Akkoma vs Discourse
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted social networks options
— licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one
replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Compare Akkoma with
choose an app… Mastodon Invidious NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped WriteFreely pump.io Pleroma Friendica Firefish Bridgy Fed Takahe Microblog.pub Fedify snac Hometown Glitch-soc Sharkey ActivityPub for WordPress Chyrp Lite Hollo Ktistec Honk Socialhome Epicyon Iceshrimp Wafrn Forte
Compare Discourse with
choose an app… Mastodon Forem Invidious NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub Elk WriteFreely LibReddit Campsite Lobsters Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Vanilla Forums Misago FlaskBB Loomio Laravel.io Artalk pump.io Plume Pleroma Endurain Manyfold phpBB Elgg Friendica Mobilizon Phanpy esoTalk Firefish OSSN MyBB Bridgy Fed Takahe Fedify Tildes snac NeoDB webmention.io Bridgy Hometown Glitch-soc SMF Soapbox Enigma 1/2 BBS Chirpy django-machina PieFed kbin Sharkey ActivityPub for WordPress YAF.NET Smithereen Discuit Postmarks Lemmy-UI Alternative Photon FluxBB Mastodon Bird UI Wavelog Hollo Gathio Loops Snikket Ktistec Libremdb Mbin Trustroots Gancio Honk Socialhome Hubzilla Epicyon Iceshrimp mlmym Wafrn GoBlog Hatsu BuddyPress Sphinx Relay JForum noStrudel Mitra lemmyBB PunBB ElkArte Lemmy-Easy-Deploy Friendiqa Hub Fedibird MeshChatX Streams Enafore Discourse-compatible Antville FUDforum Sublinks Throat Buddycloud Phorum Zap bbPress Nostr Relay Squeaknode Khatru Pyramid Catodon Route96 Discuz! X Osada usocial Tesseract AsmBB Bloat Forte GoToSocial Iceshrimp.NET Masto-FE (🦥 flavour) PeerTube search-index Snort yarn.social
Feature Akkoma Discourse Category Social Networks Social Networks License AGPL-3.0 GPL-2.0 Language Elixir Ruby Setup difficulty Medium Medium Min. RAM 512 MB 2,048 MB Deployment docker, bare-metal, source docker, source GitHub stars ★ 400 ★ 47,619 First released 2022 2013 Replaces Twitter, Tumblr phpBB, Reddit
Why pick each one
Choose Akkoma if… Lots of configuration options Lightweight footprint Akkoma details
Frequently asked questions Is Akkoma or Discourse better? Neither is universally better. Discourse has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Akkoma and Discourse free and open-source? Yes. Akkoma is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Discourse under GPL-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Akkoma and Discourse with Docker? Akkoma: yes. Discourse: yes.