Flarum vs Invidious
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 Flarum with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Fizzy Pixelfed HumHub Elk WriteFreely LibReddit Campsite Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Vanilla Forums Misago FlaskBB Loomio Laravel.io Artalk pump.io phpBB esoTalk MyBB SMF django-machina YAF.NET FluxBB JForum lemmyBB PunBB ElkArte Discourse-compatible Antville FUDforum Phorum bbPress Discuz! X
Compare Invidious with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse PeerTube NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Tube Archivist Fizzy Pixelfed HumHub Elk WriteFreely Pinchflat LibReddit MediaCMS 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 Fedify snac NeoDB webmention.io Bridgy Hometown Glitch-soc Damselfly Web 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 Tube yarn.social
Feature Flarum Invidious Category Social Networks Social Networks License MIT GPL-3.0-only Language PHP Crystal Setup difficulty Medium Medium Min. RAM 512 MB 50 MB Deployment docker, bare-metal, source bare-metal GitHub stars ★ 6,739 ★ 22,442 First released 2015 2023 Replaces phpBB, vBulletin YouTube
Why pick each one
Choose Flarum if… Fast and clean interface Easy to extend Flarum details Choose Invidious if… Released under the GPL-3.0-only license Mature project with 22.4k GitHub stars Written in Crystal Tiny footprint — runs in 50 MB RAM Invidious details
Frequently asked questions Is Flarum or Invidious better? Neither is universally better. Invidious has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Flarum and Invidious free and open-source? Yes. Flarum is licensed under MIT and Invidious under GPL-3.0-only. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Flarum and Invidious with Docker? Flarum: yes. Invidious: check the project docs for container support.