Lemmy vs Loops
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 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 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
Compare Loops with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Invidious PeerTube NodeBB diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Tube Archivist Pixelfed Pinchflat MediaCMS Damselfly Web Friendiqa Hub Peachpub Tube
Feature Lemmy Loops Category Social Networks Social Networks License AGPL-3.0 AGPL-3.0-or-later Language Rust PHP Setup difficulty Medium Medium Min. RAM 512 MB 350 MB Deployment docker, bare-metal, source bare-metal GitHub stars ★ 14,538 ★ 437 First released 2019 2025 Replaces Reddit Instagram, TikTok, YouTube
Why pick each one
Choose Lemmy if… Reddit-like experience Efficient resource use Lemmy details Choose Loops if… Released under the AGPL-3.0-or-later license Written in PHP Lightweight — runs in 350 MB RAM Loops details
Frequently asked questions Is Lemmy or Loops 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 Lemmy and Loops free and open-source? Yes. Lemmy is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Loops under AGPL-3.0-or-later. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Lemmy and Loops with Docker? Lemmy: yes. Loops: check the project docs for container support.