Campfire 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 Campfire with
choose an app… Mastodon Invidious NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub Elk WriteFreely LibReddit Campsite Redlib Mixpost Pro Vanilla Forums Misago Loomio Artalk pump.io
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 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 Akkoma 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 Campfire Discourse Category Social Networks Social Networks License free GPL-2.0 Language Ruby Ruby Setup difficulty Easy Medium Min. RAM 512 MB 2,048 MB Deployment docker, one-click docker, source GitHub stars ★ 4,471 ★ 47,619 First released 2022 2013 Replaces — phpBB, Reddit
Why pick each one
Choose Campfire if… Easy to set up — beginner-friendly First-class Docker support for quick deployment One-click install on common self-host platforms Active community (4.5k GitHub stars) Campfire details
Frequently asked questions Is Campfire or Discourse better? Neither is universally better. Discourse has the larger community, while Campfire is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Campfire and Discourse free and open-source? Yes. Campfire is licensed under free and Discourse under GPL-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Campfire and Discourse with Docker? Campfire: yes. Discourse: yes.