Invidious vs WriteFreely
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 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
Compare WriteFreely with
choose an app… Hugo Astro Gatsby Ghost Mastodon Discourse Halo Eleventy Zola NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Quartz Misskey Piped Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub Elk LibReddit Campsite Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Vanilla Forums Misago Nikola Loomio Artalk pump.io Plume Pleroma Microblog.pub Marmite ActivityPub for WordPress Chyrp Lite Akkoma Socialhome Mataroa Wafrn GoBlog PageCord Forte
Feature Invidious WriteFreely Category Social Networks Social Networks License GPL-3.0-only AGPL-3.0 Language Crystal Go Setup difficulty Medium Easy Min. RAM 50 MB 256 MB Deployment bare-metal docker, binary, source GitHub stars ★ 22,442 ★ 5,216 First released 2023 2018 Replaces YouTube Medium, Tumblr
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 WriteFreely better? Neither is universally better. Invidious has the larger community, while WriteFreely is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Invidious and WriteFreely free and open-source? Yes. Invidious is licensed under GPL-3.0-only and WriteFreely under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Invidious and WriteFreely with Docker? Invidious: check the project docs for container support. WriteFreely: yes.