NodeBB vs snac
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 NodeBB with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Forem Invidious Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Spectrum Piped Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub Elk WriteFreely LibReddit Campsite Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Vanilla Forums Misago FlaskBB Loomio Laravel.io Artalk pump.io Plume Pleroma Endurain Manyfold phpBB Talkyard Elgg Friendica Mobilizon Phanpy esoTalk Firefish OSSN MyBB Bridgy Fed Takahe Fedify NeoDB webmention.io Bridgy Hometown Glitch-soc SMF Soapbox Enigma 1/2 BBS Chirpy django-machina kbin Sharkey ActivityPub for WordPress YAF.NET Smithereen Postmarks FluxBB 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 JForum noStrudel Mitra lemmyBB PunBB ElkArte Friendiqa Hub Fedibird MeshChatX Streams Enafore Discourse-compatible Antville FUDforum Sublinks Buddycloud Phorum Zap bbPress Nostr Relay Squeaknode Khatru Pyramid Catodon Route96 Discuz! X Osada usocial Tesseract AsmBB Bloat Forte GoToSocial Iceshrimp.NET Masto-FE (🦥 flavour) PeerTube search-index Snort yarn.social
Compare snac with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Invidious Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Piped pump.io Pleroma Friendica Phanpy Firefish Bridgy Fed Takahe Microblog.pub Fedify Hometown Glitch-soc Sharkey ActivityPub for WordPress Hollo Ktistec Akkoma Honk Epicyon Iceshrimp Shuttlecraft Mitra Streams Khatru Pyramid
Feature NodeBB snac Category Social Networks Social Networks License GPL-3.0 MIT Language JavaScript C Setup difficulty Medium Medium Min. RAM 1,024 MB 64 MB Deployment docker, bare-metal, source binary, source GitHub stars ★ 15,182 ★ 900 First released 2013 2022 Replaces phpBB, Discourse Twitter, Mastodon
Why pick each one
Choose NodeBB if… Snappy real-time UI Flexible database options NodeBB details Choose snac if… Released under the MIT license Written in C Tiny footprint — runs in 64 MB RAM snac details
Frequently asked questions Is NodeBB or snac better? Neither is universally better. NodeBB has the larger community; both share a medium setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are NodeBB and snac free and open-source? Yes. NodeBB is licensed under GPL-3.0 and snac under MIT. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run NodeBB and snac with Docker? NodeBB: yes. snac: check the project docs for container support.