Lemmy vs Pleroma
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 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 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 Pleroma with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Invidious NodeBB diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped WriteFreely pump.io Friendica Firefish Bridgy Fed Takahe Microblog.pub Fedify snac Hometown Glitch-soc Sharkey ActivityPub for WordPress Chyrp Lite Hollo Ktistec Akkoma Honk Socialhome Epicyon Iceshrimp Wafrn Forte
Feature Lemmy Pleroma Category Social Networks Social Networks License AGPL-3.0 AGPL-3.0 Language Rust Elixir Setup difficulty Medium Medium Min. RAM 512 MB 512 MB Deployment docker, bare-metal, source docker, bare-metal, source GitHub stars ★ 14,538 ★ 2,200 First released 2019 2017 Replaces Reddit Twitter, Tumblr
Why pick each one
Choose Lemmy if… Reddit-like experience Efficient resource use Lemmy details Choose Pleroma if… Runs on small servers Compatible with Mastodon apps Pleroma details
Frequently asked questions Is Lemmy or Pleroma 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 Pleroma free and open-source? Yes. Lemmy is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Pleroma under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Lemmy and Pleroma with Docker? Lemmy: yes. Pleroma: yes.