Discourse vs Mastodon
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 Discourse with
choose an app… 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 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 Mastodon with
choose an app… Invidious NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub Elk WriteFreely LibReddit Campsite Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Vanilla Forums Misago Loomio Artalk pump.io Plume Pleroma Endurain Manyfold phpBB 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 Zap Nostr Relay Squeaknode Khatru Pyramid Catodon Route96 Osada usocial Tesseract AsmBB Bloat Forte GoToSocial Iceshrimp.NET Masto-FE (🦥 flavour) PeerTube search-index Snort yarn.social
Feature Discourse Mastodon Category Social Networks Social Networks 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, bare-metal, source GitHub stars ★ 47,619 ★ 50,177 First released 2013 2016 Replaces phpBB, Reddit Twitter, X
Why pick each one
Choose Mastodon if… Large fediverse network Strong moderation features Mastodon details
Frequently asked questions Is Discourse or Mastodon better? Neither is universally better. Mastodon has the larger community, while Discourse is simpler to set up (medium difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Discourse and Mastodon free and open-source? Yes. Discourse is licensed under GPL-2.0 and Mastodon under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Discourse and Mastodon with Docker? Discourse: yes. Mastodon: yes.