Lemmy vs phpBB
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 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 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 phpBB with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Forem Invidious NodeBB diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Spectrum Piped Flarum Vanilla Forums Misago Talkyard esoTalk MyBB SMF YAF.NET ElkArte FUDforum bbPress Discuz! X
Feature Lemmy phpBB Category Social Networks Social Networks License AGPL-3.0 GPL-2.0 Language Rust PHP Setup difficulty Medium Easy Min. RAM 512 MB 256 MB Deployment docker, bare-metal, source bare-metal, source GitHub stars ★ 14,538 ★ 2,090 First released 2019 2000 Replaces Reddit vBulletin, Discourse
Why pick each one
Choose Lemmy if… Reddit-like experience Efficient resource use Lemmy details Choose phpBB if… Runs on basic shared hosting Decades of stability phpBB details
Frequently asked questions Is Lemmy or phpBB better? Neither is universally better. Lemmy has the larger community, while phpBB is simpler to set up (easy difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Lemmy and phpBB free and open-source? Yes. Lemmy is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and phpBB under GPL-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Lemmy and phpBB with Docker? Lemmy: yes. phpBB: check the project docs for container support.