Invidious vs Vanilla Forums
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 Invidious with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse PeerTube NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Tube Archivist Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub Elk WriteFreely Pinchflat LibReddit MediaCMS Campsite Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro 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
Compare Vanilla Forums with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Forem NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Spectrum Piped Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub Elk WriteFreely LibReddit Campsite Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Misago FlaskBB Loomio Laravel.io Artalk pump.io phpBB Talkyard esoTalk MyBB SMF django-machina YAF.NET FluxBB JForum lemmyBB PunBB ElkArte Discourse-compatible Antville FUDforum Phorum bbPress Discuz! X
Feature Invidious Vanilla Forums Category Social Networks Social Networks License GPL-3.0-only GPL-2.0 Language Crystal PHP Setup difficulty Medium Medium Min. RAM 50 MB 512 MB Deployment bare-metal docker, bare-metal, source GitHub stars ★ 22,442 ★ 2,800 First released 2023 2009 Replaces YouTube phpBB, Discourse
Why pick each one
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 Invidious or Vanilla Forums 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 Invidious and Vanilla Forums free and open-source? Yes. Invidious is licensed under GPL-3.0-only and Vanilla Forums under GPL-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Invidious and Vanilla Forums with Docker? Invidious: check the project docs for container support. Vanilla Forums: yes.