Elk 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 Elk with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Invidious NodeBB diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub WriteFreely LibReddit Campsite Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Vanilla Forums Misago Loomio Artalk pump.io Soapbox
Compare Lemmy with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Forem Invidious NodeBB diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub WriteFreely LibReddit Campsite Lobsters 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 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 Elk Lemmy Category Social Networks Social Networks License MIT AGPL-3.0 Language Vue Rust Setup difficulty Easy Medium Min. RAM 64 MB 512 MB Deployment bare-metal, source docker, bare-metal, source GitHub stars ★ 6,027 ★ 14,538 First released 2022 2019 Replaces Twitter app Reddit
Why pick each one
Choose Elk if… Released under the MIT license Easy to set up — beginner-friendly Mature project with 6k GitHub stars Written in Vue Elk details Choose Lemmy if… Reddit-like experience Efficient resource use Lemmy details
Frequently asked questions Is Elk or Lemmy better? Neither is universally better. Lemmy has the larger community, while Elk is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Elk and Lemmy free and open-source? Yes. Elk is licensed under MIT and Lemmy under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Elk and Lemmy with Docker? Elk: check the project docs for container support. Lemmy: yes.