head to head · open source
Lemmy vs upvote-rss
Lemmy has 14,612 GitHub stars, 968 forks, 129 open issues and last shipped 2 days ago. upvote-rss has 500 stars, 13 forks, 15 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. Lemmy leads on adoption by 2,822% (14,612 vs 500 stars). Lemmy is written in Rust under AGPL-3.0; upvote-rss is written in PHP under MIT. Lemmy has attracted 7% as many forks as stars, upvote-rss 3%. Lemmy was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 2 topic tags (lemmy, reddit), 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
| Lemmy | upvote-rss | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 15K | ★ 500 |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Rust | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-09-25 | 2026-03-13 |
| Forks | ⑂ 968 | ⑂ 13 |
| 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 upvote-rss if
- You want the upvote-rss feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the MIT license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and upvote-rss 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 upvote-rss
Upvote RSS is a self hostable PHP application that generates rich RSS feeds of the most popular posts from Reddit, Hacker News, Lemmy, Lobste.rs, PieFed, Mbin, and GitHub, aimed at people who want to follow those communities from a feed reader rather than browsing them directly.
read the full upvote-rss overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Lemmy or upvote-rss more popular?
Lemmy has 14,612 GitHub stars and upvote-rss has 500. Lemmy has the larger community by that measure.
Are Lemmy and upvote-rss free?
Both are open source. Lemmy is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and upvote-rss under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Lemmy and upvote-rss?
Lemmy is written in Rust and upvote-rss 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 upvote-rss?
Choose Lemmy if you want the larger community (14,612 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose upvote-rss if its feature set, stack or MIT licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.