Lemmy 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 Lemmy with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Forem Invidious NodeBB diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub Elk 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 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 WriteFreely with
choose an app… Hugo Astro Gatsby Ghost Mastodon Discourse Halo Invidious Eleventy Zola NodeBB 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 Lemmy WriteFreely Category Social Networks Social Networks License AGPL-3.0 AGPL-3.0 Language Rust Go Setup difficulty Medium Easy Min. RAM 512 MB 256 MB Deployment docker, bare-metal, source docker, binary, source GitHub stars ★ 14,538 ★ 5,216 First released 2019 2018 Replaces Reddit Medium, Tumblr
Why pick each one
Choose Lemmy if… Reddit-like experience Efficient resource use Lemmy details
Frequently asked questions Is Lemmy or WriteFreely better? Neither is universally better. Lemmy 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 Lemmy and WriteFreely free and open-source? Yes. Lemmy is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and WriteFreely under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Lemmy and WriteFreely with Docker? Lemmy: yes. WriteFreely: yes.