head to head · open source
answer vs homeland
answer has 15,680 GitHub stars, 1,368 forks, 137 open issues and last shipped 3 days ago. homeland has 3,859 stars, 1,176 forks, 27 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. answer leads on adoption by 306% (15,680 vs 3,859 stars). answer is written in Go under Apache-2.0; homeland is written in Ruby under MIT. answer has attracted 9% as many forks as stars, homeland 30%. answer was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (community, forum), so they are genuine substitutes rather than adjacent tools.
Two open source projects, one decision. Both are free and self-hostable — the differences are community size, license terms, language stack and release pace.
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Side by side
| answer | homeland | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 16K | ★ 3.9K |
| License | Apache-2.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Go | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-15 | 2026-08-08 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.4K | ⑂ 1.2K |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick answer if
- You weight community size — 16K stars and counting
- You want the Apache-2.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Go
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick homeland if
- You want the homeland feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and homeland fits your workflow better
About answer
Apache Answer is an Apache 2.0 licensed, Go and React question and answer platform that teams of any size can run as a community forum, help center, or knowledge management system, and it is aimed at organisations that want their own Q&A site rather than a hosted one.
read the full answer overview →
About homeland
Homeland is an open source forum and community system written in Ruby and built on Ruby on Rails. It is described as an open source discussion website, and its tagline says that it was developed based on Ruby China. That places it in the community platform category, where the main purpose is to operate a discussion website.
read the full homeland overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is answer or homeland more popular?
answer has 15,680 GitHub stars and homeland has 3,859. answer has the larger community by that measure.
Are answer and homeland free?
Both are open source. answer is licensed under Apache-2.0 and homeland under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between answer and homeland?
answer is written in Go and homeland in Ruby. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, answer or homeland?
Choose answer if you want the larger community (15,680 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose homeland if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.