Discourse vs MyBB
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 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 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 MyBB with
choose an app… Forem Answer NodeBB giscus Spectrum Utterances Flarum Lobsters Fider Commento Vanilla Forums Misago FlaskBB Laravel.io phpBB Coral Schnack Talkyard Question2Answer Askbot esoTalk Tildes Scoold Mouthful vichan SMF django-machina PieFed Lainchan YAF.NET FluxBB JForum lemmyBB PunBB ElkArte Discourse-compatible Antville FUDforum Phorum bbPress Discuz! X
Feature Discourse MyBB Category Social Networks Forums & Community License GPL-2.0 LGPL-3.0 Language Ruby PHP Setup difficulty Medium Easy Min. RAM 2,048 MB 256 MB Deployment docker, source docker, bare-metal, source GitHub stars ★ 47,619 ★ 1,232 First released 2013 2005 Replaces phpBB, Reddit vBulletin, phpBB
Why pick each one
Choose MyBB if… Simple to install and run Good customization MyBB details
Frequently asked questions Is Discourse or MyBB better? Neither is universally better. Discourse has the larger community, while MyBB is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Discourse and MyBB free and open-source? Yes. Discourse is licensed under GPL-2.0 and MyBB under LGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Discourse and MyBB with Docker? Discourse: yes. MyBB: yes.