head to head · open source
Mastodon vs laravel-love
Mastodon has 50,465 GitHub stars, 7,536 forks, 4,525 open issues and last shipped yesterday. laravel-love has 1,202 stars, 77 forks, 11 open issues and last shipped 7 months ago. Mastodon leads on adoption by 4,098% (50,465 vs 1,202 stars). Mastodon is written in Ruby under AGPL-3.0; laravel-love is written in PHP under MIT. Mastodon has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, laravel-love 6%. Mastodon 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
| Mastodon | laravel-love | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 1.2K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | MIT |
| Written in | Ruby | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-04-17 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.5K | ⑂ 77 |
| Self-hosting | Yes | Yes |
| Data ownership | Your server | Your server |
pick Mastodon if
- You weight community size — 50K stars and counting
- You want the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches Ruby
- 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 Mastodon
[!NOTE] Want to learn more about Mastodon? Click below to find out more in a video. Mastodon is a free, open source social network server based on ActivityPub where users can follow friends and discover new ones. On Mastodon, users can publish anything they want: links, pictures, text, and video. All Mastodon servers are interoperable as a federated network (users on one server can seamlessly communicate with users from another one, including non Mastodon software that implements ActivityPub!) Navigation Project homepage 🐘 Donate to support development 🎁 View sponsors Blog 📰 Documentation 📚 Official…
read the full Mastodon overview →
About laravel-love
Laravel Love Introduction Laravel Love is emotional part of the application. It let people express how they feel about the content. Make any model reactable in a minutes! There are many implementations in modern applications: GitHub Reactions Facebook Reactions YouTube Likes Slack Reactions Reddit Votes Medium Claps This package developed in mind that it should cover all the possible use cases and be viable in enterprise applications. Official Documentation Documentation can be found in [Laravel Love Guide]. Installation Pull in the package through Composer. Run database migrations. Upgrading Please see…
read the full laravel-love overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Mastodon or laravel-love more popular?
Mastodon has 50,465 GitHub stars and laravel-love has 1,202. Mastodon has the larger community by that measure.
Are Mastodon and laravel-love free?
Both are open source. Mastodon is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and laravel-love under MIT. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Mastodon and laravel-love?
Mastodon is written in Ruby 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, Mastodon or laravel-love?
Choose Mastodon if you want the larger community (50,465 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.