Flarum 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 Flarum with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Invidious NodeBB 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 Lemmy with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Forem Invidious NodeBB diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Fizzy Pixelfed HumHub Elk 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 Flarum Lemmy Category Social Networks Social Networks License MIT 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 ★ 6,739 ★ 14,538 First released 2015 2019 Replaces phpBB, vBulletin Reddit
Why pick each one
Choose Flarum if… Fast and clean interface Easy to extend Flarum details Choose Lemmy if… Reddit-like experience Efficient resource use Lemmy details
Frequently asked questions Is Flarum 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 Flarum and Lemmy free and open-source? Yes. Flarum is licensed under MIT and Lemmy under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Flarum and Lemmy with Docker? Flarum: yes. Lemmy: yes.