head to head · open source
Lemmy vs laravel-love
Lemmy has 14,599 GitHub stars, 966 forks, 129 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. laravel-love has 1,204 stars, 76 forks, 11 open issues and last shipped 5 months ago. Lemmy leads on adoption by 1,113% (14,599 vs 1,204 stars). Lemmy is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0; laravel-love is written in PHP under MIT. Lemmy has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, laravel-love 6%. 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 | laravel-love | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 15K | ★ 1.2K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-16 | 2026-04-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 966 | ⑂ 76 |
| 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 laravel-love if
- You want the laravel-love feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and laravel-love 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 laravel-love
Laravel Love is an open source PHP package that adds social reactions to Laravel Eloquent models. It is built for the Laravel ecosystem and distributed through Composer under the name cybercog/laravel love . The project describes itself as the emotional part of an application: it lets people express how they feel about content, and it is designed so that any model can be made reactable in minutes.
read the full laravel-love overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lemmy or laravel-love more popular?
Lemmy has 14,599 GitHub stars and laravel-love has 1,204. Lemmy has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lemmy and laravel-love free?
Both are open source. Lemmy is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and laravel-love under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lemmy and laravel-love?
Lemmy is written in Rust and laravel-love in PHP. 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 laravel-love?
Choose Lemmy if you want the larger community (14,599 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose laravel-love if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.