head to head · open source
Lemmy vs koala
Lemmy has 14,599 GitHub stars, 966 forks, 129 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. koala has 3,568 stars, 456 forks, 45 open issues and last shipped 11 months ago. Lemmy leads on adoption by 309% (14,599 vs 3,568 stars). Lemmy is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0; koala is written in Ruby under MIT. Lemmy has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, koala 13%. Lemmy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee.
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
| Lemmy | koala | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 15K | ★ 3.6K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | Ruby |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2025-10-16 |
| Forks | ⑂ 966 | ⑂ 456 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Lemmy if
- You weight community size — 15K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Rust
- You value the larger contributor base for long-term maintenance
pick koala if
- You want the koala feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- You evaluated both and koala fits your workflow better
About Lemmy
Lemmy is a link aggregator and forum platform for the Fediverse, written in Rust and released under the AGPL 3.0 license. It supports communities where users subscribe to forums, post links and discussions, vote, and comment. Each server can operate independently while remaining federated through ActivityPub, so users on one server can interact with users and communities on other servers.
read the full Lemmy overview →
About koala
Koala is a lightweight Ruby library for Facebook APIs. It supports the Graph API, the Marketing API, the Atlas API, realtime updates, test users, and OAuth validation. It lives in the Ruby and Ruby on Rails ecosystem and provides API accessors that return simple JSON responses.
read the full koala overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lemmy or koala more popular?
Lemmy has 14,599 GitHub stars and koala has 3,568. Lemmy has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lemmy and koala free?
Both are open source. Lemmy is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and koala under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lemmy and koala?
Lemmy is written in Rust and koala 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, Lemmy or koala?
Choose Lemmy if you want the larger community (14,599 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose koala if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.