head to head · open source
Mastodon vs movim
Mastodon has 50,465 GitHub stars, 7,536 forks, 4,525 open issues and last shipped yesterday. movim has 2,069 stars, 287 forks, 43 open issues and last shipped yesterday. Mastodon leads on adoption by 2,339% (50,465 vs 2,069 stars). Mastodon is written in Ruby under AGPL-3.0; movim is written in PHP under AGPL-3.0. Mastodon has attracted 15% as many forks as stars, movim 14%. movim was the more recently maintained of the two, and both are self-hostable with no licence fee. The two share 1 topic tag (social-network), 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
| Mastodon | movim | |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | ★ 50K | ★ 2.1K |
| License | AGPL-3.0 | AGPL-3.0 |
| Written in | Ruby | PHP |
| Last push | 2026-11-02 | 2026-11-02 |
| Forks | ⑂ 7.5K | ⑂ 287 |
| 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 movim if
- You want the movim feature set and don't need the biggest community
- You prefer the AGPL-3.0 license terms
- Your stack matches PHP
- You evaluated both and movim 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 movim
Movim Federated blogging and chat platform About Movim is a federated blogging and chat platform that acts as a web frontend for the XMPP protocol. Deployment Please refer to the installation instructions in the INSTALL.md file, or check out the Movim Wiki for more information. Quick Test You can try out Movim on your local machine in a container using Podman (main website). Podman is a FOSS alternative to Docker that is available on all the main distributions. ⚠️ This setup is only for tests purpose, the containers are not optimized and most of the caches are disabled. To deploy your own Movim instance use the…
read the full movim overview →
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Frequently asked questions
Is Mastodon or movim more popular?
Mastodon has 50,465 GitHub stars and movim has 2,069. Mastodon has the larger community by that measure.
Are Mastodon and movim free?
Both are open source. Mastodon is licensed under AGPL-3.0 and movim under AGPL-3.0. Neither carries a licence fee.
What is the difference between Mastodon and movim?
Mastodon is written in Ruby and movim 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 movim?
Choose Mastodon if you want the larger community (50,465 stars) or its AGPL-3.0 licence terms. Choose movim if its feature set, stack or AGPL-3.0 licence fits better. Both are self-hostable.