head to head · open source
answer vs homeland
answer has 15,708 GitHub stars, 1,382 forks, 137 open issues and last shipped 13 days ago. homeland has 3,859 stars, 1,176 forks, 27 open issues and last shipped 3 months ago. answer leads on adoption by 307% (15,708 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 | 2026-10-21 | 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 Build Q&A platform A Q&A platform software for teams at any scales. Whether it’s a community forum, help center, or knowledge management platform, you can always count on Answer. To learn more about the project, visit answer.apache.org. Screenshots Quick start Running with docker For more information, see Installation. Plugins Answer provides a plugin system for developers to create custom plugins and expand Answer’s features. You can find the plugin documentation here. We value your feedback and suggestions to improve our documentation. If you have any comments or questions, please feel free to…
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About homeland
Open source discussion website. 开源的论坛／社区网站系统，基于 Ruby China 发展而来。 Usage DEPLOYMENT GUIDE EXAMPLE RELEASE NOTES CONTRIBUTE GUIDE License Released under the MIT license: www.opensource.org/licenses/MIT
read the full homeland overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is answer or homeland more popular?
answer has 15,708 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 (15,708 stars) or its Apache-2.0 licence terms. Choose homeland if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.