Piped 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 Piped with
choose an app… Mastodon Discourse Invidious PeerTube NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Misskey Tube Archivist Fizzy Pixelfed Flarum HumHub Elk Pinchflat LibReddit MediaCMS 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 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 WriteFreely with
choose an app… Hugo Astro Gatsby Ghost Mastodon Discourse Halo Invidious Eleventy Zola NodeBB Lemmy diaspora* Nitter Element Quartz Misskey 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 Piped WriteFreely Category Social Networks Social Networks License AGPL-3.0-or-later AGPL-3.0 Language Vue Go Setup difficulty Easy Easy Min. RAM 50 MB 256 MB Deployment bare-metal docker, binary, source GitHub stars ★ 10,168 ★ 5,216 First released 2024 2018 Replaces YouTube Medium, Tumblr
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 WriteFreely better? Neither is universally better. Piped has the larger community; both share a easy setup difficulty, so the decision comes down to features and licensing.
Are Piped and WriteFreely free and open-source? Yes. Piped is licensed under AGPL-3.0-or-later and WriteFreely under AGPL-3.0. Both can be self-hosted at no software cost.
Can I run Piped and WriteFreely with Docker? Piped: check the project docs for container support. WriteFreely: yes.