Lemmy vs Phanpy
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 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
Compare Phanpy with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Invidious NodeBB diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Firefish Takahe snac Hometown Glitch-soc Sharkey Hollo Ktistec Honk Epicyon Iceshrimp Shuttlecraft Mitra Streams Khatru Pyramid Forte GoToSocial
Feature Lemmy Phanpy Category Social Networks Social Networks License AGPL-3.0 MIT Language Rust JavaScript Setup difficulty Medium Easy Min. RAM 512 MB 100 MB Deployment docker, bare-metal, source bare-metal GitHub stars ★ 14,538 ★ 1,472 First released 2019 2024 Replaces Reddit Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads
Why pick each one
Choose Lemmy if… Reddit-like experience Efficient resource use Lemmy details Choose Phanpy if… Released under the MIT license Easy to set up — beginner-friendly Active community (1.5k GitHub stars) Written in JavaScript Phanpy details
Frequently asked questions Is Lemmy or Phanpy better? Neither is universally better. Lemmy has the larger community, while Phanpy is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Lemmy and Phanpy free and open-source? Yes. Lemmy is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Phanpy under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Lemmy and Phanpy with Docker? Lemmy: yes. Phanpy: check the project docs for container support.