Lobsters
Forums & CommunityComputing-focused link aggregation and discussion site
Replaces Reddit, Hacker News
Best Real-Time Forums & Community for self-hosting
The 9 best Real-Time forums & community you can self-host, ranked by community traction.
Coral
Forums & CommunityOpen-source commenting platform for newsrooms
Replaces Disqus, Facebook Comments
Talkyard
Forums & CommunityCommunity forum combining discussion, chat and Q&A
Replaces Discourse, Disqus
Askbot
Forums & CommunityDjango-based question and answer forum software
Replaces Stack Overflow
Tildes
Forums & CommunityNon-profit community discussion platform
Replaces Reddit
Lemmy-UI Alternative Photon
Forums & CommunityModern alternative web client for Lemmy instances
Replaces Reddit
Shapado
Forums & CommunityOpen-source question and answer community software
Replaces Stack Overflow, Quora
Codidact
Forums & CommunityCommunity-driven Q&A knowledge-sharing platform
Replaces Stack Overflow, Stack Exchange
phpBB mChat
Forums & CommunityShoutbox extension for phpBB forums
Replaces vBulletin chatbox
No apps match these filters.
At a glance
| App | Deploy effort | Difficulty | Min. RAM | License | ★ Stars |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lobsters | Read-the-docs project | Medium | 512 MB | BSD-3-Clause | 4,851 |
| Coral | Under-an-hour setup | Medium | 1,024 MB | Apache-2.0 | 2,000 |
| Talkyard | Under-an-hour setup | Medium | 2,048 MB | AGPL-3.0 | 1,813 |
| Askbot | Under-an-hour setup | Medium | 512 MB | GPL-3.0 | 1,567 |
| Tildes | Read-the-docs project | Hard | 1,024 MB | AGPL-3.0 | 1,000 |
| Lemmy-UI Alternative Photon | Under-an-hour setup | Easy | 128 MB | AGPL-3.0 | 557 |
| Shapado | Read-the-docs project | Hard | 512 MB | AGPL-3.0 | 527 |
| Codidact | Under-an-hour setup | Medium | 1,024 MB | AGPL-3.0 | 444 |
| phpBB mChat | Read-the-docs project | Easy | 64 MB | GPL-2.0 | 14 |
Quick picks
- Most adopted: Lobsters (4,851 GitHub stars).
- Lightest footprint: phpBB mChat (from 64 MB RAM, against 2,048 MB for the heaviest here).
- Licensing: 5 of 9 use AGPL-3.0; check the rest individually if you plan to modify and redistribute.
Every option here is open-source and self-hostable, tagged Real-Time within the forums & community category. Deploy effort is graded from published container recipes, not vendor claims — see the methodology.