Mastodon vs Takahe
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 Mastodon with
choose an app… Discourse Invidious NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub Elk WriteFreely LibReddit Campsite Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Vanilla Forums Misago Loomio Artalk pump.io Plume Pleroma Endurain Manyfold phpBB Elgg Friendica Mobilizon Phanpy Firefish OSSN Bridgy Fed Microblog.pub Fedify snac NeoDB webmention.io Bridgy Hometown Glitch-soc Soapbox Enigma 1/2 BBS Chirpy kbin Sharkey ActivityPub for WordPress Smithereen Postmarks 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 Friendiqa Hub Fedibird MeshChatX Streams Enafore Sublinks 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 Takahe with
choose an app… Discourse Invidious NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped pump.io Pleroma Friendica Phanpy Firefish Bridgy Fed Microblog.pub Fedify snac Hometown Glitch-soc Sharkey ActivityPub for WordPress Hollo Ktistec Akkoma Honk Epicyon Iceshrimp Shuttlecraft Mitra Streams Khatru Pyramid
Feature Mastodon Takahe Category Social Networks Social Networks License AGPL-3.0 BSD-3-Clause Language Ruby Python Setup difficulty Hard Medium Min. RAM 2,048 MB 1,024 MB Deployment docker, bare-metal, source docker, bare-metal GitHub stars ★ 50,177 ★ 1,174 First released 2016 2022 Replaces Twitter, X Twitter, Mastodon
Why pick each one
Choose Mastodon if… Large fediverse network Strong moderation features Mastodon details Choose Takahe if… Released under the BSD-3-Clause license First-class Docker support for quick deployment Active community (1.2k GitHub stars) Written in Python Takahe details
Frequently asked questions Is Mastodon or Takahe better? Neither is universally better. Mastodon has the larger community, while Takahe is simpler to set up (medium difficulty). Choose based on the comparison table above and your own setup.
Are Mastodon and Takahe free and open-source? Yes. Mastodon is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and Takahe under BSD-3-Clause. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Mastodon and Takahe with Docker? Mastodon: yes. Takahe: yes.