Honk 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 Honk with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Invidious NodeBB diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped pump.io Pleroma Friendica Phanpy Firefish Bridgy Fed Takahe Microblog.pub Fedify snac Hometown Glitch-soc Sharkey ActivityPub for WordPress Hollo Ktistec Akkoma Epicyon Iceshrimp Shuttlecraft Mitra Streams Khatru Pyramid
Compare Lemmy with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Forem 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 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 Honk Lemmy Category Social Networks Social Networks License ISC AGPL-3.0 Language Go Rust Setup difficulty Medium Medium Min. RAM 128 MB 512 MB Deployment binary, source docker, bare-metal, source GitHub stars ★ 400 ★ 14,538 First released 2019 2019 Replaces Twitter, Mastodon Reddit
Why pick each one
Choose Honk if… Released under the ISC license Written in Go Tiny footprint — runs in 128 MB RAM Honk details Choose Lemmy if… Reddit-like experience Efficient resource use Lemmy details
Frequently asked questions Is Honk 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 Honk and Lemmy free and open-source? Yes. Honk is licensed under ISC and Lemmy under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Honk and Lemmy with Docker? Honk: check the project docs for container support. Lemmy: yes.