diaspora* vs Flarum
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 diaspora* with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Invidious NodeBB Lemmy Nitter Element Misskey Piped Fizzy Pixelfed HumHub Elk WriteFreely LibReddit Campsite Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Vanilla Forums Misago Loomio Artalk pump.io Plume Pleroma Endurain Manyfold phpBB Movim Elgg Friendica Mobilizon Phanpy Firefish OSSN Bridgy Fed Takahe Microblog.pub Fedify snac NeoDB webmention.io Bridgy Hometown Glitch-soc Soapbox Enigma 1/2 BBS Chirpy kbin Sharkey ActivityPub for WordPress Smithereen Postmarks 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 noStrudel Mitra lemmyBB Friendiqa Hub Fedibird MeshChatX Streams Enafore Sublinks Buddycloud Libervia Zap Nostr Relay Squeaknode Khatru Pyramid Catodon Route96 Osada usocial Tesseract AsmBB Bloat Forte GoToSocial Iceshrimp.NET Masto-FE (🦥 flavour) Peachpub PeerTube search-index Snort yarn.social
Compare Flarum with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Invidious NodeBB Lemmy Nitter Element Misskey Piped Fizzy Pixelfed HumHub Elk WriteFreely LibReddit Campsite Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Vanilla Forums Misago FlaskBB Loomio Laravel.io Artalk pump.io phpBB esoTalk MyBB SMF django-machina YAF.NET FluxBB JForum lemmyBB PunBB ElkArte Discourse-compatible Antville FUDforum Phorum bbPress Discuz! X
Feature diaspora* Flarum Category Social Networks Social Networks License AGPL-3.0 MIT Language Ruby PHP Setup difficulty Hard Medium Min. RAM 1,024 MB 512 MB Deployment docker, bare-metal, source docker, bare-metal, source GitHub stars ★ 13,656 ★ 6,739 First released 2010 2015 Replaces Facebook, Twitter phpBB, vBulletin
Why pick each one
Choose Flarum if… Fast and clean interface Easy to extend Flarum details
Frequently asked questions Is diaspora* or Flarum better? Neither is universally better. diaspora* has the larger community, while Flarum is simpler to set up (medium difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are diaspora* and Flarum free and open-source? Yes. diaspora* is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Flarum under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run diaspora* and Flarum with Docker? diaspora*: yes. Flarum: yes.