Forem vs Lemmy
A side-by-side comparison of two self-hosted apps from related categories
— licensing, setup difficulty, resource needs, and what each one
replaces.
Not the right match-up?
Compare Forem with
choose an app… Discourse Answer NodeBB giscus Spectrum Utterances Lobsters Fider Commento Vanilla Forums Misago FlaskBB Laravel.io phpBB Coral Schnack Talkyard Question2Answer Askbot esoTalk MyBB Tildes Scoold Mouthful vichan SMF django-machina PieFed kbin Lainchan YAF.NET Discuit Lemmy-UI Alternative Photon FluxBB Shapado Codidact Mbin AnsPress mlmym JForum lemmyBB PunBB ElkArte Lemmy-Easy-Deploy Discourse Chat Integration Discourse-compatible Antville FUDforum Sublinks Throat Phorum bbPress Flarum Tags Extension Discuz! X phpBB mChat Tesseract
Compare Lemmy with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse 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 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 Forem Lemmy Category Forums & Community Social Networks License AGPL-3.0 AGPL-3.0 Language Ruby Rust Setup difficulty Hard Medium Min. RAM 2,048 MB 512 MB Deployment docker, source docker, bare-metal, source GitHub stars ★ 22,760 ★ 14,538 First released 2019 2019 Replaces Discourse, Reddit Reddit
Why pick each one
Choose Forem if… Released under the AGPL-3.0 license First-class Docker support for quick deployment Mature project with 22.8k GitHub stars Written in Ruby Forem details Choose Lemmy if… Reddit-like experience Efficient resource use Lemmy details
Frequently asked questions Is Forem or Lemmy better? Neither is universally better. Forem has the larger community, while Lemmy is simpler to set up (medium difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Forem and Lemmy free and open-source? Yes. Forem is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Lemmy under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Forem and Lemmy with Docker? Forem: yes. Lemmy: yes.