Discourse vs Forem
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted apps from related categories
— licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one
replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Compare Discourse with
choose an app… Mastodon 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 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
Compare Forem with
choose an app… Answer NodeBB Lemmy giscus Spectrum Utterances Lobsters Fider Commento Vanilla Forums Misago FlaskBB Laravel.io phpBB Coral Schnack Talkyard Question2Answer Askbot esoTalk MyBB Tildes Scoold Mouthful vichan SMF django-machina PieFed kbin Lainchan YAF.NET Discuit Lemmy-UI Alternative Photon FluxBB Shapado Codidact Mbin AnsPress mlmym JForum lemmyBB PunBB ElkArte Lemmy-Easy-Deploy Discourse Chat Integration Discourse-compatible Antville FUDforum Sublinks Throat Phorum bbPress Flarum Tags Extension Discuz! X phpBB mChat Tesseract
Feature Discourse Forem Category Social Networks Forums & Community License GPL-2.0 AGPL-3.0 Language Ruby Ruby Setup difficulty Medium Hard Min. RAM 2,048 MB 2,048 MB Deployment docker, source docker, source GitHub stars ★ 47,619 ★ 22,760 First released 2013 2019 Replaces phpBB, Reddit Discourse, Reddit
Why pick each one
Choose Forem if… Released under the AGPL-3.0 license First-class Docker support for quick deployment Mature project with 22.8k GitHub stars Written in Ruby Forem details
Frequently asked questions Is Discourse or Forem better? Discourse is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler medium setup. Consider Forem if its specific feature set fits your needs better.
Are Discourse and Forem free and open-source? Yes. Discourse is licensed under GPL-2.0 and Forem under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Discourse and Forem with Docker? Discourse: yes. Forem: yes.