Discourse vs SMF
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 MyBB Bridgy Fed Takahe Fedify Tildes snac NeoDB webmention.io Bridgy Hometown Glitch-soc 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 SMF 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 MyBB Tildes Scoold Mouthful vichan django-machina PieFed Lainchan YAF.NET FluxBB JForum lemmyBB PunBB ElkArte Discourse-compatible Antville FUDforum Phorum bbPress Discuz! X
Feature Discourse SMF Category Social Networks Forums & Community License GPL-2.0 BSD-3-Clause 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 ★ 745 First released 2013 2004 Replaces phpBB, Reddit vBulletin, phpBB
Why pick each one
Choose SMF if… Reliable and well established No licensing fees SMF details
Frequently asked questions Is Discourse or SMF better? Neither is universally better. Discourse has the larger community, while SMF is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Discourse and SMF free and open-source? Yes. Discourse is licensed under GPL-2.0 and SMF under BSD-3-Clause. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Discourse and SMF with Docker? Discourse: yes. SMF: yes.