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Open source alternatives to Reddit

We track 5 open-source Reddit alternatives, of which 3 currently score 70 or above on Repoly's GitHub health scale and 4 ship a Docker image. Discourse leads on health at 99/100 with 1616 commits in the last 90 days; across all 5 projects you are choosing between AGPL-3.0, Apache-2.0, GPL-2.0 and 1 other licences.

5
Alternatives
95k
Combined stars
1,685
Commits / 90 days
4
With Docker
Licence family Licence

Showing 5 of 5 tools

All 5 Reddit alternatives, ranked by health

  • Top pick · highest health

    Discourse

    99 GOOD

    Advanced forum / community solution based on Ruby and JS.

    ★ 48k · ⟳ today · _gh-attach-assets · GPL-2.0

    Docker
    Website ↗ Source ↗

  • Lemmy

    97 GOOD

    Link aggregator for the fediverse (alternative to Reddit).

    ★ 15k · ⟳ 2 days ago · 0.19.20 · AGPL-3.0

    DockerRust
    Website ↗ Source ↗

  • Answer

    93 GOOD

    Knowledge-based community software. You can use it to quickly build your Q&A community for product technical support, customer support, user communication, and more.

    ★ 16k · ⟳ 4 days ago · v2.0.2 · Apache-2.0

    DockerGo
    Website ↗ Source ↗

  • Flarum

    59 SLOWING

    Delightfully simple forums. Flarum is the next-generation forum software that makes online discussion fun again.

    ★ 16k · ⟳ 18 days ago · v1.8.19 · MIT

    PHP
    Website ↗ Source ↗

  • PieFed

    20 STALE

    A link aggregator / reddit clone for the fediverse (alternative to Reddit).

    AGPL-3.0

    DockerPython
    Website ↗ Source ↗

Reddit alternatives: common questions

What is the most maintained open source alternative to Reddit?

Discourse scores highest at 99/100, with 1616 commits in the last 90 days, 48k GitHub stars and its latest release (_gh-attach-assets) published 2 months ago. It is also the most active by raw commit count.

Which Reddit alternatives use a permissive licence?

2 of 5 are permissively licensed (MIT, Apache, BSD or similar): Answer (Apache-2.0), Flarum (MIT). 3 use copyleft licences such as GPL or AGPL, which require you to publish changes if you distribute a modified version.

Which Reddit alternatives run in Docker?

4 of 5 publish a Docker image or Compose file: Discourse, Lemmy, Answer, PieFed. Docker support contributes 10 of the 100 available health points, because it is the clearest signal that self-hosting is a supported path rather than an afterthought.