NodeBB 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 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 Fedify snac 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 Takahe with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Invidious 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 NodeBB Takahe Category Social Networks Social Networks License GPL-3.0 BSD-3-Clause Language JavaScript Python Setup difficulty Medium Medium Min. RAM 1,024 MB 1,024 MB Deployment docker, bare-metal, source docker, bare-metal GitHub stars ★ 15,182 ★ 1,174 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 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 NodeBB or Takahe 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 Takahe free and open-source? Yes. NodeBB is licensed under GPL-3.0 and Takahe under BSD-3-Clause. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run NodeBB and Takahe with Docker? NodeBB: yes. Takahe: yes.