Elgg vs Lemmy
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 Elgg with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Invidious NodeBB diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped HumHub Campsite Bonfire Buddycloud
Compare Lemmy with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Forem Invidious NodeBB diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub Elk WriteFreely LibReddit Campsite Lobsters Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Vanilla Forums Misago Loomio Artalk pump.io Plume Pleroma Endurain Manyfold phpBB Friendica Mobilizon Phanpy Firefish OSSN Bridgy Fed Takahe Fedify Tildes snac NeoDB webmention.io Bridgy Hometown Glitch-soc Soapbox Enigma 1/2 BBS Chirpy PieFed kbin Sharkey ActivityPub for WordPress Smithereen Discuit Postmarks Lemmy-UI Alternative Photon 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 Lemmy-Easy-Deploy Friendiqa Hub Fedibird MeshChatX Streams Enafore Sublinks Throat 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 Elgg Lemmy Category Social Networks Social Networks License GPL-2.0 AGPL-3.0 Language PHP Rust Setup difficulty Medium Medium Min. RAM 512 MB 512 MB Deployment docker, bare-metal, source docker, bare-metal, source GitHub stars ★ 1,680 ★ 14,538 First released 2004 2019 Replaces Facebook Groups, Yammer Reddit
Why pick each one
Choose Elgg if… Flexible for custom networks Mature codebase Elgg details Choose Lemmy if… Reddit-like experience Efficient resource use Lemmy details
Frequently asked questions Is Elgg or Lemmy better? Neither is universally better. Lemmy has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Elgg and Lemmy free and open-source? Yes. Elgg is licensed under GPL-2.0 and Lemmy under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Elgg and Lemmy with Docker? Elgg: yes. Lemmy: yes.