RSS & Atom Feed Parser

RSS & Atom Feed Parser turns any RSS 2.0, RDF or Atom feed into normalized JSON items (title, link, date, author, summary, content), newest first, at $0.02 per feed on the Apify Free plan.

• Price: $0.02 per feed parsed on the Free plan, less on paid plans. A feed that cannot be fetched or parsed is not charged.
• Example input: { "url": "https://hnrss.org/frontpage", "maxItems": 50 }
• Output fields: feedUrl, feedTitle, itemCount, items, error

Turn any RSS or Atom feed into clean, normalized JSON — no XML headaches.

Live on the Apify Store — run it instantly or call it as an agent tool via Apify MCP.

What you get

• Works with RSS 2.0, RDF, and Atom feeds — auto-detected.
• Every item normalized to the same shape: title, link, guid, publishedAt (ISO 8601), author, categories, summary, content, enclosure.
• Items sorted newest-first; cap how many you want per feed.
• Bulk mode — pass an array of feed URLs and get one result object per feed.
• Handles CDATA, content:encoded, dc:creator, media:content, and enclosures.

Input

{
  "url": "https://hnrss.org/frontpage",
  "maxItems": 50
}

Or parse many feeds at once:

{
  "urls": [
    "https://hnrss.org/frontpage",
    "https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/.rss"
  ],
  "maxItems": 25
}

Output

One dataset record per feed:

{
  "feedUrl": "https://hnrss.org/frontpage",
  "feedTitle": "Hacker News: Front Page",
  "itemCount": 30,
  "items": [
    {
      "title": "Show HN: A tiny RSS parser",
      "link": "https://example.com/post",
      "guid": "https://example.com/post",
      "publishedAt": "2026-06-24T18:12:03.000Z",
      "author": "jane",
      "categories": ["programming"],
      "summary": "A short description…",
      "content": "<p>Full HTML content…</p>",
      "enclosure": null
    }
  ]
}

Pricing

Pay-per-event: $0.02 per feed parsed on the Apify Free plan, billed as the feed-parsed event. Paid Apify plans pay less ($0.0186 Bronze, $0.0174 Silver, $0.016 Gold and up). No start fee. A feed that cannot be fetched or parsed comes back with an error field and is not charged.

FAQ

How do I convert an RSS feed to JSON? Pass the feed URL — every item comes back normalized to the same shape (title, link, guid, ISO-8601 publishedAt, author, categories, summary, content, enclosure), newest first, no XML handling on your side.

Does it work with Atom feeds too? Yes — RSS 2.0, RDF, and Atom are auto-detected and normalized into one identical item shape, so your code never branches on feed format.

How does it handle CDATA and namespaced fields? CDATA blocks, content:encoded, dc:creator, media:content, and enclosures are all parsed into the normalized fields — the messy 20% of real-world feeds that break naive XML parsing.

Can I parse several feeds in one run? Yes — pass up to 25 feed URLs in urls, one result object per feed, maxItems capping items per feed (50 by default, up to 500). $0.02 per feed parsed.

How is this different from the RSS Change Monitor? This parser returns the current items every time — stateless. If you want only what changed since last run on a schedule, that's our RSS Change Monitor, which keeps a baseline between runs.

For AI agents

This Actor is built to be called by software, not just by people.

• Mount it directly as an MCP tool — no Store search, no ranking, just this one tool: https://mcp.apify.com/?actors=eliai/rss-feed-parser
• Or call it over HTTP and get the results in the same request: POST https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/eliai~rss-feed-parser/run-sync-get-dataset-items
• Costs are predictable before you call. Pricing is pay-per-event (see Pricing above), so an agent can budget a run in advance instead of discovering the bill afterwards.
• Send only the field you mean. If you pass the bulk field, it is used on its own; the single-value field is a fallback, never merged into your request. You are charged for the items you sent and nothing else.

Who uses it

• App developers turning RSS and Atom feeds into one normalized JSON shape for a reader UI
• Newsletter curators pulling the newest items from 25 source feeds in a single run
• No-code builders feeding parsed feed items into Airtable or Google Sheets
• Data teams archiving podcast and blog feed entries as structured records
• AI agent builders giving an agent a tool to read the latest posts from a feed URL