How we evaluate and test apps
Our best apps roundups are written by humans who’ve spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it’s intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. We’re never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site—we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.
For this roundup, I looked primarily at news aggregator apps. Read-it-later apps and RSS readers can aggregate news for you, but they’re more hands-on, and really a different category of app. I also left out any apps that are owned by companies that do their own journalism—like CNN, Fox News, and Reuters. And while I might get some flak for it, Reddit and other social media apps also weren’t up for consideration.
I know most folks don’t look at their news on a desktop, so I also focused on mobile apps. I tested each app on an iPhone 15 running on iOS 18.5. Testing involved downloading each app, choosing a few sources and topics to follow, exploring the types of news articles on offer, and taking note of the user experience over a few weeks of testing.
Most of the apps on this list pull from the same news sources, but you’ll notice that certain apps (like Google News) prioritize free stories over subscription-only sources. As a result, those news apps tend to pull articles from lesser-known publications, providing a wider selection of news than apps like Apple News, for example, which mainly promotes news from more prominent sources. I kept that all in mind as I was reviewing the apps.
As I tested, here’s what I kept my eye out for.
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Personal feed. The news needed to be presented well and organized intuitively on a custom feed.
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Content interaction. I wanted to see what options were available for engaging with the content (e.g., a comment section or share options).
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Categories. Each app organizes its content differently, but I wanted to see some sort of category-based organization, whether that was tabs, side panels, grouped content, or anything else.
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Search and filter. Sometimes you’re looking for a specific news topic, so I made sure search and filter capabilities allowed you to do that.
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Customization. Everyone reads the news differently, so there needed to be features available for personalization, including the ability to follow certain topics, save searches, or create folders.
The best news apps at a glance
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Best for |
Price |
|
|---|---|---|
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Apple News |
Access to paywalled content |
Free; Apple News+ plan is $12.99/month or included in Apple One Premier plans for $37.95/month |
|
Google News |
Free access to a wide range of news |
Free; you may have to pay to view certain stories, depending on the source |
|
|
Designing your own news experience |
Free; you may have to pay to view certain stories, depending on the source |
|
Ground News |
A variety of perspectives |
Free; Pro plan is $9.99/year for bias comparison and a wide range of news sources; Premium plan starts at $3.99/month for advanced Blindspot and Factuality analyses |
|
Rize |
AI-summarized news stories |
Free |
Best news app for accessing paywalled content
Apple News (iOS, macOS)
Apple News pros:
Apple News cons:
Apple News is a great option for us Apple users. The app is available across all iPhone, Mac, iPad, and Apple Watch devices, and offers a decent free version. It’s built for Apple and showcases the typical clean design and supreme usability you’d expect from an Apple app. Reader view is the default, so you can be sure reading an article shares the same easy, clean experience as scrolling through the feed.
Search and follow the topics, channels, and publications you care about (or block and unfollow those you don’t) from the right-side tab, keep track of your favorite team from the Sport tab, or listen to narrated stories from the Audio tab. You can save stories to read later and download stories to read offline.
What really sets Apple News apart, though, is the Apple News+ plan. You do have to pay to access it, but one subscription of $12.99/month gets you access (in-app) to a veritable ton of premier, paywalled news sources.
This is a huge differentiator for Apple—and it’s the reason I subscribed after finally giving social media and cable news the boot earlier this year. Apple News+ subscribers can access content from The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, Vox, The New Yorker, a huge number of local city newspapers, and so much more.
Apple News pricing: Free plan available; upgrade to Apple News+ for $12.99/month (or as part of Apple One Premier for $37.95/month)
Best free news app for access to a wide range of news
Google News (iOS, Android, Web)
Google News pros:
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Emphasis on local news
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Full coverage link shows you a wide array of articles on that topic
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Newsstand tab shows top stories sorted by publisher
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Curates your feed based on your Google Search history
Google News cons:
We all know that Google does aesthetics well—and the modern look of the Google News app definitely helps create an enjoyable news-reading experience.
I particularly liked the Full Coverage panels, available on bigger stories: they give you a range of sources on a breaking story, plus relevant tweets and videos. When reading an article, you can just click the full coverage icon to access more on that topic. This made it easy and quick to spot similar stories without having to go out of my way to search for them manually. It also helps ensure that you’re getting a variety of perspectives on a particular topic instead of just taking one perspective as gospel.
You can follow the topics and news sources you’re most interested in, give individual stories a thumbs up or thumbs down, and save the searches and stories you’re most interested in. I also appreciated the extensive search options, which include subcategories, recommended sources, and relevant articles—all of which means you’ll get more relevant news the next time around. And if you want to mirror the experience of thumbing through a real newspaper or magazine, you can navigate to the Newsstand tab to peruse collections of articles grouped by publication.
The nice (or unsettling, depending on your take) thing about Google News is that it doesn’t require a lot of manual setup or customization effort on your end. Simply sign in using your Google account. Along with topics and sources you choose to follow, the app uses your past search activity on Google and YouTube to suggest content you might be interested in. While it can be a slightly disturbing reminder of how much your browser and visited websites are watching you at all times, there’s no denying that it is convenient.
Google News price: Free; you may have to pay to view certain stories, depending on the source.
Yahoo News is another good cross-platform option for accessing a variety of sources. It has a well-designed feed, with the option to set your own interests, blocked sources, and—crucially—blocked keywords, too.
