head to head · open source
homeland vs bbs-go
homeland has 3,859 GitHub stars, 1,176 forks, 27 open issues and last shipped 1 months ago. bbs-go has 3,478 stars, 701 forks, 44 open issues and last shipped 24 days ago. homeland leads on adoption by 11% (3,859 vs 3,478 stars). homeland is written in Ruby under MIT; bbs-go is written in TypeScript under GPL-3.0. homeland has attracted 30% as many forks as stars, bbs-go 20%. bbs-go 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
| homeland | bbs-go | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 3.9K | ★ 3.5K |
| License | MIT | GPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | TypeScript |
| Last push | 2026-08-08 | 2026-08-25 |
| Forks | ⑂ 1.2K | ⑂ 701 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick homeland if
- You weight community size — 3.9K stars and counting
- You want the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick bbs-go if
- You want the bbs-go feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the GPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches TypeScript
- You evaluated both and bbs-go fits your workflow better
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 →
About bbs-go
bbs go is a lightweight community and Q&A platform for forums, knowledge bases, and discussions. It lives in the self hosted community platform ecosystem, combining questions, posts, articles, comments, votes, tags, and nodes. The project is offered under the GPL 3.0 license, and its topics include golang, react, forum, qna, community, and discussion.
read the full bbs-go overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is homeland or bbs-go more popular?
homeland has 3,859 GitHub stars and bbs-go has 3,478. homeland has the larger community by that measure.
Are homeland and bbs-go free?
Both are open source. homeland is licensed under MIT and bbs-go under GPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between homeland and bbs-go?
homeland is written in Ruby and bbs-go in TypeScript. The practical differences are community size, licence terms, language stack and release cadence — all compared in the table above.
Which should I choose, homeland or bbs-go?
Choose homeland if you want the larger community (3,859 stars) or its MIT licence terms. Choose bbs-go if its feature set, stack or GPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.