Piped vs Vanilla Forums
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 Piped with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Invidious PeerTube NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Tube Archivist Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub Elk WriteFreely Pinchflat LibReddit MediaCMS Campsite Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Misago Loomio Artalk pump.io Plume Pleroma Endurain Manyfold phpBB Elgg Friendica Mobilizon Phanpy Firefish OSSN Bridgy Fed Takahe Fedify snac NeoDB webmention.io Bridgy Hometown Glitch-soc Damselfly Web 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 Tube yarn.social
Compare Vanilla Forums with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Forem Invidious NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Spectrum Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub Elk WriteFreely LibReddit Campsite Campfire Redlib Mixpost Pro Misago FlaskBB Loomio Laravel.io Artalk pump.io phpBB Talkyard esoTalk MyBB SMF django-machina YAF.NET FluxBB JForum lemmyBB PunBB ElkArte Discourse-compatible Antville FUDforum Phorum bbPress Discuz! X
Feature Piped Vanilla Forums Category Social Networks Social Networks License AGPL-3.0-or-later GPL-2.0 Language Vue PHP Setup difficulty Easy Medium Min. RAM 50 MB 512 MB Deployment bare-metal docker, bare-metal, source GitHub stars ★ 10,168 ★ 2,800 First released 2024 2009 Replaces YouTube phpBB, Discourse
Why pick each one
Choose Piped if… Released under the AGPL-3.0-or-later license Easy to set up — beginner-friendly Mature project with 10.2k GitHub stars Written in Vue Piped details
Frequently asked questions Is Piped or Vanilla Forums better? Piped is the stronger all-round pick: it has both the larger community and the simpler easy setup. Consider Vanilla Forums if its specific feature set fits your needs better.
Are Piped and Vanilla Forums free and open-source? Yes. Piped is licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later and Vanilla Forums under GPL-2.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Piped and Vanilla Forums with Docker? Piped: check the project docs for container support. Vanilla Forums: yes.