Best news app for designing your own news experience
Flipboard (iOS, Android, Web)
Flipboard pros:
Flipboard cons:
Flipboard is based on the idea of curating your own digital magazine—a compendium of stories, pulled from your choice of news sources, blogs, and any other site you can plug into Flipboard (which is pretty much all of them). It borders on RSS reader, but it’s definitely more of a news app, so it made the cut.
You can be as broad or specific as you like with Flipboard: point it toward a general topic like technology or productivity, or specify one site in particular that you want to keep up with, and Flipboard mixes everything together seamlessly.
Flipboard beats out other news-gathering apps when it comes to its interface. While you can enable traditional scrolling in the settings, the default “flipping” interface feels like turning pages in a real magazine. It does make navigation slightly clunky here and there—but at least for me, it’s fun once you get used to it. And the content flow feels natural, whether you want to check out the top stories of the day or dig deeper into something that hasn’t been as widely covered. Where relevant, podcasts, tweets, and videos can be embedded alongside news stories.
It’s not just for you, either—you can collect articles in a Flipboard magazine to share with family or with a team at work, helping other people focus on what’s important in certain sectors and cutting out the extraneous noise.
Since Flipboard doesn’t have an all-inclusive plan that lets you subscribe for access to multiple publications, I noticed I didn’t see stories from places like WSJ or other paywalled publications quite as much. Instead, Flipboard more often recommends stories from smaller, free publications.
Flipboard price: Free; you may have to pay to view certain stories, depending on the source.
Best news app for getting a variety of perspectives
Ground News (iOS, Android, Web)
Ground News pros:
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Gives each news story a political Bias Distribution
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Filter view lets you sort by bias, factuality, paywall, or location
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Blindspot feature shows news stories from both sides of the political spectrum
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Ground Summary tool uses AI to summarize related news articles using neutral language when possible
Ground News cons:
The look of Ground News is a bit drab, but the app certainly makes up for it in other ways.
At the top of each article is an AI-generated summary called Ground Summary. It gives you a more-than-headline level of information before you decide if you want to invest time into reading a story (which you can do by clicking on a source under Full Coverage).
Ground News prides itself on presenting a wide range of perspectives, and I saw this come through with its Across the Spectrum and Factuality features. When I scrolled past the Full Coverage section of an article, I was greeted by three bars of varying length and color: a blue one to represent politically left-aligned sources, red for politically right-aligned sources, and white for sources that fall somewhere in the center.
Ground News also has what they call Bias Distribution for political stories, which indicates how biased a story or topic is toward a particular side of the political spectrum. If a story appears to be too weighted in favor of one side, Ground News will offer a warning that the story may be a blindspot.
With the premium plan, you also get custom articles recommended to you based on your reading habits, among other things. For instance, it comes with a personalized Blindspot feed that helps suggest news topics you might be missing in your normal news diet.
If having a better understanding of the inclinations and motives of your news sources is important to you, I’d say that Ground News is worth the cost.
Ground News price: Free; the Pro plan is $9.99/year for media bias ratings and a wide range of news sources. The Premium plan starts at $2.49/month (or $29.99/year) for unlimited access to advanced personalization and Blindspot features.
While it’s not the best from a design or user experience point-of-view, AllSides is a useful tool for analyzing your media diet and ensuring you see a variety of perspectives. The app highlights top headlines and offers sources from—when available—left-, center-, and right-leaning sources. You can search for a publication to see where it falls on the political spectrum and look up common terms to see how each side uses, thinks, and feels about them.
Best news app for AI-summarized stories
Rize (iOS, macOS)
Rize pros:
Rize cons:
If you’re looking for a news app that will help you stay on top of the day’s news—without letting the news get on top of you—Rize is worth a look. The app considers your preset interests and reading history to select the five most crucial stories you should know about. Pulling from a number of sources, it uses AI to generate a 1–2-paragraph overview for each. If you’re interested to know more, just tap on Sources to see all the stories Rize consulted, and click on any you want to read in full.
I’m not usually the biggest fan of news apps that only show you one story on-screen at a time—I’m here for the bird’s-eye view—but I didn’t mind it with Rize. You swipe up and down to move between stories. After the fifth story, you’ve exhausted your Morning digest. Swipe to the next screen, and the app will automatically close itself, making it easy to get on with your day. Or you can keep scrolling to see more news.
One of the coolest and most unique features of Rize is “Ask more about this.” You’ll see this prompt at the bottom of every story summary. Clicking it opens a chat where you can ask the conversational AI chatbot any questions you may have about the topic.
In the screenshot, you can see I’ve asked the bot for context on how environmentalists think about oil drilling after reading an AI summary about the Trump administration’s push to expand drilling in Alaska. All the usual caveats here about trusting AI and doing your own research, but I love the option to get quick context and clarification without interrupting the flow of my morning digest.
Rize pricing: 100% free
Why should you use a news aggregator app?
The avalanche of news that breaks each and every day can be daunting, but with the right apps at hand, it doesn’t have to be—you can get the news you want, in the way you want it, and keep up to speed with what’s happening in the world.
Related reading:
This article was originally published in July 2018 by David Nield and has also had contributions from Kristina Lauren. The most recent update, with contributions from Kiera Abbamonte, was in June 2025.
