Flarum vs Piped
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 Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey 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 Piped with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Invidious PeerTube NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey 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 Piped Category Social Networks Social Networks License MIT AGPL-3.0-or-later Language PHP Vue Setup difficulty Medium Easy Min. RAM 512 MB 50 MB Deployment docker, bare-metal, source bare-metal GitHub stars ★ 6,739 ★ 10,168 First released 2015 2024 Replaces phpBB, vBulletin YouTube
Why pick each one
Choose Flarum if… Fast and clean interface Easy to extend Flarum details Choose Piped if… Released under the AGPL-3.0-or-later license Easy to set up — beginner-friendly Mature project with 10.2k GitHub stars Written in Vue Piped details
Frequently asked questions Is Flarum or Piped better? Piped is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler easy setup. Consider Flarum if its specific feature set fits your needs better.
Are Flarum and Piped free and open-source? Yes. Flarum is licensed under MIT and Piped under AGPL-3.0-or-later. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Flarum and Piped with Docker? Flarum: yes. Piped: check the project docs for container support.